2015 Winners

For Madison Bernier, from First Colonial High School in Virginia Beach, VA, creating a video started as an assignment in her 10^th grade AP Human Geography class. She researched all three topics before choosing one but ultimately “farmland was the most interesting and the one I found the most information on.” She recalls that during the population unit in her class, “we learned about people per land area and how that affects crops and how they’ll be grown.” Additionally, an aunt of Madison’s owns a farm so she had some real-life connections to the topic.

Madison is a first time filmmaker and shared that her biggest challenge was finding a way to tie everything into a one minute video. She found that picking a topic that really interested her, conducting in-depth background research, and organizing her thoughts really helped her succeed.

Despite being a sophomore, Madison is already thinking about her future education. She plans to put half of her prize money, if not all, into savings for college. She enjoys dancing, singing, and playing acoustic guitar and participates in fundraising for charities at her school. She had a summer trip to California planned this past summer, but it fell through and perhaps influenced her superpower choice: “To fly… probably to California!”