Videographer Wins First Place

Senior Elsa Lee recently won first place in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis national video competition.

The contest required its participants to find creative ways to explain the four factors of production: land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship.

Lee’s video tells the story of a young woman who decides to start her own business selling flowers.

The Federal Reserve hopes high schools will utilize the piece in classrooms, according to a university press release.

Lee, who is an economics and French double major, wanted to create a video that would keep students interested in economics.

“Economics can be a very dry subject, and videos and other media can really help students understand certain concepts,” Lee said.

She wanted to keep the video’s content simple to make it as comprehensible as possible. All entries were required to be under five minutes in length, as well.

“After researching the subject, I wrote a short script,” Lee said. “I tried to keep the structure of the video fairly simple, limited the shooting locations and employed my roommates as the actors.”

This is Lee’s first time winning a competition, and she hopes to enter more in the future.

“I enjoy working with narrative film, but it was fun doing an educational video,” Lee said. “I’ve done a commissioned documentary, and I do video news reporting for the Bullet.”

Lee shares her interest in video making with her younger brother Patrick, a freshman at James Madison University. He won third place in the competition, having written his own script and shot and edited the video with his sister’s help.

Lee enjoyed her involvement in her brother’s piece.

“It was relaxing to just act as cameraman and editor,” she said. “He wrote, directed and starred in his own entry.”

Lee would like to be a professional filmmaker, if she can be.
“That’s the dream,” she said.