The Insomniacs Challenge is an annual film competition at Tahoma High School where Video Production students have 68 hours to write, film, and edit a short film of their making. The participants are given a theme to base their story off of, two objects that they have to incorporate into at least one shot as well as a line of dialogue they have to include.

This year, 9 teams competed in the challenge and the theme was apprehension. The two items they had to include were a paper airplane and a musical instrument and the line of dialogue the teams had to incorporate was “What we have here is failure to communicate.”   

The future filmmakers spent the weekend the first weekend of June working tirelessly to make their films perfect. Monday June 3rd was the public viewing of the films as well as the awards ceremony.

1st place judges choice award went to “Aero”, a film about a young girl facing her fear of flying. This film was produced by seniors Josh Hren and Caroline Lathrop and juniors Bridget Nolan and Hannah Rayburn. 1st place audience choice award went to “The Greenwater Killer”, a film about a serial killer on the hunt his next victim. “The Greenwater Killer” was produced by seniors Ally McLoughlin and Sophie Smith and junior Nick Wall.

The director of the film “Aero”, Caroline Lathrop, received the first place judges choice award two years in a row. When asked about how she felt about the wins, she stated that “Honestly it’s a little bit surreal, like going into it I was pretty confident with the project my team created but seeing all the other amazing projects really made me think we weren’t going to win much, if anything at all…My team put in so much work so to have that appreciated was just amazing.”  Zach Robinson, the director of the second place judges and audience choice award film “The Suspect”, stated that “It was very satisfying to win this year finally getting a judge’s choice award. It was nice being recognized as not just being an entertaining video but also high quality. Winning the award felt really nice because I put a lot of work into this project and seeing it be successfully made me very proud.”

During the awards for the feature films, video production teacher Mr.Haag also took the time to give senior awards out. He awarded seniors, Caroline Lathrop, Josh Hren, Ally McLoughlin, Sophie Smith, Zach Robinson, Meghan Anderson and Declan Nolan. They were all given plaques in the form of cinema clapper boards to celebrate their commitment to the program over their high school years.

Congratulations to the winners of this years Insomniacs Challenge!

Winnings:

• “Aero”: 1st place judges and 3rd place audience awards.
• “The Greenwater Killer”: 3rd place judges and 1st place audience awards.
• “The Suspect”: 2nd place judges and 2nd place audience awards.