Preparation for SMASH’N underway

On the massive projector in the McAfee Center, a live vote was being cast for the final award of the 2016-17 SMASH’N event: the People’s Choice Award. The crowd roared as their favorite film, a rap poetry video created by alumni Will Liddle, Orin Milazzo, Jimmy Derner, Gemma Ambrose and Tia Valdez, won the award.

A similar sight will be seen at this year’s SMASH’N, the Media Arts Program’s annual end of the year awards showcase, on May 25. As the event nears, students are gearing up by filming promotion videos, creating scripts and preparing for raffle ticket pre-sales. The event was created for MAP students to submit their video projects made during the school year so that staff members could judge submissions and award the best of the best.

The group primarily responsible for planning SMASH’N is MAP Leadership, a team of MAP students who coordinate events such as the Speaker Series, Pielooza and the 48 Hour Film Festival.

The head of the team, senior Cailley Bryan says she’s excited for the event to take place.

“It’s definitely been a lot of work leading up to SMASH’N, but overall, I’m super excited for how things are gonna turn out,” Bryan said.

Senior Alec Kruka, MAP Leadership’s SMASH’N/Speaker Series Head, and junior Kitty Huang, co-head of SMASH’N/Speaker Series, are both in the process of filming and editing the SMASH’N cold open, an introductory video which starts off the awards ceremony.

In addition, English 10 MAP teacher and MAP Coordinator Suzanne Herzman and a group of leadership students are developing a script for presenters of the event. Raffle tickets will also be pre-sold the week before SMASH’N for a variety of different items, such as a drone, etc etc, that will be  auctioned at the event.

“We’re working with an incredible group of people for scriptwriting the event, and all of the staff met up a few days ago to finalize our plans and improvement for this year’s SMASH’N,” Herzman said.

In terms of SMASH’N itself, many of the awards will be the same as previous years, including Best Actor, Best Director, Best Documentary and Best Senior Project. A key addition to this year’s roster is the award for Best 48 Hour Film, an award for the most polished film created during the 48 Hour Film Festival earlier this year.

Media Arts 2 teacher Joel Tarbox, is anticipating the projects shown at the event and the awards ceremony itself.

“We have great work and I expect a great show. [The show] features an impressive line-up of work from our students,” Tarbox said.