Nashville Dispatch – Day 4

If you’ve been following our Twitter feed, you already know that our team from SAGU placed third in the 36.DV Challenge with their “I Am National Right to Life” ad.

Krystle, Danielle, Richie and Jason face the judges during the wrap-up for the 36.DV Challenge at NRB11.

To recap: beginning at 9pm Friday night, the team comprise of Krystle Sonmore, Danielle Chambers, Jason Rutel and Richie Kotwica (under the watchful guidance of their faculty advisor Rob Price) had 36 hours to come up with a promotional ad for NRLC.  In that time they had to familiarize themselves with our work, conceptualize the ad, storyboard it, script it, film it, edit it, code it and turn it in by 9am Sunday morning (they submitted the final cut at 8:59am 🙂 ).

The iNRB judges evaluated all five video projects based on content and technical excellence and announced the winners during the iNRB awards ceremony last night.  The top three videos were all within a few points of each other.  Even though our team didn’t take 1st place (and the $150 cash prize for each student that went with it), they placed first in our eyes for all of their hard work.

Our winning team from SAGU: Richie Kotwica, Danielle Chambers, Jason Rutel, and Krystle Sonmore.

And now, the team’s video…”I Am National Right to Life”:

Nashville Update

Our team of students from SAGU stopped by for a photo op!  We still haven’t seen the ad, but we’re looking forward to the awards ceremony at 4:30~

Olivia, Jess and Derrick with our team from SAGU!

Dispatch from Nashville – Day 3

And we’re off! (And we skipped talking to you on Day 2).

The Exhibition Hall officially opened about 30 minutes ago and we’re down here talking to the early bird attendees who waiting for the official opening ceremony.  Lots of thumbs-up from passers-by and our stack of educational literature is already starting to dwindle.

And we’ve already visited with our friend Janet Mefferd from the Salem Media family!  Most of the time, we only get to talk to Janet over the phone during interviews on her show.  It’s great to see her, and other hosts, while we’re here in Nashville.

A quick update on the team from SAGU creating a :60-second promotional video for NRLC during the 36.DV Challenge.  Their 36 hours ended at 9am and the top 3 from both the audio and video categories will be unveiled during the iNRB awards ceremony at 4:30.  We’re hopeful that our team will be in the that top 3.  We’ll find out in just a few hours!

We promised some pictures of our booth…we finally got a memory card for the camera…after we remembered the phone had photo capabilities!  So, here, looking a little pixelated, are some of the phone shots from yesterday before the exhibit hall opened.

Shot of the booth from the corner aisle

Our sitting area for meetings

The view from our booth looking toward the entrance. That's convention registration right ahead. We're close to the front!

Looking toward the back of the hall...

Nashville Dispatch – Day 1

Once again, the NRLC Communications team is in Nashville for the annual National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Convention at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center.  And, once again, we’ll be blogging from the convention daily with our experiences and thoughts!

The NRB convention is always a wonderful experience – surrounded by pro-lifers – giving us a chance to spread the pro-life message, meet our Pro-Life Perspective station partners, and reach out to new ones.  We also come away with fresh ideas for our own work and leads for new innovations.

We were blessed with an uneventful travel day from Washington…until we got to Nashville, that is.  Within 20 minutes of our arrival, an extremely severe thunderstorm moved through the area with high winds and, from what we’ve learned, 2 confirmed tornado touchdowns.  Most likely, there was at least a third within a 1/4 mile of the Opryland Hotel.  Thankfully, no injuries or fatalities…but a lot of damage.  The images on the local news are devastating.  I know you join us in keeping those affected in your prayers.

Today was our set-up and errands day.  Our booth on the convention floor is all set for the exhibit hall to open Sunday (we’ll add pictures tomorrow…we forgot the memory card for the camera and have to go grab a new one.)  We’ve run around gathering last minute items and tomorrow will be spent getting all of the things we forgot today!

Tonight, we met with a team of students from Southwestern Assemblies of God University in Dallas, Texas who are here taking part in iNRB.  We’re all taking part in the 36-DV challenge.  Teams of 4 students are paired up with organizations to create a :60-second promotional radio or television spot (in our case, our team is working on an NRLC promotional video).

Beginning at 9pm tonight the students drew organizations out of a hat and met with the reps from their chosen organization.  We spent about 45 minutes with our team discussing NRLC and our work as they fired questions at us about target audience, messaging and statistics.  They have  have 36 hours to complete the project – storyboarding, filming, editing, final production and coding before turning in the finished project at 9am Sunday.  The projects will be judged and the winners announced in the iNRB awards ceremony Sunday afternoon.

There are a total of 8 teams (3 audio, 5 video) spread out throughout the hotel frantically brainstorm and conceptualizing their projects.  After our meeting, we’re really excited with the whole project and can’t wait to see what these bright, energetic students come up with.

That’s it for today!  We’ll be back with more tomorrow (hopefully with some pics!)

(Apropos of nothing, we’ve already devoured a box of Goo Goo Clusters)