Two College of Arts & Letters students were part of award-winning teams recently recognized with statewide honors from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters (MAB).
The 2017 MAB Michigan Student Broadcast Awards were presented during the Great Lakes Broadcasting Conference and Expo on March 8 at the Lansing Center in downtown Lansing.
The College of Arts & Letters students and the awards they received, include:
- First Place for Digital Media Experience for WDBM (Impact 89FM) Digital Media Experience 2017 – Lorenza Centi, Graphic Design senior, who is WDBM’s lead Graphic Designer and Art Director. The other members of the team include Joel DeJong, Media and Information senior; Audrey Matusz, Arts and Humanities senior; and Meghan Zimmerman, Arts and Humanities senior.
- Second Place in the Mini-Documentary category for the documentary RECLAIM – Amy Wagenaar, a senior with a double major in Film Studies and Media and Information. Wagenaar was the Director of Photography for the documentary worked and Elise Conklin, Media and Information senior, was the Director
As Art Director and lead Graphic Designer for WDBM, Centi has a hand in all deliverables of the station’s image, both digitally and physically. The award-winning Digital Media Experience project showcases the station’s use of digital media as it pertains to station branding and overall audience experience.
“We created a video that demonstrates how Impact utilizes Internet, social media, apps, video, and other digital media to deliver music, sports and news,” said Centi, who will graduate from MSU in May. “My main role in this award was to compile footage and animate the video to highlight all of the station’s talents.”
This was my first venture into documentary filmmaking, and I found it to be an interesting and engaging form of film that reached new depths of emotional and personal resonance.
AMY WAGENAAR
In the student Mini-Documentary category, there were 689 entries with RECLAIM receiving second place. RECLAIM is an environmental documentary that follows the story of a creative reuse shop, the Geek Group, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Funded by the MSU School of Journalism’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, the film is centered on the people who work and thrive in the shop.
The film highlights the concept of creative reuse, which is the concept of taking potential waste (plastic bottles, paper, egg cartons, etc.) and using it to create art. While the film initially began as a purely creative documentary to showcase the use of art for the purpose of recycling, it turned into a dynamic and emotional story chronicling the personal endeavors of the team at the Geek Group who use the shop as a therapeutic backdrop to create meaningful and emotional art.
Work on the documentary spanned the course of a year, from May 2015 to May 2016. As Directory of Photography, Wagenaar was in charge of the camera and lighting.
“This was my first venture into documentary filmmaking, and I found it to be an interesting and engaging form of film that reached new depths of emotional and personal resonance. The camera style is much more organically focused, and the practice of discovering the story as opposed to creating it was a unique opportunity which I hope to further explore in future ventures.”
Wagenaar, who is graduating in May, currently works as a videographer for the College of Education, and she is a founding member of the MSUFC (Michigan State University Film Club).
The MAB is a nonprofit organization representing commercial radio and television broadcast stations in Michigan. Its college student broadcast awards program is open to all Michigan college students and promotes education and advancement in the broadcasting industry.
