In the summer of 2011, the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) created Storyboard, a video competition for current students, as a way to encourage creative use of digital media to tell MSFS stories. The competition ran during the 2011-2012 academic year. Storyboard called for students to create short videos suitable for YouTube that responded to the theme of “MSFS Core Values.”
The competition awarded 3 prizes for 1st-year student submissions, and 3 prizes for 2nd year/continuing student submissions. The spring competition was very close, and resulted in 2 ties among the 2nd year/continuing student submissions. The 1st and 2nd place submissions were decided by a tie-breaker, and the 3rd place submissions remained tied after the tie-breaker, and split the 3rd place award.
The awards were as follows:
Class of 2012
1st place went to MSFS: Path to a Brighter Future (by Cassandra Florian) https://youtu.be/42eFWtQ0uWk
2nd place went to MSFS: A Commitment to Service (by Nasim Novin) https://youtu.be/SSAoQhuG5bg
3rd place was a tie between MSFS: Our Values (by Salvador Peña) https://youtu.be/qEr1Y9xr-qE
and MSFS Life in a Day (by Alison Gilbert) https://youtu.be/cGRSqTJO2cI
Class of 2013
1st place went to Shades of Our Community (by Marshall Bennett) https://youtu.be/PWcgAUvaOKk
2nd place went to MSFS: The Spice of Life (by Kaveri Marathe) https://youtu.be/jTtapP7YECQ
3rd place went to D.C. Internship Diary (by James Zimmerman) https://youtu.be/hvXTH_V9Vdk
Congratulations to our award winners!
The Storyboard competition was greatly assisted by our distinguished panel of judges. All videos were judged by the following SFS alumni, all of whom have direct experience with film or media:
Andrew Jameson, F’90, https://alumni.georgetown.edu/career/career_48.html
Brian Christopher Griffin, MSFS ’02, *Bio below. Demo reel: www.vimeo.com/39717794
Erin Lyall, MSFS ’02, https://youtu.be/Qv10wD6v_Uw
Michael Horn, MSFS ’90, https://goo.gl/iNRNF
Erin Pelton, MSFS ’05, https://twitter.com/#!/erin_pelton
Since the Storyboard competition began in the fall of 2011, MSFS has posted all of the submitted videos to our YouTube channel, and has been using them to help with recruitment efforts and with alumni events. A number of videos have been shared on MSFS Facebook pages for recently admitted students, alumni, and friends of the program; meanwhile, the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA) has reposted some of our videos on their Facebook page, which greatly increases our reach.
The competition is engaging our students in a creative enterprise that affords them the opportunity to think about their educational experiences in ways they may not have considered before (while developing skills that we believe will be useful to them now and in the future). The competition is also building content for our various media platforms that further engages alumni, prospective students, current members of MSFS, and friends of the program. These videos are helping to tell the stories of what goes on behind the main gates at Georgetown and beyond.
*Brian Christopher Griffin was born and raised in Huntington, New York, and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Individualized Studies, specialization in East Asian languages, from New York University. While living in New York City he was a volunteer for local HIV/AIDS organizations, and after college he taught English for two years in Taipei, Taiwan (where he unwittingly shared a Mandarin teacher with fellow MSFS ’02 alumnus Janee Pierre-Louis). In 2002 he graduated from MSFS with a specialization in international development, focusing his work on the international HIV/AIDS epidemic and doing internships with John Snow, Inc. in Washington, DC, and Population Services International in Yangon, Myanmar. He began his international development career doing training and monitoring and evaluation for international HIV/AIDS programs at John Snow, Inc., and later relocated to Antwerp, Belgium, where he worked as an independent consultant with several London- and Brussels-based HIV/AIDS and sexual health international NGOs. Afterwards he moved to Italy to learn Italian and try writing a novel, and instead stumbled upon a long-term training consultancy at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, working with young people in Africa on HIV and food security. When he finished the consultancy (and finally learned Italian) he enrolled in an intensive documentary filmmaking program in Venice and made a short documentary, Italiano per stranieri (“Italian for foreigners”), that won the “Avanti” Prize for New Directors at the 2008 Turin Film Festival. He followed this with a full-length documentary about a gay Italian volleyball team, Volley Tales. Brian currently lives in London and is starting a production company that helps organizations working in international development use video for research, training, data presentation and digital storytelling.