OLLY Goes Pro With New Video Club

Here at Our Lady of the Lake, I’ve made it my mission to find or create opportunities for teens to both sow and nurture “seeds” in the community, and for parishioners and families to engage with our youth.  I was telling Fr. Joe about my idea for another youth opportunity --.a teen video club where students could learn from adults with professional skills to make short videos that share our story through parish events and activities. The ideas is that teens learn valuable lifelong skills and participate in service with a purpose while both youth and adults form meaningful relationships and everyone becomes more engaged in the life of our parish and shares the good news. I was excited about the possibilities, and wanted to get Fr. Joe’s feedback.

Well, this seed fell on fertile soil! Fr. Joe saw valuable potential, my friend and colleague, Dana Heil, provided a contact, and the end result was I connected with a really nice man named Dave Ramnarine who is going to help my idea become reality. Dave serves on the board at VASJ, is a professional videographer with the MLB (yes, including the Cleveland Indians!), and enjoys sharing his skills with youth. During our meeting, he graciously stepped up to volunteer his time and talents to lead our group along with some parents willing to provide support.

I am thrilled to inform you that Our Lady of the Lake Teen Video Club is born – and it already has a new name! OLLY Productions (or OLLY Pro for short!), is ready to start rolling out new video clips, to help share the story of Our Lady of the Lake, our parish, community and people, and all the good things happening here.

With Dave’s expert guidance, our youth will learn the entire process of creating professional videos, from writing the narrative, to working as a team, shooting the video, editing it, and producing a final product. They’ll work through pre-production meetings, learn the art of videography, composition and framing, go out and find stories and work with the same state-of-the art technology being used by professionals in the field. Our goal is to create and publish short videos about all sorts of parish events and activities, and we’d love to hear from you about stories you’d like to see produced. We also hope you’ll get to know us better when you see us “live” and in action through our videos. There’s so much value in communicating and sharing; we want to get to know each other better!

If you have ideas for us, please send them to me: Rita@olleuclid.org. We would love to have your input. If you would like to support our group by volunteering your time and talents, I’d love to hear from you as well.

This is a wonderful opportunity for our youth to stay connected, be involved with a meaningful project, and engage with our community. It will be wonderful to see Our Lady of the Lake’s story in video. The stories we will be sharing are the stories we create together as a parish in all the things we do and in all of our events and gatherings. Because, everyday and in everything we do, all of us at Our Lady of the Lake are sowing seeds...and wonderful things are growing!