A Spanish video, "Un desastre" ("A Disaster"), submitted by Seymour Community School 6th hour Spanish students to the Second Annual AEA 15 Foreign Language Academy Awards video competition came up a winner.

During the course of this comic episode about the ecapades of a class of beginning drivers, everything imaginable goes wrong.

The students wrote, filmed and acted in the production, which was performed entirely in Spanish. This winning entry was created by Whitney Glenn (the Driver's Ed teacher), Deena Rupalo and Rachael Young (the maniac student drivers,) and Audrey Lancial, borrowed from another class to be the third student in the class who made Whitney's life interesting and difficult.

Snappy deliveries, excellent timing, and expressiveness marked the production as a winner.

The year long project was judged on its understandability, message, acting, and transcript. A traveling "Oscar" with the winning schools' names engraved on it will remain in the winning school until May, 2002. The awards are voted on by area schools NOT submitting their own original work.

"'Un Desastre' nearly lived up to its name during the filming. Filming schedules were disrupted by extremely cold weather which saps camera batteries, excused student absences for other events, trouble shooting "safe" crashes, and the need to turn in top performances in the same clothes and hair styles as earlier takes. Three different vehicles were used due to availability problems, but only a really discerning viewer will notice the difference even when looking for it because of carefully selected camera angles," says Miss Hugus, the Seymour Spanish teacher.

Many thanks to Steve Davenport for driving the group on location and performing some "special effects" with the school car, which was NOT really in four wrecks in under five minutes.