Pennsylvania’s What’s So Cool About Manufacturing film competition was created back in 2013 by an organization called Catalyst Connections, but 2025/26 is the first year that Shaler Area has joined the event. The primary goal of the competition is to educate Pennsylvanians about career opportunities in manufacturing. The secondary goal is to provide an opportunity for youth to engage in an unforgettable hands-on student-run film production experience.
SAMS registered two teams in the WSCAM competition this year, each with a student Producer, Director, Sound & Light Tech, Camera Operator, Asset Manager, and Media Editor. Each team was partnered with and had to learn about a local manufacturing center. The teams then toured the facilities to get a sense of the space, the employees, and management. A month was spent storyboarding ideas, practicing camera/lighting techniques, and engineering ways to obtain desired shots. Afterwards, the teams returned to the sites and spent a day filming – amassing a couple hundred hours of footage that needed edited down to the competition’s two-minute-thirty-second maximum film length.
To meet the deadline, final videos were submitted by the end of February. Both of our films have been approved by the prospective companies and are now available for online viewing. Students will be attending an Academy Awards style awards ceremony at the end of March where various film awards will be announced. The most coveted award, the “People’s Choice” award, is determined through online voting – and is where the students need your help!
This is a statewide competition, but Shaler Area is one of twenty schools located in the Pittsburgh Central Division. The videos for all the schools in our division can be found at this link: https://www.whatssocool.org/contests/pittsburgh-central-pa-contest/
The students request that everyone follow the link and peruse the videos but make sure to cast votes for Shaler Area Team #1 & Shaler Area Team #2! Voting multiple times is encourage, but you’ll need to refresh the page to vote again.
The students have worked diligently on this project and overcame several obstacles along the way. They are now in the home stretch and would greatly appreciate the community’s support to carry them over the finish line!
Information about the films:
Shaler Area Team #1 (Ivy V, Mary Jeanne K, Javon R, Peter L, R.J. B, and Grant C)
Partnered with Mitsubishi Electric Power Products in Warrendale. The workers in this facility build the environmental control units, power supplies, and location/braking systems that keep subway/train cars comfortable, on time, and distanced enough away from each other to avoid accidents. The work environment is impeccably clean with a focus on quality and efficiency. The students filmed this in a documentary style with the premise of searching for “Hidden Heroes” in our midst. This team was exceptionally well organized and looked like a professional film crew when we were on site with multiple camera angles, cameras set on rolling dollies & ladders, and they didn’t shy away from giving adults direction. Ultimately, to get final approval, the students needed to remove all references in the film to the employees keeping train passengers ‘safe’ so the Hidden Hero story line got weakened, but they did a fantastic job start to finish.
Shaler Area Team #2 (Nate L, Abbie K, Andrea W, Owen L, Neva C, and Evey M)
Partnered with the family-owned Ace Wire Spring and Form in McKees Rocks. This 80-year-old company with employees and management that are genuinely kind and helpful, produce special order springs for buyers who need items built to unique specifications – a number of which we weren’t allowed to film (and some we weren’t even allowed to see). They build large scale items used in vehicles or security gates, small springs for watches, specialized springs for custom guitars, and anything that needs a wire to be a certain shape. For this film, the students focused on the work the company has done with NASA – specifically the springs they made for the Mars Rover. This charming film uses greenscreen work and puppetry to create a quest storyline showing a helpful Martian traveling to Earth in the hopes of locating an originally manufactured replacement part to repair the rover’s suspension system.