Harborfields High School students Gavin and Melina Sandel recently earned first place in the Best Science News Package category Broadcast Awards for Senior High sponsored by Stony Brook University for their work on the school’s morning live show Tornado News. BASH is part awards ceremony and part learning conference for Long Island high school students and teachers involved in journalism programs and media production classes.
Gavin has been doing weekly weather reports at Harborfields High School throughout the year. His sister Melina created the graphics, runs the studio equipment and edits the packages for his segments on Tornado News. Additionally, Gavin also generates scoreboards that display on the show and the building’s digital signage system and composes daily sports reports. As for Melina, she has become an amazingly productive content producer in her own right as she is adept in both Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Photoshop.
“Both Gavin and Melina serve as great examples of what the broadcast journalism and video production program can do for students,” Tornado News Team Productions adviser Vincent Ambrosio said. “They have built impressive portfolios of published work while assembling a powerful and marketable set of skills that have propelled them into college and onto their respective career paths.”