Welcome to AMHS Live! - A Prologue
If you are reading this article, most likely, you have been admitted to AMHS, so congratulations! At AMHS, you have a myriad of opportunities, ranging from sports, debate, tech, robotics, and the topic for this article, the sports broadcasting team. If you are interested in learning about a great organization, making new experiences, and are curious about what AMHS Live is about, you’re in the right place.
In life, we make choices every day, “Do I want pizza or a hamburger for lunch” or, “Should I do my homework now or should I watch some Netflix?” Many of these choices may have been done on purpose, with strong intentions, but many others may happen due to chance. To be completely honest, I joined AMHS Live entirely by chance and luck; I knew nothing about filmmaking or sports broadcasting coming into high school. During my freshman year, I stumbled into the wrong club meeting when I was trying to find the meeting room for some technology club. AMHS Live was quite small at the time, as I remember, there were only 4 to 6 people in the room. Embarrassed that I went to the wrong place, I just ended up leaving, having gone to neither the technology club nor AMHS Live. Later that day, I hung out with my friends and tried to forget about the incident.
A year later, I saw a notice on the Mitty announcements that AMHS Live was looking for new members for the school year, quite possibly how you found out about this club too. Remembering that awkward moment I had a year back, I realized that the people there were actually really friendly and couldn’t hurt to give the club a visit. In fact, I think they were open to me joining at the time, but at the moment, I didn’t realize because I was too embarrassed. Then for the following years, I became an official member, received a Press Pass, and enjoyed not only filming sports games, but making friends and sharing pizza before a broadcast. Plus, I got five service hours which was always nice. For my junior and senior years, I grew to appreciate what the organization had to offer, so I put in some more work and ended up being a technical director, then the president of AMHS Live. I was able to see the club grow from just a couple of people to a group of people who all had unique ideas and purposes.
Now let’s get into the central part of this prologue that you’re probably interested in. What is AMHS Live really about? What is it like to be a member? Would I do it all over again if I had the chance? After three years in this club, I have a couple of main takeaways that you may find helpful:
AMHS Live isn't just a "film club"
AMHS Live provides an opportunity many high schools don't have
AMHS Live can help you communicate better with others
The first thing to realize is that AMHS Live isn’t just the stereotypical “film club” that you may see in movies or even other schools. It isn’t a film appreciation club where members watch popular movies, eat popcorn, and talk about their favorite scenes. It’s an organization that was meant for you to make movies and videos. In this organization, most of your time will be time spent on creating films, documentaries, podcasts, and sports reels. In fact, the main reason this group was founded was to live-stream Mitty sports games, hence the name, AMHS Live. Honestly, many of my favorite memories in high school are somehow tied to this group; whether it be staying late night with friends to live-stream the Homecoming football game, or taking a sponsored road trip to Lafayette and trying hibiscus tea. If you have a story to tell that you want to share with the world, or you’re looking to start your story, this is a great place to start.
Another aspect that I found that AMHS Live provided was teaching me valuable skills. Although you can say this for many organizations, most notably Debate and Robotics, AMHS Live has unique quirks that make it stand out. On a side note, I was also an operations leader in Robotics during my senior year, so I truly understand the differences. One of these details about joining AMHS Live is that there’s more impending responsibility. Although this sounds not very useful, or even a negative point, it creates a sense of urgency and importance that other groups may lack. The content you film, the sports you broadcast, thousands of people will be watching your content. As I mentioned previously, sports broadcasting at Mitty is quite remarkable due to the fact how Mitty doesn’t sell contracts to outside professional organizations to cover games; they rely on the students to broadcast them. Many other high school students can’t broadcast their sports games because an outside company owns all of their team’s sports footage. While this does mean AMHS Live will involve more work, it also means that the work you do will have a real impact. People who watch the broadcast, NBA athletes (take a look at the Aaron Gordon documentary that Jack Smith helped make), and even scouts will rely on the content you helped create. You can legitimately say the impact that you made after working on a broadcast or documentary. Plus, maybe you’ll meet an all-star athlete!
Another skill that I’ve learned through AMHS Live is leadership and people skills. Now to be honest, I was terrible at this when I was a freshman. I could barely talk, and the only way I could talk to people was by doing magic tricks. But whether you like it or not, these skills will need to be learned one way or another, because that’s how the world works. But I think this is a great place to develop these skills because it’s not as hardcore as a full-time job so there’s some more leeway in making mistakes. Plus, it’s always fun to meet new people and make new friends, especially as all of you will have shared interests.
One of my favorite aspects of AMHS Live is how diverse it can be. On the outside, it may just seem like students who want to create films and broadcast sports. However, AMHS Live supports the infrastructure for so many more types of content creation. I remember in the club how there were people who wanted to make podcasts, people who wanted to film in the forests, people who wanted to make mountain bike videos, and even someone who participated in Ski Patrol. Not to mention a student who actually had a pretty big following on YouTube, making excellent stop-motion Lego animations. Even if you just want to make YouTube videos and show off your cool hobby, AMHS Live can teach you the skills to up your game when it comes to filming, editing, and publishing videos. You can even submit your videos to many competitions for the chance to win recognition, scholarships, and even an Emmy. I’m trying to say that even if you want to create fun documentaries like Great Big Story, become a YouTube star, or do comedy “on the street videos” and tell people that 8th period no longer exists, we’ll teach you skills and give you the equipment. Man, it was terrific having access to gimbals, DJI Pockets/Drones, and that Sony Alpha 7III. That bad boy is a fantastic camera.
I hope that you found this article useful, or at the very least, enjoyable to read. If you would like to learn more, feel free to reach out to some other veterans of AMHS Live or the mentors, they would be glad to answer your questions. As always, you can always contact me by leaving a comment or sending me an email if you have anything to say. Whatever you decide to do in your high school career and beyond, I wish you the best of luck. You’ll be surprised in four years the person you can become.
If there’s one takeaway I would like for you to take from this article, it would be to just give it a shot. Try a late-night football broadcast and look professional in an AMHS Live tee and rocking a free Press Pass. Or make a cool skateboarding video or whatever other hobby you might have. If you ever wanted to make a video, create content, or have the opportunity to try your hand at something most other high schools don’t even offer (because they let other companies sign out contracts), give it a shot! Now go make your story!
