Arlington Tech grads come out on top in TV-production competition

Lina Barclay and Ellie Nix, two 2022 Arlington Tech graduates from the Arlington Career Center, won the first-place gold medal in the Television (Video) Production contest at the annual National Leadership and Skills Conference and SkillsUSA Championships, held recently in Atlanta.

Barclay and Nix represented Virginia in this contest and competed against 37 other teams from across the U.S.

The Television (Video) Production contest is a two-member team competition where students are given a prompt to plan, shoot and edit a 60-second promotional video in two days. The team is evaluated on skills such as adherence to the prompt, shot selection and composition, camera stability and focus, audio quality, editing flow and transitions, speech/music balance and the “wow factor” of the piece.

Tom O’Day, the television and multi-media production instructor at the Arlington Career Center, has waited a long time for this result.

“This is an extremely difficult contest to win. We have competed in this contest for over 25 years, and could never get over the hurdle to win,” O’Day said. “It’s incredibly competitive since we are taking on each state champion.”

Barclay and Nix came in second place in the contest last year, and were determined to win the whole thing in 2022.

“Their hard work has paid off and they can proudly say that they are national champions,” O’Day said.

Barclay will be attending Boston University to study film and Nix will be attending the University of Texas in Austin to study radio, television and film.

Arlington Career Center television-production students also took home a third-place medal in the Atlanta competition. Career Center student Scotten Maderal and Arlington Tech students Evan Holt, Rand McAvoy and Antonio Abela competed against 20 other teams in that effort.