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No. 46 | A JWC Media publication
NEWS
Story remains key for students using top-notch technology By Jake Jarvi
T
his spring, Apple announced that Steve Douglass, the new media teacher at Lake Forest High School, was awarded a place among the Apple Distinguished Educators, a community who use Apple technology to innovate in the classroom. When Douglass started teaching telecom at LFHS 10 years ago, the most top-of-the-line equipment the students had access to were three low-grade mini-dv cameras. A tour through the new media department these days is a different story. Fifteen Mac Pro towers and monitors capable of handling 4K footage (which is what we see in movie theaters) line the wall. Next to this is a room with a green screen wall and a selection of LED lights rigged to the ceiling. Students have access to 15 HD Canon cameras that shoot using lenses that provide a soft, cinematic depth of field. These kids have everything they need to make a full-blown movie. Though the technology is
Relay for Life event raises more than $27,000. P16
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Glenbrook North boys lacrosse falls in first finals appearance. P.22 Follow us:
For young actor, golden age lies before him, not behind BY SAM EICHNER
U
pon first impression, Harry Thornton is clean-cut and polished. He’s articulate, insightful, and humble — and outstanding, Douglass still em- when he speaks, it’s with a silky timber. It’s phasizes that the most important not hard to imagine him, on stage, spitting element is a well-told story. out Shakespearian soliloquies as Hamlet “I think it is so important for (which he has) or belting musical notes in kids to contextualize what they’re front of a packed audience (he’s done that, going through, especially in too). adolescence, but also throughout Yet, though his maturity may suggest othlife,” Douglass says. “I wanted to erwise, Thornton has only just graduated from figure out a way for them to do high school. that by leveraging the iPhone, Recently, as a senior at Evanston Township which is such an amazing piece High School, Thornton placed as one of ten of equipment.” finalists in the English-Speaking Union’s With the help of Jonathan 32nd annual National Shakespeare CompeKelly of Lake Bluff, the chief tition. It was a long road. More than 15,000 technology officer for MightyN, students compete in 57 ESU branches naDouglass designed an iPhone app tionwide; to reach the finals, Thornton had called showNtell, which offers to win both the competition at his school students an easy fill-in the-blanks and the one for the entire Chicagoland approach to crafting a two-min- branch. Only then could he travel to New ute personal story and outputting York with the other branch winners to it as a well-produced video. Fol- perform a Shakespearian sonnet and monolowing one of several pre-written logue (his was from Hamlet) in front of a scripts in the app, users fill in panel of judges at Lincoln Center Theater blanks about a subject of their — of those 57 student representatives, just choosing, Mad-Lib style. They 10 were invited back as finalists to recite a then read the script off of their randomly assigned monologue later that day. phone as if it’s a teleprompter, “Part of what made it such a powerful recording the narration audio. experience,” Thornton says, “is that there were Douglass’s New Media students students from all over the country, all coming have cracked the code on crafting together to perform the works of this writer who lived hundreds of years ago. Being with Continues on page 11 a group of fellow students who are inter-
Harry Thornton
ested in that idea was rare, and important to me.” This was not Thornton’s first trip to New York. As a freshman, he advanced to New York, but did not make it to the finals. “I’ve gotten a lot better at acting,” Thorn-
ton notes, an achievement he attributes less to a fine-tuning of technical skill and more to the well of life experiences he’s accumulated in the intervening years. “Alienation Continues on page 11
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