Central High Graduation Video – A Gift from Central City News

CENTRAL — Central City News editor Woody Jenkins wanted to do something special for the Central High School Class of 2011.  So he pulled together some of the Central City News’ best photos from the school year and from last week’s Central High graduation ceremonies and produced an HD quality video as a gift for the Senior Class.  The video includes more than 500 photographs.

To view the four parts of the video, click on the following links:

Central High Graduation Video – Part 1 – 1:22

Central High Graduation Video – Part 2 – 5:50

Central High Graduation Video – Part 3 – 4:06

Central High Graduation Video – Part 4 – 4:31

Jolice Provost of Central City News contributed photographs to Part 1 of the video.

Jenkins said, “The Class of 2011 is a wonderful group of young people, and I believe they will make a tremendous contribution to the Central community, Louisiana, and the nation.  I have had the privilege of being there during their four years in high school and have taken 10,000 or more photos of these young men and women. We try to publish as much of their activities as possible in the Central City News, but space is obviously very limited. With my years in TV news and production, I started thinking about a video and conceived this idea. Hopefully, it will allow the Class of 2011 to preserve some of the memories that would otherwise be lost.”

Jenkins spent over 100 hours at the computer working on the project, including all of the Memorial Day weekend.  “I think it was worth it.  We’ll see if they like it.  You obviously try to put some emotion into a project like this, and I hope we captured some of the feeling.”

“We have a wealth of material to work with at the Central City News, and the new media give us the chance to get more of what we have out to the people.  It’s not about money, because this kind of thing doesn’t produce money, but it is about serving our community and our readers.”

Jenkins said the Central City News is fully commited to delivering news and information via the Internet as well as in print.

“So far, we have gotten a tremendous response to our Facebook news reports, our website, www.centralcitynews.us, and our Photo Gallery.”

Jenkins said he has been amazed at the response to the Photo Gallery at the www.centralcitynews.us website.  “In the past 30 days, we have had 82,628 photo views on our website.  That is pretty staggering.”

Because an HD quality video has such a large file size, Jenkins broke up the video into four parts for distribution on Facebook and from the newspaper’s website.  “It’s really in rough cut form right now.  But after we get comments from the seniors and others who view the videos, we’ll go back to the project, do a little more editing, and merge the four short videos into one DVD.  Seniors will be able to download the HD quality video from the Internet.  Or, if they’d like an HD quality DVD of the final product, we’ll send them one free, if they email us their name and mailing address no later than June 30, 2011.  That request should be sent to centralcitynews@hotmail.com.”

Jenkins encouraged everyone to become a Facebook Friend of the Central City News, in order to get news updates and everything else the newspaper produces.  “Most of the creative product of the newspaper staff can be viewed at www.centralcitynews.us.  Facebook updates lead you to the website and then to the on-line version of the print edition, the newspaper’s archives of 8,000 articles, and the Photo Gallery.  For us, Facebook is not so much a social network as it is a means of distributing our news product,” he said.