KNOXVILLE –- A video produced by the University of Tennessee for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation has won the Bronze Telly, the top national award for outstanding video production.
Telly Award Brad Prosise of UT’s video and photography services department produced the video along with Tisha Calabrese-Benton from Environment and Conservation. Prosise and Calabrese-Benton traveled across the state over a six-day period to film 20 of Tennessee’s 54 state parks.
“We worked sunrise to sunset, going from one end of the state to another,” said Prosise. “It was a marathon.”
The Telly Awards are given annually, and are the premier national awards for cable TV commercials and programs, as well as video and film productions from the local, regional and national level. More than 12,000 entries are received each year.
The video services department, in addition to working with campus entities to support the university’s overall marketing and educational efforts, works with a wide variety of institutional clients from state government.
“Winning a Telly is a great accomplishment for Brad and our whole department, as well as for the Department of Environment and Conservation and their efforts to promote the state’s parks,” said Tom Owens, UT’s video and photography director.
Tennessee was one of four states in the country chosen by the National Recreation Parks Association as a finalist for a national award recognizing excellent state parks systems. Each finalist submitted a video, and Environment and Conservation continues to use the video as a tool to help educate people about the wide variety of experiences available to them at Tennessee’s 54 state parks.
Shooting the video presented an array of unique situations, according to Prosise, especially with so many parks and activities in such a short period. He specifically recalled the experience of hiking an hour into the woods to meet up with a group of volunteers who were spending the weekend building a section of the Cumberland Trail, Tennessee’s linear state park, which will eventually stretch 300 miles from Chattanooga to Kentucky along the Cumberland Plateau.
“Carrying my equipment through the fresh mud was definitely interesting, but we got the shot we were looking for,” said Prosise.
To view the video, visit the Tennessee State Parks Web site at http://www.tnstateparks.com and click on the NRPA Gold Medal Award Finalist icon.
For more on UT’s video and photography center, visit http://videophoto.tennessee.edu
—
Contacts:
Jay Mayfield, media relations (865-974-9409, jay.mayfield@tennessee.edu)