Polotsk YouTube channel "The First Forest" and its authors
He is only twenty-nine. Yet, it seems as if this person harmoniously combines, complementing each other, youthful enthusiasm and the wisdom of pedagogical experience, adolescent thirst for new knowledge, boundless energy, and mature logic. Nikolay Marchenko is the "Person of the Year of Polotschina," teaches at the branch of BSTU "Polotsk State Forestry College," hosts city concerts, dances in a pop ensemble, and promotes the student television journalism studio. Such a multifaceted personality.
From a Club to a Talk Show
We meet in a classroom where the vocational training instructor discusses with his students, on equal footing, the plot of the next video – it will appear on the "First Forest" YouTube channel in the coming days. While the students are discussing the details of the upcoming filming, Nikolay Valeryevich briefs the journalists:— Our studio is a youth innovation project, it was founded about four years ago. The association included members of two clubs — "Planet of Video" and "Young Special Correspondent". Now it is the only student television in the Vitebsk region among secondary vocational education institutions. We are known far beyond the city and even the country. Don't believe it? Watch the channel.
We watched it. It's impressive. You wouldn't even say that 16-17 year old teenagers are on the other side of the camera. Nikolai does not hide: there is a lot of work, together with the children, they need to come up with interesting informational stories, direct, set up lighting and sound. Editing is done at home at night.
The studio members note that the implementation of the idea would have been impossible without the support of the college administration. Now the guys have professional equipment. They are always met halfway, whether it's equipping the studio to receive guests or allocating equipment for filming outside the college and the city:
— Currently, about twenty young television journalists are studying in the studio, — says the mentor. — The launch of a YouTube channel is a completely new level of broadcasting. Our programs can also be seen on Instagram. That is, we are primarily accessible to young people who are not used to spending time in front of the TV screen. But don't think that the topics covered are exclusively for children and teenagers. A year after the launch, interviews and our own talk show appeared, to which we invited famous people in the city, and discussed topics important for the region and the country as a whole. We also have a lot of social advertising videos and environmental programs, which is quite logical: today's studio members will become professionals in the forestry industry tomorrow.
Nikolai Marchenko shared another idea in confidence. In the year of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory, enthusiasts of "Pervy Lesnoy" will be shooting a documentary film about the war. The guys got their hands on several letters from soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, written in the trenches. These miraculously preserved messages from the distant past already have an original voiceover, as close to reality as possible. The poignant and unsettling voices of the front-line soldiers speak of the death of their comrades, longing for their homeland and loved ones. The future foresters decided to reconstruct military events, to show how and under what conditions the fearless warriors wrote these letters to their mothers, wives, and children.
"Fierce battles took place in the Polotsk region during the Great Patriotic War, and not all pages of military history are known to descendants today," reasons Nikolai Marchenko. "We want to combine local history, research work, and television journalism – to find, study, and record individual episodes, facts, and memories of still-living witnesses of those events."
In addition, a series of short films about the lives of "special" people is in development. How difficult is it for someone who is not like everyone else to survive in our society? What difficulties do these people face, how do they overcome them, and what needs to be done to teach others to be more compassionate towards them? In the meantime, while the young directors are thinking through scripts and looking for actors, another group of "Pervy Lesnoy" studio members is using a professional quadcopter to shoot another video in the spring forest on the theme of ecology. After all, nature protection is their future profession.
We watched it. It's impressive. You wouldn't even say that 16-17 year old teenagers are on the other side of the camera. Nikolai does not hide: there is a lot of work, together with the children, they need to come up with interesting informational stories, direct, set up lighting and sound. Editing is done at home at night.
The studio members note that the implementation of the idea would have been impossible without the support of the college administration. Now the guys have professional equipment. They are always met halfway, whether it's equipping the studio to receive guests or allocating equipment for filming outside the college and the city:
— Currently, about twenty young television journalists are studying in the studio, — says the mentor. — The launch of a YouTube channel is a completely new level of broadcasting. Our programs can also be seen on Instagram. That is, we are primarily accessible to young people who are not used to spending time in front of the TV screen. But don't think that the topics covered are exclusively for children and teenagers. A year after the launch, interviews and our own talk show appeared, to which we invited famous people in the city, and discussed topics important for the region and the country as a whole. We also have a lot of social advertising videos and environmental programs, which is quite logical: today's studio members will become professionals in the forestry industry tomorrow.
Movies are being made
Nikolai Marchenko's creative mood is passed on to the students: with such a teacher, you want to develop and experiment. The results are obvious — victories in competitions and reviews, including in the international social project "The World Through the Eyes of Students" and the Republican Open Competition of Amateur Films named after Yuri Tarich "I'm Making a Movie". However, Nikolai does not focus on diplomas and certificates — for him, for example, the number of channel subscribers is more important, which, by the way,is steadily growing.Nikolai Marchenko shared another idea in confidence. In the year of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory, enthusiasts of "Pervy Lesnoy" will be shooting a documentary film about the war. The guys got their hands on several letters from soldiers of the Great Patriotic War, written in the trenches. These miraculously preserved messages from the distant past already have an original voiceover, as close to reality as possible. The poignant and unsettling voices of the front-line soldiers speak of the death of their comrades, longing for their homeland and loved ones. The future foresters decided to reconstruct military events, to show how and under what conditions the fearless warriors wrote these letters to their mothers, wives, and children.
"Fierce battles took place in the Polotsk region during the Great Patriotic War, and not all pages of military history are known to descendants today," reasons Nikolai Marchenko. "We want to combine local history, research work, and television journalism – to find, study, and record individual episodes, facts, and memories of still-living witnesses of those events."
In addition, a series of short films about the lives of "special" people is in development. How difficult is it for someone who is not like everyone else to survive in our society? What difficulties do these people face, how do they overcome them, and what needs to be done to teach others to be more compassionate towards them? In the meantime, while the young directors are thinking through scripts and looking for actors, another group of "Pervy Lesnoy" studio members is using a professional quadcopter to shoot another video in the spring forest on the theme of ecology. After all, nature protection is their future profession.