WLTV

WLTV has been a staple of homecoming and festival spirit weeks at the high school I went to for years. My senior year, my best friend, Peter, and I had the privilege of hosting it for festival (Wisco's version of a turnabout dance).

The premise behind WLTV has been a news-segment-style series of videos shown after chapel each day of the week. They've traditionally featured a short intro with info about that day's activities, etc, followed by a more scripted, plot-based segment. That's exactly the path we took with our attempt.

From day one of knowing we were doing WLTV, we looked at it as a cinematic work. We knew it was nothing to be taken too seriously, but we wanted it to be relatively high quality. This meant a high-effort plot, script, acting, cinematography, etc. I literally bought a $300 audio recorder just for WLTV (thankfully it's an investment that's more than paid for itself since). Peter and I spent the better part of a month working on a plot and script. Peter's original idea was to an ironic sort of purposely cringy Among Us themed plot. Regardless of how ironic and self-aware it would have been, I think we can all be glad we didn't go through with that. Instead, we settled on what we would eventually come to call WLTV: Disunity.

Fair warning, if you care about spoilers for a dumb high school short film, skip this next paragraph.

The general basis of the plot is that a feud between choir and band escalates into a school-wide all-out war. As Peter's voiceover in episode 4 states, "each side has set up guards on their sides, forming a clear border between the two masses. Each side is using the crawling time to prepare and fortify. It is however unclear if battle will ever break out. Everyone is willing to sacrifice time and sleep to get another room bugged and monitored, but no one is sure if they’ve got what it takes to report on their best friend. Nevertheless, mob mentality will likely prevail, and one sudden cry, one breaking of courage or fear may send the whole school into rampant chaos. For now, there remains only silence...." The series cumulates in resolution between the two main sides, music and athletics, followed by a lovely little mini-chapel led by Peter.

Below, I have an abundance of material related to WLTV, including a master cut of the series, the promotional poster Peter made, an episode of the Viking Voice we made on the behind the scenes of production, along with literally the entire Google Drive folder holding every single asset from Disunity cause why not.