Farmington Hills City Beautification Awards

The Farmington Hills City Beautification Awards Ceremony is a contest held every year in Farmington Hills to celebrate buildings that have significantly improved their landscaping techniques and improved property values for the town. This article documents briefly the 2010 awards ceremony.

Content
A nervous host introduced the event, slurring several words in his efforts to explain himself. He began by thanking everyone for arriving, explaining the points system by which buildings with improved landscaping are judged to determine if they deserve an award or not, and then handed the mic over to Farmington Hills' mayor at the time-Jerry Ellis.

Jerry introduced himself as wanting to start with a joke; but complained he had nothing to say about flowers. He got the "Get-Wellephant" joke he used from online. He stated the various categories of facilities that would receive rewards, then went on to flatter the homes and businesses that qualified. He even mispronounced "asterisk" as "asterick." After thanking everyone again from coming, he turned the mic over to Steve Brock. Steve was happy for the high attendance, and thanked the mayor for calling him "the eye candy." He also thanked SWOCC for capturing the event on camera.

Steve continued by switching topics to the Detroit Riverfront. Implication was that its success spelled hope that Farmington Hills could begin its own projects to become more appealing. Riverfront, he claimed, got a huge facelift back in 2003. A well-landscaped walkway exists in what used to be nothing more than an industrial waste dump full of abandoned buildings and the kinds of scum that could be seen in RoboCop.

After a lengthy and boring speech by a lady involved in the Detroit Riverfront project, a several-minute propaganda piece played celebrating the project's success. The video ended with that same lady speaking briefly, before handing the mic over to yet another speaker. That other speaker finally announced the nominees for beautification awards.

The beginning announcer finally came back, thanking Busch's and others in the area for providing food for the event.

Production
It took at least two weeks to produce and edit this piece. The short video that's included and refers to Detroit Riverfront's facelift project was pulled off of a DVD, copied to a MiniDV tape, and then transferred into an Avid digital feed. The three cameras were not 100% synced for some reason, so a frame-by-frame analysis was done of each camera feed and then the center camera's audio was made the audio for every feed. Once all feeds were synced to center-camera's audio, a time-on-shot analysis was performed to determine how long to sit on any one given angle before cutting to another one.

The entire piece does not actually cover every single second of the event. Several minutes of technical difficulties were actually cut out of the final product. Individual slides were imported and each one adjusted as-needed to fit where it needed to in accordance with which topics were being discussed.

SoaT rating
Since the actual budget is not known for this event, an accurate measure could not be obtained. However, the following is considered a most-likely scenario rating:

It would get slashed from the budget before a few other things would, but this function is by no means a serious issue.