High School Musical

High School Musical was our 2016 Senior Production, and the highlight of my graduating year. I played Chad, which was a bit of a stretch. I had enough acting in me to carry it, but I was also the lankiest guy on the planet and a deeply unconvincing Wildcats basketball player. To be fair, the whole team was useless. We were actors, not athletes.

The BTS video and all the advertising material was just stuff I did because I wanted to. I took photos of the entire cast and we put posters up around the school. They made it into the brochure too.

The BTS doc itself was everyone mucking about backstage, collated into one big throwback at the end. We screened it at the after-party, around midnight, with the whole cast. Maybe sixty people. It was packed with inside jokes and the reactions were fantastic. It rounded the night off perfectly.

It played again at a school assembly, where I learned something useful: a long video full of in-jokes for a cast of sixty is pretty boring for the other few hundred people watching. Lesson noted.

I was still figuring out my skill set back then. This was one of the first times I got to push into the stuff I actually wanted to do, on my own time, for the love of it. Looking back it was foundational. A lot of how I capture school content today started here.