Students Win Big in Economics Video Contest

Two students submitted the above video into a national video contest and received top honors. It is embedded here with their permission. To watch the video in full quality, click here. 
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For two young economics pupils, "Sarah" provided an important answer. George Mason University students Mark Meranta and Terra Strong won the Fraser Institute’s 2009 Student Video Contest by answering the topic question “What is the most appropriate role of government in the economy?” through a three-minute video entitled My Friend Sarah.

The film took the top prize by shortly chronicling the ideological shift of main character Sarah’s economic opinions.

“It is a political mockumentary about a girl who used to be the president of her college’s ‘Progressive FDR’ club, but took an economics class and became a libertarian who believed in personal and economic freedom,” said Meranta.

After finding out about the contest and topic through an online database for student opportunities such as these, Meranta and Strong set out to make a different kind of informative film that would kept an audience’s interest by using humor.

“We didn’t want another film that just lectures the viewer; I rarely make it through those films and they fail to hold the average student’s interest,” said Strong. “Using humor, we expressed basic libertarian ideals in a documentary style similar to shows like The Real World and The Office.”

Meranta and Strong created the short film, which features Mason students and a cameo from economics Professor Thomas Rustici, after many afternoons of scripting.

“The three minute time limit was probably one of the most difficult obstacles — it really made me want to see how far we could go making a film with a larger time frame,” said Strong.

“We tried to make the dialogue witty and full of humor to keep our audience’s attention,” said Meranta. “We also tried to leave out as much economic jargon as possible and tried to use real world examples to push our ideas. We are basically trying to show the hypocrisies that political advocates show all too often.”