With hardwork and determination, anything is possible. One of the many talented students at Yorba Linda High School has shown this to be true during this past weekend. Nick Franklyn won first place at the Chapman Holocaust Museum a few weeks ago for one of his many short films. Put up against many other talented film students, Nick pulled ahead with a heart wrenching film about the horrible conditions the Holocaust survivors went through.

While Nick was visiting the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, Nick knew he needed to film the camp. He then looked through many Holocaust survivor testimonies and found one that stood out the most. Sonia Berson’s testimony inspired him to put the whole film together. Her experiences, and many others, led him to make the video that won him first place.

Not only was Nick recognized for his Holocaust piece, he has also won many other notable awards around Orange County. He was nominated as artist of the year by the Orange County Register. He also won best independent film at the Orange County Film Festival for his film Bedhead.

Along with all of these awards, he is a co-producer of the Yorba Linda High Schools advanced video productions class on campus. With this title comes a ton of responsibility and dedication. Nick and a few other classmates take videos of events that happen throughout the week to show in front of the whole school through Mustang Mix. Mustang Mix is Yorba Linda High School’s weekly video broadcasts. They spend their time going to sports events, theatrical productions, and interviewing students during lunch. The students involved in Mustang Mix condense many hours of footage into a ten to fifteen minute video played to everyone on campus every other week.

According to one of his many class mates, Mary Liu (11), Nick is a “very hardworking and reliable person” in advanced video productions. He puts in all of “his time and efforts to ensure that this class runs as smoothly as possible.”

These awards and this class are great steps towards his dream of having a career in the film industry. He hopes to go to college that has an upstanding film program so he can grow his knowledge on something he is passionate about. Nick even hopes to one day become a film producer for a major company.