Shorecrest grad Rhys Kroehler needs your vote (Today!) to win $7500 scholarship for his 60 second film

Rhys Kroehler
2017 Shorecrest grad
and current film student at USC

By Luanne Brown

Rhys Kroehler, 19, is a finalist in his age group for the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation (IPOEF) 2018 Video Contest.

Kroehler, a 2017 graduate of Shorecrest High School, found out about the competition through a scholarship notification web site. 

“The $7500 scholarship prize goes to the film that gets the most online votes by today’s deadline (August 31, 2018). 

“The prize money would help me continue my education at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts as a Film and Television Production major,” Kroehler said. 

He is currently enrolled at the school as a sophomore and is on track to graduate in 2021.

The goal of the competition is to create a 60 second video that “teaches the world something interesting about patents, trademarks, or copyrights’, according to IPOEF.

Rhys at work on a film

 
Kroehler said he has been interested in filmmaking since he was 10 when he received a stop motion camera that he used to make short films using Legos®. Raised in Shoreline, his parents are both creative people. His dad, an artist, and his mother, a writer and graphic designer, taught him at an early age that all art has a story to tell.

“I realized the power of filmmaking when I showed a short I’d done in my sophomore year to my mom and she cried halfway through” he said. 

That experience taught him that film is more than 24 pictures per second flashing by in a second. It establishes a connection between the people behind the screen and those in front of the screen watching it.

While still in high school, Kroehler built houses in Mexico three summers in a row. While there, his interest in learning about people’s stories deepened and it gave him more insight into how powerful story telling can be. 

“I met a man who had been living in the U.S. for 40 years. He had a family and was deported over a parking ticket.”

He is fascinated by what leads people to take certain paths in their life. 

“There is so much animosity between people who are different because we don’t know them. We all go through similar struggles,” he said. 

According to him, the best way to get to know someone else is to share stories with them. While his primary goal is to entertain, he believes that it’s also important to make the world better.

 “If I can make someone stop and consider an alternate viewpoint just for a second, then I consider my work a success.”

Vote by end of day (Friday, August 31th) for Khroeler’s film HERE 
An additional $2000 prize is awarded for the film that gets the most Facebook likes: HERE

Some quotes are taken from his 2017 short, “A Story Can Change the World”