WOOSTER, Ohio — A picture may be worth a thousand words, but for Diane Gress of Shreve, Ohio, pictures were worth the top prize in the National Ag Day Video Contest.

The purpose of the contest was to raise the awareness of agriculture and National Ag Day. Gress is a student at Triway High School.

With an interest in Graphic Arts, Gress has created other videos, including the winning entries in Ohio Department of Agriculture’s 2011 “Ag is Cool” video contest and Ohio Farm Bureau Federation’s 2011 “My Ohio Agriculture” video contest. And this year, Gress produced a video that earned top honors in the Ag Day contest and was shown at the national convention in Washington, D.C.

Gress said the National Ag Day Video Essay Contest consisted of two parts: participants had the opportunity to create a video based on the theme “Feeding the Future. Filling the Gap” or write an essay. Gress chose to create a video, but first she had to write a speech that could be converted to a video.

She used her video to raise awareness of how agriculture has improved food production for the world population and how it will continue to improve as the population increases.

“Mom found information on the contest and I had a month to come up with the video,” she said.  

Gress developed a plan and wrote a script, before creating the sketches for each section of the script. The video was created using IMOVIE, a free program available on her computer.  

“The challenge was figuring out what I was going to draw,” she said. “You are drawing an idea, so you have to have something that connects the words with the pictures.

She added it was a lot of trial and error before she was satisfied with the end product.