Chelsea Kardos, a recent graduate of the School of Media Arts & Studies, now living and working in Los Angeles, was watching this year’s Academy Awards with several other Media School alums when she suddenly saw a few more familiar faces on television.

Last year, Chelsea was the lead producer of  “Asleep in the Deep” (view on Vimeo), a short film made in MDIA 4719 (aka 419), an advanced narrative production class. Three clips from a behind the scenes video documenting the production were used in a 60 second promotional video YouTube called “We’re All Storytellers,” narrated by Andrew Stanton, director of Pixar’s Finding Nemo and WALL-E.

“When the commercial came on,” Kardos said. “I remember all of us kind of making fun of some of the clips they were showing, specifically the one where the Assistant Cameraperson slates with her hands in front of the camera."

"And then there was MY 419! My crew on a Google commercial played during the Oscars. I started screaming. And kept hitting the people around me because I couldn't believe that it not only showed one clip, but three."

Jessica Rovniak was the director of Asleep in the Deep. "I was actually not watching the awards because I don't have cable. All of a sudden I got a rush of texts and calls saying we were on the Oscars. I freaked out! My mom called and said she was brushing her teeth watching and saw the clip and screamed."

A production group associated with Google, YouTube’s parent company, contacted Dan Hildebrand, producer/editor of the BTS documentary (view on YouTube) about two weeks before the Academy Awards. “They said Google was interested in using some of our clips from the BTS documentary in a new video they were producing. The premise was:

"Behind every film are filmmakers–people who spend countless hours falling, tripping, failing, inventing, searching, learning, improving, and relentlessly working to bring their vision to life. The mistakes and mishaps behind the camera are made by everyone from every level of filmmaking. When we all fail, we all succeed."

“Aside from that I didn't know that the video was meant to be shown at the Oscars, so I was completely blown away,“ said Hildebrand, who was actually in Hollywood at the time, taking part in the Media School’s Spring Break in LA program.

Strangely, this was not the first time that work by Media Arts students has been shown during the Academy Awards. In 2005, BMW used work done by a group led by producer John Swartz, now a top assistant to Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, to promote a storytelling competition they were sponsoring.