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GREENSBORO -- It’s lights, camera and rubber chicken as a Weaver Academy junior puts the spotlight on education and becomes a finalist in a national video contest.

Alex Hughes is one of ten finalists in the U.S. Department of Education’s video contest “I Am What I Learn.” The contest encouraged students to create videos that explain how education has shaped who they are.

More than 600 students entered videos. Voting ends today, and three winners will be announced later this month. The winners receive $1,000.

Alex, who entered the contest on a whim, is excited to be a finalist.

“I looked at all the other videos and saw they weren’t really funny, and I thought who was going to watch these videos? Students are. So I tried to make mine funny,” he said.

Alex’s video begins with him sitting in a director’s chair with a green screen in the background. As the two-minute video progresses, Alex walks around his yard and house explaining how a good education leads to accomplishing dreams.

All the while, Alex’s friends are in the background interacting with movie-set pieces, getting Alex to sign off on important movie documents and, of course, getting their director’s opinion on which rubber chicken is funniest for a crucial scene.

Michael Crenshaw, Alex’s digital media teacher at Weaver, said the video is tightly written and has a strong sense of comedic timing, giving it a polished feel. Alex the director comes off as a confident auteur. It’s a side of the teen his friends and classmates hadn’t seen before.

“He’s a shy guy and in his video that’s where he’s able to express himself,” Crenshaw said.

Crenshaw encouraged Alex to enter the contest. He says out of the 50 or so students enrolled in his media classes each year maybe three show the natural talent that Alex does.

His classmates recognized the talent. Lauren Winberg wants to be a journalist and said she regularly looks to Alex for advice on video projects.

“Everybody goes up to him and asks for help,” she said. “I know he knows what he’s doing.”

Lauren said she expects to see Alex hitting it big with movies in the future.

For now, Alex is waiting to see how his first short film contest piece turns out. It’s unclear how many votes he’ll receive. The contest is hosted on the education department’s website but it’s played through the Youtube application, which is blocked through Guilford County Schools. Teachers and classmates can vote on the videos but they can’t watch them at school.

If he does win, Alex said he will pay his extras $50 a piece and save the rest of the money for college or buy more movie equipment.