Year 7 and 8 teacher Sydney Robertson said the pupils exceeded her expectations.
The class was one of five around the country to win $10,000 for making a video about safety at school.
"The money has definitely opened up a whole lot of opportunities for the school," she said.
An article shared by her mother gave Miss Robertson the idea to enter the competition.
"I came to school and I said to my kids ‘we’re going to enter this competition’."
The class watched Air New Zealand safety videos to understand the airline’s unique style of communication. After that, the class began writing scripts.
"We thought about things at our school that we could do safety on."
The class thought about things like how to exit the classroom in an emergency and how to ride bikes safely, as well as sun safety, which was important in Central Otago’s summer.
The script and theme was finalised, and only five days after she first heard about the idea, Miss Robertson and her class began to film.
"We went and we just started filming . . . which we thought was going to take all day but we were finished by lunchtime," she said.
Everyone in the class was involved with the video, whether in front of or behind the camera.
"You can see their personality and creativity . . . whether they’re doing things and behind the scenes or standing in front of the camera and talking."
The video’s theme had safety inspectors coming to test the school and check how safe it was. In the video, students demonstrated bike and sun safety, and where to store bags and how to evacuate like a real airline video.
A big issue with the video was that it was three minutes long — a minute more than the competition requirements, she said.
"We had to do lots of chopping and changing and cutting it down, speeding some things up."
After the entries had closed, the winning schools were meant to hear back from the airline on December 19.
" I thought ‘oh like that’s a shame we haven’t won it’," she said.
It wasn’t until she was sitting in the classroom and had thought about how she was going to break the news to her class that Miss Robertson received an email which said her class had won.
"I was sitting in my classroom thinking those poor kids are going to come back to school and I’m going to have to tell them we didn’t win it and then two hours later I got an email and a video from Valerie Adams saying that we had won, so that was really exciting."
While she has yet to talk to the children in the video, the reaction from parents had been positive.
"The parents’ response has been really, really cool school-wide, not just for our class as well," Miss Robertson said.
