The dynamic duo: Duwel & Langen

via+instagram

via instagram

Do you ever find yourself asking the question: “Who are those two students always filming at sporting events and school activities?”?

By now, many are familiar with the two notorious film producers of ENN and have gained appreciation for the work they do for the school.  These students, junior Jack Langen and sophomore Adam Duwel, have really made a name for themselves this school year with the material there are putting out. From ENN news production, to basketball and football live stream, to broadcasting school events such as pep rallies and glee club, these boys have let Elder Nation reveal its true pride.

As viewers we see there work displayed on a daily basis, however; I wanted to get a little bit of insight from their point of view.  Curious to know about the relationship they have formed over the past two years, I asked both to share their own thoughts.

“Ya know when I first met Jack early my freshman year I was thinking to myself, “What a nerd”. The more and more I started to “work” with him, the more I started to get interested in the same things he was. Whether we are setting up the live stream for a football game or traveling up to Cleveland for a game, we are always having a good time cracking jokes about something. No matter what is going on in the situation we are both open to hear criticism from the other. I am the older of the pair by a couple of days, but Jack is the wiser and more realistic thinking one,” stated Duwel.

Having grown up in Lawrenceburg, Duwell told me that Elder had always been the type the high school he was looking for. His dad attended Elder and his family owns Duwel Automotive on Glenway, making his decision a “no brain-er”. Although a forty-five minute drive doesn’t sound too enjoyable, he said the drive to and from is well worth it.

Adding his own perspective, Langen told, “I started to work with Duwel my sophomore year during the football season. We needed a cameraman for the football game, so my brother found Adam. After that, Mr. Fuell directed him towards ENN and he hasn’t looked back. Adam works hard and got heavily involved early. It’s honestly incredible the amount of stuff he does around school and even in the community. His work effort keeps mine in check, and I think there’s a sort of competitive collaboration between us that keeps us producing better products. Aside from that, we’ve just had a lot of fun. We get to meet some cool people and take road trips and have been lucky enough to have been offered some neat opportunities. We have fun and I give him a lot of crap, but I hold him in a high regard.”

Also coming from a distant grade school in St. Ignatius, Langen has been rightfully appreciated by many of the students and community of Elder High School. Langen stated after filming the Glee Club’s St. Patrick’s Day Cabaret. “Everyone at the event was treating me so nice; I was just some St. Ignatius kid and all these people from the Elder community were coming up and talking to me. It was an awesome night because that was when I dropped my identity as a Wildcat and realized my identity as part of the Elder community. ”

Adam Duwel and Jack Langen as they appear on ENN news with the weekly sports report. (screen capture from Boxcast)

Having a great relationship always comes with some fun. With many journeys traveled between the two, I asked them to pick out one that stood out more than most.

“Geez, my favorite memory. Gotta be the Elder basketball game at LaSalle. Jack was unable to go so I just went to get some highlights and stuff. That game had a great finish with a 3 by Bittner in the closing seconds to put us up two and our defense holding strong to win it. As the game ended in that fashion, the Elder Faithful were going crazy. As that is going on I am thinking to myself, “Holy Cow, I am the only guy who got that on a camera.” No one else from the news was there. So I tweeted it out on the ENN twitter page. (Btw give it a follow @newselder). I mentioned the guys at FOX 19 that do the sports, Joe and Jeremy and they tweeted back and said, “thanks we’ll put it on the FOX 19 sports report tonight at 11:15. I’m like yea, right. I then turned on FOX 19 at 11:15 and there it was in all its glory my video of the closing seconds of the Elder-LaSalle game starting their show *drops mic*”, said Duwel.

Duwel in Morgantown for WVU basketball game (via instagram)

“I have many memories over these few years from ENN/EHSports, many of them being inside jokes that were developed over time and such. If I had to pick one, I’d go with our WVU trip. We did that around January 2 of this year. Trey Jansen (a freshman), Adam, Mr. Rogers, and I all took one of those school transportation vans up to West Virginia University early in the morning and we arrived in Morgantown a little after noon or so. We had a lot of time in the car; we filled that with a lot of screwing around telling jokes and talking about what we could do with ENN and EHSports in the future. We then arrived in Morgantown and got to walk around campus. We met with one of the directors at the Reed College of Media, Whitney, and she showed us their facilities. It was a pretty personal tour so we got some useful information and we discussed how some of their concepts of Sports Marketing applied to us. Later that day, we met back up with Whitney and she took us into their scoreboard control room. They had a crew of nine who controlled lighting and the scoreboards. It was a neat experience because their hectic operation style was very similar to some of the situations we had been in, plus the people joked around with us and were very nice. We left the control room a few minutes into the game. They hooked us up with tickets, which were like front-row seats. We got to see #12 Texas Tech play WVU and the game got down to the wire. I’d never been to a big college basketball game, so that was a plus. We had a hotel room because we scheduled a general tour the next morning. Since we had pretty much seen all we needed to see, we kinda just hung in the back of the tour group and messed around. It was a consistent vibe of screwing around and telling jokes throughout the whole story, and we learned some really important things while doing so. My favorite part of that trip, though, was probably the back-and-forth between Duwel and Mr. Rogers. It did not stop—the dudes had me weak. Mr. Rogers shared with us some college advice. It was great to get to know everyone a bit more. It was incredulous to me because at any moment. I was either learning something or laughing, and that is not hyperbole,” shared Langen.

Although the work they do may seem as just seem like fun and games, hard work and dedication is what makes their product so successful. As both of them agreed, there is a lot of sacrifice involved. Whether it’s staying up late making videos, prepping ideas for their next broadcast, or simply missing out on a cheering section, the time put in is something that needs to be applauded.

With much more left in the tank, be on the look out for newly published material from these two guys in the upcoming future.

CHECK OUT SOME OF THEIR WORK HERE:

https://twitter.com/newselder?lang=en