December 17, 2025 
St. Bonaventure University senior Tanner Pasi won the Broadcast Education Association's inaugural Gen AI Competition. The competition challenged students to create a 30-second video using all artificial intelligence tools in just 60 minutes.
Pasi, an English major from St. Marys, Pennsylvania, created his winning work using Sora 2, OpenAI's advanced text-to-video generator.
“I was excited. When I started reading the news, I literally started shaking with excitement,” Pasi said after learning that she had won the national competition.
The BEA Challenge was open to universities across the country and required students to create a fully AI-generated video with visuals, narration, and effects that aligned with a theme presented by the organization.
The guideline the students had to use to create the AI prompt was that they had just witnessed “the greatest scene in the history of sports” at the 1980 World Championship Track and Field Championships in Moscow (but not the boycotted 1980 Summer Olympics). They were allowed to interpret what “best” meant, from triumphant to heartbreaking.
Although the students only had an hour to create their videos, they did not know what the parameters of the prompt were until the time began.
Pasi's video shows a young child watching on TV as a pole vaulter breaks a world record, feeling excited and ultimately inspired. The scene ends with a scene several years later, where the child is preparing to vault with a pole in hand.
The 21 participating schools included Syracuse, Drake, Miami, Arizona State, Florida and Alabama.
Pasi's entry was submitted through JMC 245: Video Storytelling. The course is taught by Scott Sackett, a faculty member in the Jandoli School of Communication, who prepared an extensive class in advance of the competition, focusing on both the capabilities and limitations of emerging AI tools.
“We had them train in class for several weeks before the competition,” Sackett said. “Students came to understand the shortcomings of AI, and we developed strategies to avoid them and even take advantage of them.
“They cleverly utilized ChatGPT to optimize Sora's output and applied video editing techniques to control the story. I am proud of the strategic thinking my students adopted and developed this semester to leverage AI.”
Students from Sackett's two sections of JMC 245 created videos and voted internally to decide which submissions would move forward.
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About the university: St. Bonaventure, the nation's first Franciscan university, is a community committed to transforming the lives of students inside and outside of the classroom, inspiring academic excellence and a lifelong commitment to civic engagement. U.S. News and World Report (2025) ranked St. Bonaventure University 8th in value and 19th overall out of 167 regional universities in the North.
