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INUVIK - For the first time in its 11-year history, a pair of Inuvik students captured gold at the Territorial Skills competition in Yellowknife on April 21.

Grade 12 students Shayne Cockney and Matthew Dyck were among several local students who went to duke it out against some of NWT's best and brightest students in the annual competition that's designed to promote trade and technology careers.

Matthew Dyck, left, and Shayne Cockney have a little fun with the camera at Samuel Hearne Secondary School on Tuesday afternoon. The pair's short film won them gold at the 11th Annual Territorial Skills Competition held in Yellowknife on April 21. - Andrew Rankin/NNSL photo

The duo who went up against five teams challenged to come up with a two to four-minute promotional video for Skills Canada NWT in six hours.

The result was a satirical film in which the pair challenged some of the stereotypes attached to trades. One minute they portrayed a know-it-all character dumbing down the trade industry, the next minute they were passionately beating down those attitudes.

"It was funny. That's why we chose to do it," said Cockney. "It would make the person laugh. It would make people pay attention to what's being said."

For Matthew, it was an opportunity to show the rest of the territory that Inuvik students are on par with anyone.

"This is so surprising someone from Inuvik won a gold medal in the Skills Canada," said Matthew. "It's based out of Yellowknife so a majority of the students are from Yellowknife.

"They have all the equipment they need at after school clubs. It's always Yellowknife that gets the gold. So we've proved something."

Shayne agreed. The opportunity to shine proved to instil some confidence in her.

"It was definitely awesome," she said. "To be able to create something like that in that amount of time - I never really thought I could do it. We had to compete here."

The pair boasted the same sort of film at the regional competition held in Inuvik last month, which they won to qualify for the Yellowknife event. Several other categories such as electrical wiring and carpentry were also included in the territorial competition.The students will now move on to the National Skills competition in Charlottetown, P.E.I., from May 20 to 23. The team will not change the theme of the film, but they promise to develop it a bit more.

Shayne and Matthew were quick to give credit to all the help they've gotten from Hugues Latour, the school's French immersion teacher and filmmaker of 10 years. Latour spent endless hours coaching the duo in the tricks of the trade, including ways in which to capture the audience.

He said he wasn't surprised at their gold-medal performance.

"They've worked really hard," he said.

"They paid for professional equipment. They have lots of talent. They deserve this. For the nationals, they can refine it even more and I'm sure they can do equally well there."

Regardless of the results, they're already looking beyond the nationals where they would like to pursue filmmaking in all of its forms, full-time.