Roses 2005

After the year off in 2004, the team that tackled Roses 2005 was almost completely different from that which had done Roses 2003, with only Dave Baker, Jonathan Bufton and Rob Humphrey still around. This lead to quite a "clean slate" approach to the task. As none of the team were particularly into sport (nothing ever changes!), what was done was driven mainly by the AU's requests rather than and particular televisual or technical goals. The coverage split into three separate strands - a mini-live rig for the Darts on the Friday night (at Megabowl, Clifton Moor), a play-out stall at the Roses Ball on the Saturday night (at Next Generation gym, behind Alcuin), and DVDs sold at the ball and produced afterwards.

The Darts

The AU held the darts matches at the Megabowl bowling alley on the Clifton Moor retail park, and wanted a live video / projector rig for it. They hired in the projector and screen (from AV) and YSTV provided the cameras. A minium kit rig was devised using two MS5 cameras (one for the darts board close-up, one wider shot), a laptop to provide an YSTV logo video feed and the Panasonic Max as a vision mixer, which also provided down stream keying of the YSTV logo over the output video. An SVHS deck also went to provide a recording of the event (and yes, we did get asked for the footage ...). Because it was an off-campus hire the projector was (predictably) the oldest one AV had, and the venue was less than inspiring, being basically a bit of floor with a blank wall (in front of which the screen was stood). Ents provided a single monitor speaker with a mic as PA, and a couple of PAR cans stood on the floor were shone upwards on the darts board.

It is somewhat unclear why the darts was held in such a far away location when a bar on campus would have done the job. It's possible that the original intention was for everyone to head to the Ikon and Diva club next door after the darts had finished (as had happened in previous years). However the club had closed down a couple of months previously, so perhaps the darts booking was made far in advance and couldn't be cancelled.

The Playout Rig at Roses Ball

This was done using the video projector / sound system installed at Next Generation, fed from Dave Baker's laptop. This played a 30 minute loop of highlights from the event with no sound, plus a selection of music from Dave's MP3 collection to keep us entertained. The play-out was the easy bit - what took the hard work was creating the video loop, and then taking down DVD orders and money off people all night. The loop was edited on the Saturday afternoon by Rowan de Pomerai with some help from Dave Baker, and then the play out stall manned by Richard Ash and Dave Baker.

The "star" guest at Roses Ball was none other than Pat Sharp from TV's Fun House. Dave gallantly chased after him at the end of the night to get him to record an ident for the station, which to his credit he did with gusto, saying "Hello, I'm Pat Sharp and you're watching YSTV. It's a whole lot of fun with prizes to be won!". Sadly the microphone wasn't turned on - although the footage did turn up as a pre-titles sequence on Small Screen later that term, complete with subtitles and the Fun House theme tune.

The DVD

This was produced in the weeks after the event, and basically consisted of all the footage that had been shot, given a quick tidy up of starts / ends / camera pointing at the floor, and with some library music added over the topUnverified or incomplete information. This produced a pile of DV AVI files, which Rowan then took home and made into a pair of video DVDs using iDVD on his Mac, thus avoiding any hassle over DVD creation. Copies were run off on the station's DVD burner, boxed and sent out to those who had bought them via their respective AUs. This actually raised quite a lot of money, which helped pay for Edit PC 2 in the summer term.

Kate and Sarah film the ballroom dancing