Elections 2015

Elections 2015
Watch Online
Genre:	Events Coverage
First Broadcast:	07/02/2015
Last Broadcast:	27/02/2015
Producer(s):	Sam Nicholson Matt Ingram

Elections 2015 built on some of the successes of 2014 and also took advantage of YUSU effectively doing a load of our marketing for us to be one of the most successful live YSTV productions in recent history in terms of viewer numbers. It comprised the 60 Second Manifestos, Full Time Officer Debates and the Elections Results Night itself,

60 Second Manifestos

Manifestos were set up the weekend before filming, making use of the slightly larger greenscreen frame borrowed from the Electronics department along with some creative lighting to get a fairly even key (roughly, light the greenscreen first to be completely flat, then light the subject as far in front of it as you can). Initially keying live was attempted, but due to the difficulty in consistently getting a clean key across a variety of clothing patterns and skin tones this was scrapped in favour of doing it in After Effects. For filming the studio was left in this set up all week as no other productions had booked it and it took us the better part of a weekend to set it up. The lighting desk was configured as a sort of "video village", with the laptop feeding a clock graphic to the plasma which was situated immediately behind the camera, along with being used to copy successful takes to Pending Edits and update the spreadsheet. A TV was also set up and connected to the AC90's HDMI output with the OSD output turned on, to monitor the video and audio levels (and also spot the one time when the camera crashed).

Candidate briefing took place in the middle of the week before filming, during which a sheet of paper was handed around for slot bookings for manifestos, and candidates were briefed on what they could expect from 60SM, FTOs, ERN and URY's Candidate Interview Night. An online system was also setup, making use of http://youcanbook.me to sync slot bookings to a Google calendar and allow candidates to edit their slots if they needed to. Slots were 15 minutes long and available all over the weekend, with a limited additional number on the Thursday and Friday for those who were away - candidates who couldn't make any of these times were encouraged to email the producers to find an alternative. Unfortunately several didn't bother, even with URY sending an email summarising the briefing to every candidate a few days later, and a few candidates complained on the following Tuesday morning after the studio was cleared up on Monday and the videos put online - unsurprisingly their failure to read their emails or get in touch meant they didn't get one! Sending the email out to all candidates the evening after the briefing instead of the Friday may have helped with this.

Following filming of each manifesto it was copied to Pending Edits and one of the editors (set up with the two edit PCs and Tom and Lloyd's desktops in G/020) would pick it up and follow through the neat workflow Peter devised, which involved replacing a template video in After Effects, tweaking the keyer settings if it didn't quite work and then flipping across to Premiere to adjust opening titlecard, background colours and names before exporting. All in all manifestos were completed and ready for upload in about half an hour after they were started. One of the main reasons all the videos got finished in time without anybody needing to pull an all-nighter was having so many people around to help, with four editors along with the two producers and a few other crew filming candidates, finishing videos, reviewing and putting online the backlog was relatively short, although a few Adobe bugs meant some of the manifestos were re-exported five or six times!

Manifestos were put live on Monday evening after Station Meeting as the last of the candidates (who had been away over the weekend and contacted us) had filmed hers and the edit had been turned around. Thanks to YSTV breaking the candidate list (abridged by those who didn't bother filming a manifesto) and YUSU embedding the videos, at time of writing there have been 112778 views of the 42 manifestos for 2015, with the view count crossing the 100k mark by the time voting had closed!

FTO Debates

Coming soon (when my degree finishes!)

Results Night

Coming soon (when my degree finishes!)