Micklegate Run 2018

Micklegate Run 2018
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Genre:	Light Entertainment
First Broadcast:	24/08/2018
Producer(s):	Stephanie Shires

The YSTV Crew after wrap

Micklegate Run 2018 was a major production during the summer of 2018 and is known to be the pet project of Stephanie Shires. Spanning two smaller video and a massive full coverage, it is likely the most intense editing job ever attempted by YSTV. Because of this, it was nominated for Best Post-Production at NaSTA 2019.

About Micklegate Run

Micklegate Run is an annual soap box race down Micklegate in York. Organised by a group of shop owners on the street, it sees several York-based teams face off (this includes the construction of their own themed karts). The race is a massive public event with several thousand spectators a year.

Pre-Production

When Stephanie Shires learned of this event, she immediately knew that it would be perfect for YSTV to cover. But instead of simply doing a YSTV Reports, Steph planned on doing something big: She wanted to cover the entire event with a multi-camera set-up.

So, she got in touch with the organisers several months in advance, planning out the set-up, the schedule and the team's base. As the event took place during the summer vacation, only a very limited number of YSTV members were actually available to crew. Despite that, Steph managed to pull together a team of YSTV people coming back to York earlier than planned and FTP students.

Filming

Prior to the big race day, YSTV came along to the scrutineering day, seeing the different teams test their soap boxes before the big day. This event was covered by the first installment of the Micklegate Run series and was kept in the style of a classic YSTV Reports.

Work on the event coverage video began a day before the race. While the organisers were setting up the ramp and race track, the YSTV crew identified the best spots for their cameras, grabbed shots of the track's set-up and especially filmed a lot of behind-the-scenes footage. In order to store the YSTV equipment, the Micklegate team provided the crew with an empty hairdresser's saloon - it would become the team's base of operation for the production.

The crew on the day of the race consisted of:

• Stephanie Shires
• Olivia Gibbs
• Jacob Boyle
• Hui-Ling Phillips
• Joseph Wharfe
• Thomas Schubert
• Kira Duckwitz
• Thomas Williams
• Emma Sahall

For the day of the race, the crew manned their cameras on designated spots across Micklegate, with Steph functioning as line producer, communicating between the different positions. While MinsterFM officially did the commentary on the top and bottom of the race track (which YSTV was allowed to use in their videos), presenter Jacob Boyle was waiting behind the finish line to provide his own comedic commentary and interview the racers. The entire shoot lasted for longer than 8 hours and filled up several hundred gigabytes on the studio's servers.

Post-Production

During the week after the race, YSTV released a highlights reel edited by Thomas Schubert.

At the same time, Stephanie Shires got to work on compiling the entire coverage. Over time, the massive scope of this edit became clear: With about 12 hours of footage to go through, incomplete coverage from some cameras and complicated After Effects animations (all created by Steph herself), editing took longer and longer, to the point were Steph was working on it several months. Even opening the project took up to two hours, with Premiere Pro regularily crashing right after.

Despite all problems, Steph was able to submit a 10 minutes extract to NaSTA 2019 which earned her a nomination for Best Post-Production.

During the summer of 2019, Olivia Gibbs edited a Behind The Streams episode out of the behind-the-scenes footage.