Elections 2016

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Elections 2016
Watch Online
Genre: Events Coverage
First Broadcast: 06/02/2016
Last Broadcast: 20/02/2016
Producer(s): Peter Eskdale (60SM)
TBC

60 Second Manifestos

With no sign of anyone coming forward to produce Elections, Peter Eskdale stepped in to take on production of the 60 Second Manifestos. Because of how successfully run last year's filming weekend was, the same model was adopted again with minor improvements.

The green screen was set up in the studio, lit by an array of new light fixtures hanging on the still rather new lighting grid, along with a video village area in the corner of the room on lighting desk. The plasma screen was set up behind the camera to show candidates the time remaining, and a pair of condenser mics on a stand was positioned in front of the candidates to capture audio.

Learning from last year's space management problems, G/020 was booked to serve as the editing room for the whole weekend. This year was the first time since YSTV re-adopted chroma-keyed manifestos that Lloyd Wallis and Tom Cheyney's desktops were not used. Instead, the Edit PCs and Peter's laptop were initially set up to edit the manifestos.

Candidate briefing took place on the Monday of Week 4, with paper bookings scrapped in favour of using http://youcanbook.me to schedule filming slots (both systems were used last year, with the production team manually entering bookings at a later time). As before, slots were 15 minutes long and available all over the weekend, as well as limited slots on Friday afternoon. It was made clear to candidates that no further time slots would be made available, unless there were extenuating circumstances. The candidates were also shown the on-demand hit graphs for last year's manifestos, in an attempt to highlight how important filming one was to their campaigns. A series of emails throughout the week (from both YSTV and YUSU) were sent to remind candidates to book their slot.

Thanks to rebranding of Elections by YUSU, manifestos no longer featured a background coloured to match the position the candidate was running for. Better green screen lighting and a simpler Premiere workflow led to manifestos being edited in about three minutes. It was discovered early on that the audio levels on many of the candidates needed some manual fine-tuning. In an attempt to remain consistent in levelling, this job was given solely to Grace Winpenny, leading to a bottleneck in workflow before a video could be encoded.

A dedicated server had initially been set up in the control room to export the completed videos. However, it was discovered early on that the chroma-keying process used was capped at two CPU threads, leading to export times in excess of 30 minutes for a 1 minute video. Due to inadequate hardware, Edit 1 was too slow to edit the chroma-keyed videos. However, it was found to be much faster at exporting the videos (about ten minutes), so was reassigned to that task for the rest of Saturday afternoon. Sam Willcocks later brought in his desktop, and that was also used to export the queue of videos.

Late Saturday afternoon, it was discovered that many of the exported videos had sound issues - some were missing background audio, some had doubled voices. The problem was narrowed down to video exported by Edit 1, so it was decided that all the faulty videos would be re-exported on Sam's desktop, with Edit 1 used for checking and uploading the final copies.

Full Time Officers were given additional tasks to do during and after their slot compared to previous year. YSTV was asked by URY to film the candidates doing turns to camera in front of the green screen, so thaty could be used in a montage introducing the candidates for FTO position on results night. URY also set themselves up in YourSpace with a borrowed Kenobi and the remaining two AC-90 cameras, and collected FTO candidates after their slots to have a light-hearted interview - which would be played out on results night as filler material for the stage show.

Overall, the weekend was fairly relaxed, with a lot of downtime for the production team. Whilst on Saturday some crew members did not leave until midnight (when the last of the days videos had been uploaded), Sunday morning and early-afternoon were mostly free - with the production team going to Courtyard for lunch. There was a flurry of candidates between 2pm and 5pm on the Sunday, with exporting on hold until Grace could come in to level the audio.

Production Team

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