Elections 2016

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.

Most candidates turned up for their slots, with some cancelling their bookings for unknown reasons. Surprisingly some of the candidates who didn't book at all, or cancelled without rebooking, were running for FTO positions. This would cause later issues for the candidate montages and interviews for the results night stage show. Despite being told several times not to (or at least e-mail ahead), some candidates still chose to wear green - often entering the studio saying "I know you didn't want us to wear green, but...". In other words, business as usual. Of particular note was a pair running for Women's Officer who had brought along rabbits, which they wanted to hold during their video. This was declined (by Peter, who felt really bad afterwards!) because of the unknown quantity that is live animals in a hot and brightly-lit TV studio, and it wasn't known whether the room agreement even allowed animals.

There a few small casualties in the lighting department: On Saturday evening, the one trico that still did green started flickering, and then died all together. This was believed to be a heat-related issue, and it was turned off for the rest of the day. It had recovered by the start of filming on Sunday, and worked fine for the rest of the weekend with careful management. Also on Sunday, Anthony spotted that the bulb was bulging in one of the asymmetric floods. Fortunately this was found before a huge block of filming in the afternoon.

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. The team eventually left at 11pm on Sunday night.

Production Team

• Producer - Peter Eskdale
• Editors - Kenric Yuen and Peter Eskdale
• Audio - Grace Winpenny
• Greeters - Rachel Burns and Sam Willcocks
• Video Village/QA - Iona McEwan
• Server Wrangler - Anthony Williams
• Turned up just for fun - Rachel Steen

FTO Debates

Similar to previous year, it's hosted in RKC. This year it's chair by a Alumni which was the RAG president when it's a full time position. This year YUSU had bought some extra mic stand which similar from the one YSTV currently own to ensure there is enough for the presidential debate, those mic stand subsequently become YSTV property.

In terms of difference, this year when presenter introduce the candidates, a special info graph is used. The info card basically is a short video play on CaspeCG where the turns of the Cadidate in 60SM are used. The transition are set as slide to right, with the same background color it look natural as a fast panning shot.

We are also able to put our Banner onto the Debate desk, giving YSTV a lot exposure.

In terms of improvement, considering the projector screen often over-expose the shot, it's worth while to consider to set the kneeling of the cameras higher, or comunicate with YUSU about the screen usage as well as Lighting.

Trival

• Photo of the debate subsequently are posted of YUSU screen as Society of the week - Debate Society....with YSTV banner on it

Production Team

Need double checkUnverified or incomplete information

• Producer: Kenric Yuen, Peter Eskdale
• Presenter: Hector Macduff, Jenny Cao, Kate Whitaker
• Scripting: Charlotte Williams along with presenters
• Vision Mixer: Lee Way Lin
• Guest: Alex Light, Ben Leatham, Tom Butler
• Graphic Op: Freya Burgess
• Technical Assistant: Sam Willcocks
• Live Camera Op: Rachel Burns, Maddie Scarlett, Iona McEwan