Roses Unlocked
Roses 2021, known primarily as Roses Unlocked, was YUSU's answer to hosting a Roses in lockdown conditions. Whilst this year was technically hosted by York, no Lancaster teams travelled to York to compete. Instead, teams competed separately - Lancaster teams in Lancaster and York teams in York. This competition took two forms. For those sports which compete against each other whilst not being in the same space - such as swimming, darts, running, etc - those sports went ahead as usual. For team sports, they instead were able to compete in a pentathlon to win points for their University.
YSTV and LA1's coverage of Roses Unlocked focused on those sports which were able to go ahead. They were timetabled to occur simultaneously at both universities. So YSTV would film the portion of the event in York, LA1 the portion of the event in Lancaster, and then these two separate feeds would be mixed into one final output which was streamed out to Roses Live.
Due to covid restrictions, the only way it was possible to view any of Roses Unlocked as a spectator was through YSTV and LA1's joint coverage. People could either watch at home on Roses Live or at one of the outdoor bars in Lancaster or York. The options at York were the outdoor area added to Glasshouse on East Campus, the Forest (a temporary outdoor bar open only in 2020/21 on Vanbrugh Bowl) or the Lakeside Tap (another temporary bar opened on Gregg's Place opened for Spring and Summer Terms of 2021).
Management Team
Roses Lead: Joe Radford
Operations Lead: Cal Cooke
Assistant Operations Lead / Marketing Lead: Sophie Bolwell-Davies
Sport Lead: Dan Derbyshire
Studio / Crewing Lead: Alize Akturk
VT Lead: Max Roach
Technical Lead: Will Stirk / Andrew Waddle
Training Lead: Tilly Garland
Infrastructure Lead: Rhys Milling
Outside Broadcast / Crewing Lead: Dom Hall
Production Architecture / Graphics Lead: Ben Allen
Preparations
Six weeks prior to the weekend of Roses Unlocked, YUSU announced that it would be happening and that the joint broadcast of it by LA! and YSTV would be integral for members of both universities to be able to spectate. Due to the covid-19 restrictions in place, the reduced number of events would be more manageable to coordinate streaming with so little time available to plan. In total there were 11 streams, including the opening and closing ceremonies, and on top of that, it was also agreed that there would be a studio show to tie everything together across the weekend.
On Roses Live, each stream would be available to watch in full with commentary provided by URY and Bailrigg FM. There would also be a 'Channel One' stream, which would be a mix of studio content and sporting content, which would show whatever sport was most in demand. It was this 'Channel One' that was broadcast to the bars around campus.
YUSU additionally requested a trailer to promote Roses Unlocked. This was produced solely by YSTV and featured members of sports teams training to return to activity, as well as spectators painting signs and heading to the Forest to watch the games. It additionally featured drone footage of central hall and the sports fields.
As no in-person livestreams had taken place in over 12 months, the majority of active YSTV members, many of whom had had minimal involvement prior to the covid-19 pandemic or had only joined the university that academic year, lacked the skills needed to operate a livestream. A series of training sessions were organised by Tilly Garland in order to get members up to scratch of setting up and operating a range of equipment.
One of the events on the weekend was to be the Vice Chancellor and Sports' Presidents' challenge. This was a game of darts. As the Vice Chancellors were not both able to be free for Roses Weekend, this was pre-recorded the week before and then played out in full as live on the weekend.
At this point in time, the covid-19 restrictions in place were that you could have no more than one individual from separate households inside in the same space at once. If you were outside, then you were able to meet in groups of no more than 6. This posed some issues in terms of operating and running livestreams. The solution to this issue was twofold. For any streams outdoors, the crew was restricted to 5 members. This was so that if needed a techie could join this group in order to fix any issues if needed. As for indoor streams, some PTZ cameras were rented (for some reason from Surrey) and were used in the place of manned cameras. Then the gallery would be setup outdoors just outside the space and again the crew would be restricted to 5 members.
All transmission and encoding of the livestreams were done from YSTV's gallery space, which became known as TX. The studio space was used primarily for overnight kit storage.
Roses Weekend
Roses Unlocked took place from Friday 30 April to Sunday 2 May. The weather across the weekend was heavily mixed from heavy rain on the Friday evening during the opening ceremony to warmer sunny spells such as on the Sunday afternoon.
The only sporting event to take place on the Friday was the Rowing, which took place alongside the opening ceremony which was broadcast from The Forest and the Studio which was being hosted from James Beach. The Friday evening, to put it lightly, was a bit of a disaster. The graphics for the rowing, which were meant to display a realtime chart of how close the competition between the competing teams was not complete. The aforementioned torrential rain, caused a large amount of our cables in the Forest to become drenched. There were issues getting all 3 livestreams live. Eventually we were able to get the Studio running and live to stall for time whilst we worked on getting the other two live. Eventually we got there but fought against feedback issues in the Forest with the Vice Chancellor hosting the opening ceremony. Then once we had cut to the Darts, we fought internet bandwidth in the Forest leading to the stream buffering. This was due to the fact that, even though we had wired connection to the internet in the Forest, it was essentially still a 4G connection. Despite the issues, it is estimated a total of 12 000 concurrent viewers watched the opening ceremony. A record for YSTV. After quite a long evening of fire fighting, the crew went home feeling a little demoralised and tried to get some sleep ahead of the early start on Saturday Morning.
Saturday consisted of a number more events. Once again the studio show from James Beach, and in terms of sports content there was Running, Swimming, Mooting and Darts. The first major issue of the day came from the first stream, Running. The event was taking place on 22 Acres and unfortunately the staff were late in arriving to open the pavilion there (where the OB was supposed to drawing power and internet from); everything was otherwise setup and ready to go. A staff member eventually arrived to open the door as the event was due to start. Unfortunately due to a faulty cable, there was a 30-minute delay before we could get the stream live whilst a replacement was retrieved from the studio. The running team were unwilling to push back the start time of their event and so began without the livestream. 30 minutes later when the OB were ready to go live, they had just finished their event and so as a result there was no coverage of the running.
Following the issues with the running livestream, Technical Lead and assigned techie for the Running stream decided he was no longer going to
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