Peter Eskdale
Officer positions held
- Deputy Technical Director: May 2013 - September 2014
- Technical Director: September 2014 - present
Biography
Peter joined YSTV at Freshers Fair 2012, after Matt Johnson insisted that they were better than URY because they had sound and video. After attending several station meetings and training sessions, Peter quickly got stuck in with crewing shows. His first major involvement was with Campus: A Tale of Terrors, which he later ended up doing most of the sound oping for.
His first experience with a camera was filming the Supermarket Sweep VT for Children in Need 2012, under the guidance of the more experienced members. Sufficed to say, running around Costcutter with a camera was probably not the easiest of tasks.
In Spring 2013, Peter tried to be involved in as much YSTV as he could. On numerous occasions, he ended up crewing multiple shows on the same day, somewhat to the detriment of his degree. Personal highlights of the term include vision mixing the inaugural Monday Evening Live episode, and YSTV's NaSTAVision entry. During setup for the Elections 2013 shows, he was first exposed to the technical side of YSTV - something he has been unable to get rid of since. Despite not knowing what any of the cables or boxes actually did, plugging things in seemed easy enough.
Peter spent most of Roses 2013 on his feet - alternating between crewing live shows, and roaming the various sports facilities to film VTs with YSTV's then only fully working camera. After helping setup Live on the Lawn 2013, he was encouraged by several members of the officership to run for Deputy Technical Director - a decision he has not regretted... mostly. He spent most of the week leading up to Woodstock 2013 helping test all the AV equipment ahead of a condensed one-day setup. Considering most of the internal vision path was wired up by him, it's surprising not much went wrong.
Returning in the Autumn for his second year, he made his directing debut with Bargain Mad (after he was 'volunteered' by Matt Johnson). With Chris Parker and Josh Hunter as presenters, his direction was mostly limited to making sure the show didn't go on all night. Thankfully, they ran out of things to sell an hour in.
Peter was a Production Assistant for Union - a fancy title for someone who came to watch filming but didn't really do much outside of covering up YUSU logos. In Episode 2, he was part responsible for creating the visual and practical effects - Mark (Chris Wall) scoring a perfect 180 in darts, and the dart board later collapsing respectively. After accidentally using the show to test the credibility checks of the site, Peter inadvertently created an IMDB page for Union. How it managed to be good enough for the database remains a mystery.
Following on-set banter about releasing the show on DVD, Peter did just that. The two disc box-set contained all six (and a bit) episodes of the show, plus special features and exclusive audio commentaries. He also made a Blu-ray version, because HD.
Throughout 2013/14, Peter has dabbled in creating graphics and animations for live shows. Most notably the big three: Children in Need 2013, Elections 2014 and Woodstock 2014.
Despite not really having much to do with building Kenobi, Peter collected the award for Best Technical Achievement alongside Sam Nicholson at NaSTA 2014 (Robert Walker was too busy to go to NaSTA that year). Fortunately for those attending, Sam made the speech.
After being re-elected as DepTech, he finally got around to writing this wiki article.
Credits
Far too many to list in full.
- Director - Bargain Mad, Monday Evening Live (14sum06)
- Producer - Have I Got News For York (14spr10, 14sum06)
- Production Assistant - Union
- Sound - Campus: A Tale of Terrors
- Promotion and Merchandising (i.e. made DVDs and IMDB a thing) - Union
Appearances in YSTV shows
Following appearances as a (rather rubbish) extra in Campus and Union (in which it later became a recurring gag), it was proposed that YSTV make their own version of Marvel's Avengers Assemble - "Eskdale's Assembly" - with Peter starring as a Nick Fury-esk character attempting to unite heroes from a number of stories within the "YSTV Universe". Why he would feel the need to do so was considered a minor detail. The concept was popular with a certain Technical Director, who was quick to set up nick.fury@ystv.co.uk as an email alias for Peter.
While he likes the idea of the show as a concept, Peter is rather unwilling to star in said show himself - despite the best efforts of members - though he is happy to speculate on the idea. As it is, he is loath to even write this section of the article. (I should probably stop before I dig myself into a hole.)