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 Greg's Place opened for Spring and Summer Terms of 2021).
YSTV's coverage of Roses Unlocked was led primarily by second years, due to a mass exodus of third years from YSTV as a result of Covid-19.
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. Initially setup times allocated for each stream were 2 hours. This was later changed to 3 hours or more if possible.
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.
Friday
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
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 be partaking in the remainder of Roses Unlocked, as he had too much work for his degree to do. This left the YSTV team with a number of issues. Primarily, several of the weekends' remaining streams were left without a techie and the cycling stream was left without someone who would be able to solve the issue of being too far away from a wired internet connection. As a result Will Stirk took over the duties of techie for those streams and the decision was made to switch the coverage of cycling to a 'live report' over 4G as opposed to full livestream coverage.
Swimming was the next stream, and again despite having issues, did go live and had fewer issues than any of the livestream up to that point. At this point, as there had been so many technical issues and the setup for Darts began as soon as the kit from Running had returned. The decision was also made to extend the setup time for all livestreams from two to three hours, or longer where possible. This meant a 7am call time for Sunday morning as opposed to the pre-arranged 8am call time.
Darts coverage also started half an hour late, primarily due to issues with the sound desk in use, a decimator and LA1's 'atem cable' falling out. However, after this everything actually worked. The stream remained stable and we actually had graphics. Some might say it went too well, as it did not end until approximately 1am. By this time the call had been made to end the stream since literally no one cared anymore. Everyone went home, had a couple of hours of sleep and returned Sunday morning.
Sunday
Sunday morning began with the double whammy of Archery and Pool. Once again issues were faced with internet access on 22 Acres for the Archery livestream and the stream began late. In order to ensure we got footage of the Archery Event, Max Roach, VT Lead, was sent to get pre-recorded footage of the Archery that could be later turned into a VT with a summary of the event and who won. It was around then that we realised it was about to begin raining and so a gazebo was rushed out to 22 Acres to cover the OB setup there. There were a few issues with the setup for Pool, but it did eventually get up and running and only a few minutes late. For the first time in the whole weekend we had two sports live simultaneously.
At the same time a remote reporter and camera op were sent to East Campus to report live from the Cycling. As the internet connection at cycling was not stable enough for a live connection, the reporter would record short moments of commentary with the velodrome behind and send them over to the studio to be mixed into the coverage 'as live'.
The Archery and Pool streams remained stable till their end and we were finally in the home stretch. Sunday afternoon featured the Vice Chancellor and Sports Presidents' challenge that had been pre-recorded and so were able to played out 'as live' too. The final two livestreams of the weekend were A Question of Roses (a YSTV take on a question of Sport), which saw the sports' committees from Lancaster and York go head to head and featured a hilarious title sequence featuring real footage from previous years' Roses. This stream was entirely virtual with competitors and hosts all joining remotely via zoom.
The final stream of the weekend was the closing ceremony. Setup for this event had began many hours earlier and began on time and ran exactly as expected, for the first time for an in-person stream in the whole weekend. It was a moment of triumph for the Roses Unlocked team. Fires had been fought all weekend in order to deliver coverage of the weekend to the communities of York and Lancaster and all of the work had paid off. York won Roses Unlocked, which was a nice cherry on top, but for YSTV, we had done our best. We had learnt a lot along the way and succeeded (even in spite of the issues) in delivering coverage of all but one of the events we were supposed to.
Celebrations began in earnest. YUSU bought YSTV and URY Dominos Pizza which was enjoyed on James Beach and then the members headed to the Black Bull, where 5 or so tables had been booked out to enjoy a well earned drink for all of the crew members who had worked long and hard over the weekend.
YSTV's AGM
It is worth mentioning finally, that YSTV's 2021 AGM took place the Tuesday immediately following Roses Unlocked. It was hosted online over zoom and Joe Radford had to rush back from Surrey (where they were returning hired kit for Roses) in order to get back host it. It was generally agreed that hosting the AGM that soon after Roses had been a mistake and no one could be bothered with it. As a result the whole event took just under 2 hours - possibly a record for the shortest YSTV AGM ever.
VTs and the Edit Ferrets
As VT Lead, Max Roach formed the Edit Ferrets, a team of editors to help with the creation of VTs for Roses Unlocked. This team of 'Ferrets' continued under Max's reign as Head of Presentation. The VTs for Roses Unlocked took a variety of forms: highlight reels from sports events and studio segments, pre-recorded footage of sports teams from before the Roses Weekend, interviews with the Chancellor of the University of York, as well as interviews with former Sports Presidents' about why Roses was important and what it meant to them.
Two of the most popular and infamous VTs from the weekend, were Louis' Vox Pops and the Long Boi VT.
Louis' Vox Pops featured the one and only Louis Dickson chaotically running around Greg's Place asking the students there what their favourite part of Roses had been, and seemingly no one was actually paying any attention to what had been going on answering things such as 'rugby' which had not taken place.
It was coincidentally the weekend of Roses Unlocked that James Cordon famously proclaimed Long Boi, a tall duck on the University of York's campus, to be the tallest duck in the world standing over 1m tall (which was a blatant lie). The VT concerning Long Boi showed Alex Towells going on a hunt for the tall duck and interviewing others also doing so.
Legacy and Awards
Roses Unlocked went down for many who worked on it as one of the most defining moments of their university experience. Many crew members learnt an awful lot in a short space of time as well as being traumatised by the chaotic and explosive events of the weekend. That said, even in spite of all of the problems and fire fighting that went on, Roses Unlocked was regarded by most as a success. The perseverance, resolve and determination of all involved could not have been greater. We pulled together as a team when it mattered the most and provided a way for Roses to happen in a year when otherwise it could not have done.
YSTV's instrumental role in Roses Unlocked was appreciated by YUSU and the University was awarded through YSTV winning Student Group of the Year and Best Event at the Love York Awards 2021, as well as winning Best Event Coverage at the Student Media Awards. Joe Radford was also awarded Highly Commended for Sport Journalist of the Year at the Colours Ball for their work on Roses Unlocked.
Additionally Rhys Milling won an award recognising his work over Roses Unlocked at the Closing Ceremony (which he promptly dropped under table as it was delivered to him).
Roses Unlocked, whilst being a trial by fire, set the stage for Roses 2022 in Lancaster. Due to most of the members of the Roses Unlocked Management Team were second years, almost the exact same team ran the coverage for the following year - which was hailed as YSTV's best Roses coverage in recent years, if not ever.
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