After the success of the Fashion Show project, we were given even bigger opportunity to challenge ourselves, this time in collaboration with the 1st year of BA Graphics. A 24h non-stop online TV channel that we not only had to create a content for but also curate the whole event.
Being a leader of the Production Team at the Fashion Show made me believe I can rise my bar and try myself in an even bigger role this time. As a General Coordinator, I had to supervise 8 production teams that were specified to create the whole event but also at the same time I was a member of one of 16 groups responsible for creating the content for the channel. It required a lot of multitasking and proper time management but I was confident it would be a great experience. This time we were given 6 weeks and after the experience with the fashion show, we knew that the time tends to run fast so there was no time to waste!
In this project communication was the key. When there are over 120 students involved in a project it is incredibly important to be on top of what, when and why is happening in each group. To be constantly informed about the progress of the project I organised weekly meetings with leaders of each group and we stayed in constant touch via online groups and group-chats.
Finding a venue, setting up a website, finding an online streaming source, contacting sponsors, gathering the equipment needed to switch between prerecorded material and live content in a previously set-up studio, dealing with copyright issues, sending hundreds of emails. Those are only a few of the challenges we had to face in order to organise The Channel.
We managed to get an approval for using a brand new Learning Zone at Camberwell College of Arts for our 24-hour studio. We separated the space into 3 zones: Backstage and the Control Zone from where we were supervising streaming the material, Green-screen Zone with lights, cameras and audience sits for the live-content parts of the channel (like live DJ set, morning yoga or an art performance) and the Viewer Zone with sofas, drinks and snacks where anyone who came to visit our studio could sit, relax and watch prerecorded content that was projected on a wall.
THE LAST SECONDS OD THE CHANNEL. AFTER 24 HOURS TIME TO WRAP UP.
Channel turned out to be a great success. We manage to broadcast for 24h straight for the first time in the history of Camberwell College of Arts. Obviously, it did not go without some technical issues but overall we managed to screen all of our prerecorded material and the live parts of the show brought a lot of attention to the Learning Zone. Also, Grafik Magazine wrote an article about the whole event again!
My second job for this project was to create a content for the Channel. All of the students were split into 16 groups with two nouns that combined together created their theme. My group (Mystery&Technology) was one of the biggest groups as we had 9 members while an average per group was 5/6. Each group could decide if they wanted to pre-record stuff or organise a live segment on the day. My group decided to create a one strong segment with many short videos that would create the whole for the Technology and Mystery theme. After an inspiring brain storm around our nouns we split into subgroup to work on a different videos at the same time.
One of the ideas that we came up with during our group T&M meetings was my script for a short with a spaceman that would run through technology constantly rejecting it in order to find a greater value. With help of 3 other group members (Nick, Yoki and Charlie) we managed to design a whole costume, gather props and shoot the shots with two cameras at the same time what gave us plenty of material to work with, in postproduction.
PANTS FIRST
Silver foil is a beautiful but also very challenging material to work with. For every time when we were about to go for a shoot, we had to create the costume freshly from scratches as the foil broke quite easily. After few first attempts, we realised that the best way to "install" the costume on the model is to start with pants and then move up to the top, the helmet and then, the scarf.
Lovely Crew
Yoki, Nick, Charlie
FINAL OUTCOME
"MOON BOY"
Completely by accident, the costume that I and Nick designed for the video was spotted by Aron, a student from sculpture who co-organised POST2018 Fashion Show at Bussey Building on the same day as our 24 hours broadcast. He asked if we were interested in putting our project on their runway and even though we were crashed with the amount of work for the Channel we just couldn't miss the opportunity :)
