Every April in Las Vegas, broadcasters from all over the world take part in the largest broadcast and media trade show in North America – The National Association of Broadcasters Convention (aka NABShow). This year, 27 of our BCIT Broadcast Television students organized funding, transport, and accommodations to be able to attend the event.
Although the primary focus of the show is a trades and technology show where manufacturers from all over the world present their latest and greatest broadcast and media hardware and software, it’s also an amazing networking opportunity for the students, with 100,000 attendees from over 156 countries!
This Saturday, March 8th, over 400 high-school students from the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, the interior of BC, Washington State, Oregon and Alberta will be competing at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in a large-scale robotic competition. This regional tournament is one of the largest in North America.
The competition organized by the Pacific Youth Robotics Society and hosted by BCIT, features large metal robots competing in a heated battle called “Toss Up.” The goal is to outscore opponents by racing to throw large red and blue rubber balls into playing field goals and trying to remove opponents’ objects from their goals.
BCIT Television and Video Production student and faculty volunteers will be broadcasting a live, high definition production of the competition – you can watch online on Saturday from 9am to 5pm!
Live Stream: www.bcit-broadcast.com/live
One of the highlights of Term 2 for our first-year Television & Video Production students is our annual trip to Science World to produce a live cut of their centre-stage science shows.
TV students bring our Broadcast Pix Mica HD Flypack down to Science World, to wire and create an entire live television control room – from scratch. The process isn’t simply turning on cameras – students need to understand signal flow, camera feeds, the intercom and audio system, as well as how to safely manage a considerable amount of production equipment in a very public setting.
The Science World staff love having BCIT Television there, as our sizable equipment setup generally becomes another exhibit for the families in attendance to observe, and we send the finished productions back to Science World to aid in the training of their staff. Something for everyone!
Week 4, and we’re back with our last two community PSAs of the term, the first by Full Focus Films as an anti-drinking and driving PSA for MADD Canada. The second PSA, by Vandelay Productions helps illustrate the importance of donating to local food banks.
Every year in term 2, we take our first-year students out to local television stations and production facilities around the lower mainland to give students a feel for both the types of work available, and a first chance to build some industry connections within the facility. The first stop on the tour schedule this year was Global Television, who pioneered a state-of-the-art production facility in Vancouver that uses video over IP, telemetrics, and virtual set technology to develop a production system that allows Vancouver control rooms to produce newscasts all across Canada.
Back again on Week 3 for more first-year PSA productions! Tuesday began the week with Take Five Production’s PSA for the Other Half Stem Cell Intuitive, which is determined to close the gap of Chinese under-representation in the global stem cell donor registry. Special thanks to Diane Pollock and Cheryl Isaak from the BCIT Specialty Nursing program for allowing us to create the PSA in one of their labs!
On Thursday, Argus Productions battled through last-minute location challenges (permits and insurance!) to produce a short PSA illustrating the importance of planning ahead when venturing into the wilderness – even when that wilderness is a seemingly safe distance from a major city like Vancouver!
PSAs for this week included Lucid Media’s PSA for the Chill Foundation, a winter program that uses snowboarding to teach life skills and increase self-esteem in participants, at-risk and underserved youth between the ages of 10-18. Unfortunately we were unable to find a local ski/snowboard facility willing to host our cast and crew, so the production company turned to visual effects to simulate their final shot on the slopes in addition to a location shoot at Comor Sports.
Millennial Media decided to produce a short PSA promoting safe online sharing of personal information, and the dangers of “over-friending” on social networks. Special thanks to the BCIT Medical Services programs who have generously helped out a number of our productions which needed shooting locations!
Both of our production companies this week decided to shoot their spots on a Canon 5D MkIII DSLR package – look for the completed spots to be uploaded in couple of weeks following post-production.
