We had a chance to tour around SIM Digital and Bling Digital with our first-year Television & Video Production students this past Monday. Always great to see such an amazing local facility, and especially when they’ve hired so many of our alumni – we ran into them in every department we visited!
Many alumni of the Television & Video Production Program work on the annual Variety Show of Hearts Telethon, and we usually arrange a tour for our students so they can see what goes into the “behind the scenes” production of the event.
Visiting the set is a great chance for our first-year students to begin making industry connections with the production staff (many of whom work at Global Television, ProShow, and many local industry freelancers)…
This group of first-year TV students (posing with one of our TV instructors, who also works the event yearly), started off by touring the production Saturday morning, and subsequently volunteered, or were hired – doing everything from PA’ing and working with the producers, to studio camera for the live show…
One of our annual first-year activities in the Television & Video Production Program is touring our students through various Television stations (and maybe some other stops!) in the lower mainland.
Not only do the tours give our students a chance to see the operations and equipment behind the scenes at local broadcasters, they’re generally the first chance our students have to meet the staff and develop the connections that can lead to a job!
Of course, it’s always a benefit to our staff as well, who get to reconnect with our alumni and see what they’re doing now. At CTV today, we ran into quite a few BCIT Alumni: Carl, Kim, Jeannine, Johnny, and Derek. And there’s another half-dozen or so grads who we missed due to the timing of our afternoon visit (Jenn, Sam, Ara and a few others!). One of the great strengths of our program is our network of industry connections!
Our first-year students had a chance to get downtown today to visit CTV Vancouver’s station on Burrard street (apologies for not getting photos behind the scenes of our Global BC tour last week, I’ll get some ASAP!)
Looks like some of the beautiful CTV Olympic setpieces got saved and are now being put to good use in their studio, including a gorgeous 150″ Panasonic plasma set that was being used for the Olympic studio.
One of the really enjoyable experiences about visiting stations around town is meeting all of our grads – they’re working everywhere! It’s one of those unique aspects of the Television and Video Production program that really allows us to get students industry placements to get their “foot in the door”.
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