Media Fantasies

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 23rd November, 2005 @ 02:41

Back in my days at Benjamin Britten High School in sunny Lowestoft, I got involved more than once in an annual event known as House Half Day. I remember being totally fascinated by the project the first time I saw it, and I couldn't wait for my chance to contribute to it.

House Half Day was the afternoon of the last day of term before Christmas. Every tutor group would gather together in their tutor room, with the occasional exception of pupils sacrificed for the event itself, and huddle around a TV. There weren't enough TVs in the school for every tutor group, so often the teachers would bring in their own sets from home.

Each TV plugged into the aerial point, one of which was available in every classroom of the school. If this was by design or added at great cost later, I'll never know. I'll also never know if said aerial point was actually attached to a useful aerial that could receive your normal terrestrial channels. Because we were not interested in receiving BBC One, we all tuned in to a special broadcast coming from one of the smallest classrooms in the Saturn House block.

Live, from this classroom cum TV studio came a show hosted by two or three presenters, in front of an elaborate set, themed differently each year. From two broadcast video cameras, and a rather chunky VHS deck, cut together through a rather ancient mixing desk came a showcase of that year's GCSE Media students' coursework.

Between each item, a live show built around an inter-house competition. In each tutor group a pre-nominated runner would return the group's answers to regular quiz questions posed throughout the afternoon.

It was a fun afternoon of TV, that certainly made a change from the usual lessons, and completely captivated me. Eventually I managed to get myself involved, partly by being a GCSE Media student and producing a video and partly thanks to my computers skills, along with dragging in my own Amiga and later PC. With much poking of ScalaMM, Lightwave 3D and later on PowerPoint, I was creating various graphics and titles for the afternoon's event.

I also got to spend hours in the tiny edit suite (read cupboard), compiling together videos, including the title sequence to the Titanic themed event for the year after I took my GCSE in Media. These were the days of linear video editing, a source VHS deck, a destination deck and an editing board with jog and shuffle dials to spool through each video frame by frame and mark my edit points. I listened intently to "My Heart Will Go On" by a certain French-Canadian more times than I care to remember, or indeed am able to recall after taking the medication prescribed.

I've always been fascinated by the production of television and my experiences on House Half Day have built on that. And so now I find myself working on a community IPTV project, where we have produced lots of local content and made it available on demand. But I want to go further than that...

Before I was even employed full time by the company I now work for, I was set the task of developing a mobile broadcasting unit. A video camera attached in one end and wirelessly out the other would stream an MPEG2 multicast. Well, the wireless part didn't work so well, but we did end up with a good, live, multicasting MPEG2 encoder.

So now I spend my evenings hunting on ebay for a cheap video mixing desk, bugging my superiors to hold a launch event for our upgraded system (we always film such things) and dying to attach a DV deck with some prepared graphics and footage, along with a video camera or two, pump it through my encoder and once again broadcast live TV!