Media Event Blog 6 - Evaluation

The day had arrived! I turned up at Weston College at 8.30am to set up the cameras I was going to use to film the event. The first problem happened almost straight away as my spare battery was flat, despite it being recently charged! I convinced the tech support to let me borrow the battery charger and the problem was solved!

I helped Kim set up the banners in the performance space and in the gallery then I started filming the preparation and build up to the event. I thought the banners were perhaps a little small but I thought they served their purpose well. Actually, in hindsight, it was quite an achievement to get these banners on time as we had only ordered them from the printers at the latter part of the week before and had to get them sent by courier to get them to us on time!

I wanted to get as many shots of the students as possible at all stages of the event - From signing in, looking at the posters and videos on display and making their way into the performance space for the main event. I also got shots of the team signing in our 'clients' and welcoming the guest speakers.

Below is a short sequence of events at the beginning of the day:

I felt a great sense of achievement as I watched the students watching the films and taking notes reading the posters, they were getting something from this event and we felt our event was doing it's job, inspiring people to think seriously about an education and career in the broadcast media. They had a great incentive to learn as much as possible with the questionnaire and prize money, but I think they genuinely wanted to learn and I felt we had succeeded in our aims.

I thought the whole event went extremely smoothly, we did have a couple of problems with the videos on show in the reception as the video files wouldn't play for some reason on one of the computers. But this was only a minor hiccup and we managed to get to the bottom of it pretty quickly. I'm glad to say that this slight problem was one of only a few and we didn't really experience many more.

As the main event started it became pretty obvious we had overlooked something important pretty quickly, the lighting. I felt that if we had used the blinds at the back of the hall, instead of putting the projector screen in front of a big window and set up a few lights, it would have looked a lot more professional. I'm not sure displaying anything on the projector like the website as the speakers were talking was a good idea either, all you could see were pictures and text on their faces!

My favorite speaker of the event was Cormac MacMahon the News editor at Heart FM in Bristol. It was great to see speakers like Valerie Burke, who worked on Challenge Anneka, Jason Holmes the genius behind Extreme Fishing with Robson Green and Laura Abrahams who has worked on Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here amongst others, but Radio is my passion and was really interested in what Cormac had to say about his career route and his day to day duties in radio journalism.

All in all it was a great event, and I really did learn a lot about event organisation. From the red tape hell and countless emails just so we could switch on a TV in reception to being successful in applying for funding I found the work really challenging and interesting. Our team was good too, we have all worked together now on many different projects over the past 2 years and I felt this events success was down to knowing each others strengths, our ideas and creativity and working really well together.