Last month, the Video and Audio Design and Event Production students made their mark at Lambeau Field during the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Student Forum, winning two awards for their outstanding work.
• First Place: Writer’s Life Lecture Series with Susanna Daniels
• Second Place: MCTV: After Hours
Full-time faculty instructor Todd Bowie has seen promise in his Video and Audio Program students for years, so he wasn’t surprised when they were recently awarded. He’s proud of the extra steps his students take.
“One thing that differentiates our program is that we’re trying to do a lot with a little. We don’t have a TV station. We don’t have a radio station like NPR on our campus, like some of these other colleges,” Bowie said.
Bowie recognizes that other colleges have multi-million-dollar budgets, but he said his students make up for that by doing well-done, original work and taking strides to do work that is noticed.
A few years ago, the Video and Audio program received a grant to purchase a broadcasting system. Bowie is grateful that they are well equipped, even if they don’t have the astronomical budgets of other schools.
“That says a lot about the quality of our students and their ambition to do this extra work and be noticed,” said Bowie.
The Writer’s Life Lecture Series with Susanna Daniels was awarded first place for the Episodic Entertainment Program. The Series is under the journalism program and David Hansen’s leadership.
The series’ meat and potatoes are the content that Hansen and his team of journalists put together to ask these experts questions. The on-air production class captures, edits and delivers it to an audience. His department shares the event award with Hansen and his team.
For the MCTV award: After Hours, Bowie’s students use a multi-camera system to tape a TV show. The students create concepts, write and act in the TV show and operate all the apparatus after hours.
The show is taped and streamed live, so there’s no post-production work. However, Bowie said there is a lot of switching work similar to a live TV show, which means they have to have a technical director and show director to call the shots.
These wins have inspired Bowie to give the students the opportunity for more recognition. He now wants to extend that to the audio students.
All the Wisconsin broadcaster awards they’ve won have been for projects produced by students in the event production class. For the first time, he plans to submit projects for awards in the radio category, with those projects coming from his audio courses.
He said some audio students are trying to produce a podcast pilot episode or a PSA production for those categories.
Bowie said the event production class distinguishes itself from others by offering a production crew scenario. It’s a team of audio, gaffer, lighting and camera operators — different jobs where people work together for a shared goal.
It is the program’s only class that offers that kind of workflow, so it closely mimics the industry.
“You can come out of the program and get an entry-level job probably on the first day, and you could get to work right away because there’s just so much there. This stuff is not going away. It’s only going to grow,” Bowie said.