The theme of January’s Digital Media Community of Practice was project budgets. We heard case studies from UBC Studios and UBCO, which use very different practices when it comes to budget. The main difference is that UBC Studios is a cost-recovery unit, while UBCO does not charge clients for the content they produce.
UBC Studios showed us the VPRI video (watch here: http://vimeo.com/92750884)
and discussed some of the successes and challenges they faced. For example, although the client had a clear budget, their original vision was fairly lofty. They had ideally wanted to include interviews with many many people, and use only software produced at UBC. The number of interviews dropped during the various planning and co-ordination stages. 165 was ideal according to the client, 50 were invited, 40 replied to an invitation, 22 were filmed, and 15 interviews ended up making the cut into the final video. As well, even though UBC Studios ended up using non-UBC software plugins, the majority of the budget went to motion graphics development. Overall, the conclusion from UBC Studios was that it’s easier to stay on budget when a client has clearly explained their goals of the video, when they focus on only 1 or 2 goals instead of 5 or 6, when goals stay realistic within the scope of the budget, and when firm dates and deadlines are decided on prior to production.
UBCO shared their experience producing a short video spotlighting an Engineering PHD student who won a prestigious scholarship (watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySOJVtK0zBA&feature=youtu.be). UBCO typically follows a ‘template-style’ method of production. They explained that this particular piece involved about 20 minutes of pre-production, a 2.5 hour shoot, and around 3 hours of post-production editing. This quick turnaround enables UBCO to publish around 2-5 stories per week. In 2014, UBCO produced over 160 stories! These are featured on UBCO.TV and Shaw cable. As well, CTV and Discovery channel will take raw footage from time to time. UBCO’s budgeting structure provides some definite advantages, such as the complete freedom to control projects, or turn down projects that are out-of-scope and a consistently satisfied and happy clientele. To save money, UBCO uses Work-Learn and Co-op students, and often recycles B-roll quite frequently. The student workers and volunteers also control the social media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which UBCO uses to leverage their productions. They mentioned that Youtube is only used for back-end hosting, as Youtube will often play advertisements for different universities before showing the video.
As the meeting came to a close, a few community members shared their homework assignments from the December meeting.
Appmaker by Mozilla (check it out here: https://apps.webmaker.org/designer) proved to be intuitive, easy to use and potentially very useful. The software is very complex, but it begins with just the basics, and ‘grows with you.’ As your app becomes more involved, you unlock new features to use. Potential applications for this program would be creating custom apps for MOOCs or FL projects, as it is free to publish your app directly to iTunes or the Play Store. It also provides a link to download, if you’d rather keep the app between a select crowd.
The next software discussed was Blackboard Collaborate, a webinar service. It was useful, as it allowed the user to keep an archive of the meeting. The Digital Media Community of Practice used Blue Jeans, which ran into a number of technical errors, so we may explore this option for future meetings.
In closing, it was decided that next weeks topic was going to be student engagement with production, and we’d keep on the same theme of meeting the first Tuesday of every month.
Thank you for reading, and if you’d like to get involved with the Community of Practice, please request an invitation from saeed.dyanatkar@ubc.ca