Students produce media project for the people
Fast forward. The Center For Informatics at Northern Kentucky University provides a state-of-the-art technical learning and collaboration venue to the region. A new Brent Spence Bridge provides an efficient conduit for ever-increasing traffic. New but unseen infrastructure supports the full-scale revitalization of our riverfront communities.
About the Author
Tim Owens is a third year student majoring in journalism with a minor in pop culture. He is 22 and lives on the outskirts of Batavia, Ohio. Tim's interests include screenwriting, film direction, TV, music, and the study of popular culture.
Tim's post graduation plans include writing for an entertainment magazine and one day starting his own entertainment magazine.
Students, faculty and staff of the College of Informatics are helping to define and contribute to this vision of the future. In support of local business and government, they've created a multimedia presentation to assist leaders with soliciting funding from the federal government for important infrastructure projects.
Not only does the multimedia presentation raise awareness and stress the importance of funding for the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area, but it also highlights the quality of education the students who created it are receiving.
Similar in scope to the commercial projects Informatics students will work on after graduation, this project involved a wide variety of people, technologies and challenges. Turning vision into multimedia doesn't come easily.
Telling the Story
Communications faculty member Chris Strobel (EMB) led a team of 10 Informatics students from all different areas of study to create the video portion of the multimedia presentation.
The team spent eight weeks shooting and editing the video. Student Paul Weber spent 20 hours a week over the course of one and half months, writing, editing and producing the project video.
"There were a lot of late nights," said Weber.
Like real-world projects, students had to overcome last-minute hurdles.
"You have to assume anything that can go wrong will go wrong," Weber said. "I remember one instance where we had to have a school bus for a scene. It didn't show up so we had to recreate it."
The script called for overhead shots of the riverfront. Problem is, NKU has no helicopter. This obstacle was overcome when a local member of the community donated the use of his helicopter for students to film the scenes from the air.
These challenges offered real world experience for Weber and the rest of his team. Students have taken what they have learned in the classroom and applied it to this project that will positively affect their community.
"A couple of intro to media classes I took really helped me do this," Weber said.
Tying It Together
Student Dan Koabel worked with Informatics' director of online technology Chris Brewer to design and program the Flash interface. Koabel believes that working on this project gave him experience that enhanced his substantial classroom learning.
"Primarily, I used to work by myself," Koabel said. "The Flash classes I took prepared me for working with a large group of people."
Involvement in this project provided him some real-world opportunities to work on a multifaceted development effort.
"To work on something of this scope is like nothing I have ever done before," Koabel said. "I took the basics I learned in class and went above and beyond with it." Perhaps one of the biggest experiences Koabel gained from the project was realizing that nothing worthwhile comes easy.
"There were a few technical hurdles," Koabel admitted. "It took a while for Chris and I to find a good way to display pictures in an easy and nice way. It was all about trial and error until we finally found one that everybody was happy with."
Live. Learn. Share.
Weber, Koabel and company also learned first-hand one of the tenets of NKU's mission: Give back to the community. These students donated their time and talent; this was not a class project and no credit was awarded. They did so because they wanted to help represent their college and surrounding region to Washington D.C. representatives.
The college views this sort of project as a win-win for everyone involved.
"With this project, the college is demonstrating a commitment to the community and to our students," Brewer said. "It's great to see our students make such a large impact on their community before they even graduate. Imagine how they'll feel driving across the new Brent Spence bridge. They'll be able to say 'I helped make this happen'."
"I would like the project to be seen as an inspiring," Weber said. "Hopefully this gets people more excited about NKU and what we can do."
