Welcome to SX:TV
SX:TV was the student television station at Essex University. I was manager of it for about 2 years (2012-2014) and together with my amazing little team and assistant manager, Amiee, we made some odd and wonderful productions, and I will be honest some awful ones too. SX:TV in its time was an award winning station, and while times change I feel that I should showcase some of the designs and some of the amazing videos I helped produce.
While I feature very little in that video, I edited it to give a flavour of what SX:TV was like to be apart of. The Media Centre of Essex University were always a real help so I still owe them for that. I like to think that the work we did with them for the News and Derby day helped contribute to the studios in the new building, but the state of media at Essex right now isn’t the point of this blog.
SX:TV banner
Two of the videos i’m most proud of are the SX:TV summer ball videos. Usually the Union gave us free entry into the summer ball to film, in 2012 for some reason they didn’t. That didn’t stop us. The presenters, camera men, sound operators and editors did these video with no reward.
The shots may not be perfect the lighting may be off, but for a group of self taught volunteers, using cheap equipment and limited resources, it is amazing. That video is everything student TV should be; A fun, budget-less labour of love.
Design wise not much survives. The custom thumbnails on the videos before and during my time as manager are still on the youtube channel, but I imagine the banners, the awards and all the leaflets have been boxed in some dusty room forever. What I do still have is a few social media banners, including the introduction to the new teams for new members;
That being said of course the design work was never the point of SX:TV, it was a TV station not a design studio. The endless hours spent editing for the NaSTA awards, filming of a rubber duck based time travelling thriller and the recruiting of new members every year at freshers’ was what made it fun and worth while. The biggest project ever undertaken was the Derby Day live, which has SX:TV broadcast from 2 different locations live across 8 hours. Within the live studio environment we also had live reporters roaming around collecting footage which was edited on the day and then broadcast live too. It was broadcast online and on a large specially erected screen in the squares. Annoyingly the only hiccup of the day is that it wasn’t recorded, but we’ve still got some photos of the set;
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- Tom on the Monitor
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- Tom, Alice and Sam between takes
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- Alice and Sam, mid conversation
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- Behind the scenes, in the gallery
Other projects included NaSTA peoples choice awards, Stop motion RED Radio Adverts and even a office like sitcom. I filmed 3 freshers, 2 Summers balls and more Ctrl Alt Del‘s than I can remember but it was all good fun. Possibly my favourite edit was the elections, oddly because of the song. Editing wise it only took an hour or two; trying to match the video qualities was difficult as they were filmed on a mixture of tape and digital cameras but it think it came out great. It brings back a lot of memories so I will let that video play you out:
SX:TV Facebook, @SXTV_online Twitter and of course the SXTVonline Youtube channel still exist if you fancy a bit of nostalgia or just want to check that I’m not making it up, but you might have to track back a few years to find anything by me. Until then I will leave you with an apt quote;
“Student Media is a lot like a man in a tiger suit drinking beer by a lake, just because nobody is going to understand it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it” – Daniel E. Wright
If you’ve made it this far into the post, you were probably a member of SX:TV, so I don’t need to tell you how awesome it was. So I’ll end with this logo, and if you won a Nico in the 3rd annual Nico awards, you can download your Nico Award certificate.
Nico Awards Logo
– Manager Out
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