It’s been nearly a year since I’ve written here. The rumors are true, I suck.
There is good personal news, however - I’m now less bad at a few things I’ve been able to work on while many of us have been cooped in quarantine.
One of those things is getting creative with my surroundings. For instance, here at ETSU we’re tremendously fortunate to have a radio studio just a short walk from my office from which our broadcasts emanate. My office, the studio, and our entire campus has been locked down since mid-March, so without access to our facilities, here’s a look at what I created in my closet:
One of the few times I’ve been happy about being so tiny.
On the video side, we’re also lucky to possess a green screen and university-themed backdrops at our ETSU offices, but with the aforementioned lockdown, my dresser filled in admirably:
On the top left you can see where things started, on the top right the setup along the way, and finally what things looked like on screen for viewers that watched our GameTime Tour features that would usually be done in person with donors around the state, but were instead delivered virtually on social media to the public this spring.
Thankfully, the middle portion of the above graphic “this took longer than I’ll admit” alludes to the setup in my room, not the graphic I made to illustrate it. That’s because my biggest strides during this quarantine have been in the Adobe programs, specifically InDesign and Photoshop. I was able to create a new, five-page Quick Facts sheet via InDesign for our women’s basketball program that we’ll use in the upcoming year, and also put together a wide variety of graphics for the same team that I’m particularly happy with. Here’s a couple of samples:
In addition to the strides in areas I wasn’t so comfortable, there’s the usual - plenty of audio and video features that kept me busy in the first two months of isolation. An 11-part recap of men’s basketball’s 30-win season complete with the biggest moments of the historic campaign was the most cumbersome of the tasks, but looking back, I still believe the time was worth it, because the team deserved to have their season immortalized. Here’s the 11 parts, dubbed Sounds Of The Season, slammed together to give a convenient, half-hour recap of an NCAA Tournament qualifier:
Of course, the five seniors that played for that team never got the NCAA Tournament appearance that they earned thanks to COVID-19, so it seemed fitting that they get a special sendoff. It doesn’t replace The Big Dance, but hopefully it lets them know how appreciated they were by ETSU and its fans as they move into the next step of their lives:
Another notable audio feature allowed us to connect with alumnus from ETSU, some of which are playing a key role in helping their region, and our nation, move through this unparalleled time:
A project that took up a lot of the first two months of social media content for our department was a fan vote to determine the top moment of the athletic year. I helped put together the video and voiceover component of the three-season (fall, winter, spring) feature, then interviewed the winner from each season leading up to the final, penultimate vote in which the top moment was awarded. An example of each:
There are tons of sad and unfortunate things about these last couple of months, the loss of life obviously being at the top of the list, so I consider myself even more lucky than usual to have been able to not only stay healthy, but stay busy and productive in this time. Fingers crossed that we get back to some semblance of normalcy soon, because I can only spend so many hours in Closet Studio. That mini-cooler is not comfortable.
Be safe, healthy and well! I’ll try to churn out more than one blog between now and next May. #Goals.