OB:Elections 2014

YUSU Elections 2014 was produced by Thomas Cheyney and Lloyd Wallis. Neither had ever produced anything for YSTV before (and as of writing, neither have tried to since), so with the considered it all went okay. Things were done quite adventurously this year with lots of things being different. This also means we learnt lots of things not to do.

60 Second Manifestos

One of the most intensive weekends that YSTV has in its yearly cycle, over the weekend of 8th/9th February 2014 almost every single one of the 51 candidates running this year came into a 15 minutes slot to record their manifesto. Tom did most of the filming, with help from Liz Williams and occassionally. Meanwhile Lloyd spent most of his time editing the manifestos on his personal desktop, which, like Tom's had been moved in for the occassion. Why, you may ask? Well, because we decided to be a little adventurous.

• For the first time in many years, we decided to make use of our green screen for the manifestos. The screen was replaced with a two-colour background which corresponded to the colours chosen for the position in the YUSU branding (e.g. red and a slightly darker red for president, purple and a slightly darker purple for activities).
• For the first time we are aware of, two cameras were used in the filming - the DSLRs of both Tom and Helen Hobin.

Over the weekend, Lloyd and Tom encountered multiple bugs with After Effects, Premiere and Media Encoder, which each did something else wrong depending on whether you exported it from one of the producer's desktops or the edit PCs. The result was a somewhat interesting workflow that involved Adobe After Effects in Render Farm mode running on the edit PCs and then plugged into the final output on Tom's. Naturally, as soon as around 45 of the manifestos were done, solutions were found to all of the problems.

Through Tom's incredible amount of preperation, as well as test runs in the form of the YourUnion 60 Second Manifestos, most of the content was ready by Monday afternoon with time for a nap on Saturday night.

Two weeks later once voting opened, the 2014 60 Second Manifestos had accumulated over 25000 views between them. By the close of polling, 7 of them had entered the YSTV Top 20 of All Time, although of course none came close to knocking off Checkmate.

Trivia

• Regardless of how long the candidates took, each video was edited to be precisely 69 seconds long.
• The backing music used for the manifestos was an edited version of Here We Are.
• Candidate for YUSU President and NUS Delegate (as well as then-Academic Officer) Dan Whitmore has two outtakes available as part of our Results Night coverage.
• One candidate requested that their 60 Second Manifesto be taken down, and another failed on all three attempts but never responded to an offer to try again.
• This was the third consecutive year that Student Trustee candidate Harry Toynton needed to film a manifesto. It was the first year where we did not have to given in and edit together parts of all three of his takes, thanks in part due to threats that Lloyd would remove his clothes if he messed up again.
• Successful candidate for Student Activities Officer, Chris Wall, was also nervous when filming his manifesto at 11pm on Sunday Evening having just got back from Sommerset. Lloyd again threatened to remove clothing, at which point the candidate just got aroused instead.
• Candidate for Senate Rep Stephen Harper did two serious and somewhat successful takes at his manifesto before instead deciding his third take would be best (and he won too).