Ffresh
Ffresh
Ffresh, The Student Moving image Festival of Wales (www.ffresh.com) saw several hundred budding film and TV makers meeting in Aberystwyth to take part in a two day festival featuring showcases, master classes, interviews and presentations from industry experts – all culminating in a series of awards geared at recognising the best young film and media talent in the making.
Over the two day festival the Aberystwyth Arts Centre played host to over 44 individual events many of featured the movers and shakers of the industry, including the likes of Marc Evans (My Little Eye, Snow Cake), Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House), Steve Robinson (Tribe).
Event organisers Sgrin, formally the Media Agency for Wales (a role now assumed by the Welsh Assembly Government) wanted the event to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible, those who just could not make the festival or indeed those who would benefit from content long after the event had finished.
Sgrin commissioned MultiStream to provide live and on demand webcasting services for the festival (a full archive of which can be accessed at http://www.ffresh.com/broadcast/archive.html). In line with the festivals ethos of ‘hands on’ opportunities for Welsh students, Sgrin used the production services of the a team of dedicated students from the Media Centre, University of Wales, Lampeter, who using their purpose built Daff 7.5ton Outside Broadcast truck, provided three camera coverage of the happenings and presented the Multistream encoding team with broadcast quality video and audio feeds.
During the planning phase of this event, MultiStream identified that the Ffresh audience would be different to the norm – rationale was that firstly as many of the potential audience are from the creative sector, Windows cannot be considered the default platform so an appropriate format for Mac users would be required, secondly as viewers would be largely from academia, higher than average internet connectivity (or bandwidth) may be available.
The MultiStream encoders were set-up onsite and configured to provide resilient Real and Windows media coverage of the events delivered through a worldwide content delivery network. Both streams were set-up to be ‘multi-bitrate’ and would automatically adjust to provide a ‘normal’ and ‘high’ bit rate version depending on the bandwidth available to the local user.
The use of both Real and Windows formats would ensure a compatible player was available for all common operating platforms, and the higher than normal bit rate option could enable those connected to Janet (The UK’s Education and Research Network) to experience high quality audio and video coverage of the event.
The event received a steady set of viewers peaking at over a hundred for the coverage of the final awards ceremony, and since the doors closed in February over 5,000 viewings of the on demand clips have been served from the archive ‘on demand’ section of the Ffresh website.
Highlights of the Ffresh webcast are available on the Ffresh website