Student Virtual Carol Service 2020
To celebrate no ordinary Christmas, a group of Solent Students and the Solent Christian Union worked hard to create a virtual Christmas Carol Service. Directed and produced by third year Media Production Student Ashanti Thomas, we caught up to hear all about how she created this live event, which are increasingly growing in popularity during the pandemic.
Chloe: What roles did you have in setting up the service, and what did they have to do?
Ashanti: I was the director and producer, so I made sure everyone was doing what they needed to do. We had a speaker that everyone could hear me through where I gave everyone their cues. I also planned the service and had a lot of help from Lecturer Roy Hanney. The Floor Manager was James Tobin, he was there to oversee the cameras and the hosts, directing them. On the cameras we had Sam Hayward, Thomas Glasspool and Steven Berry. Krisana Polyotha was on sound and Alisha Kan was the Studio Assistant, helping with anything else that needed to be done. Victor Kuyeli was on Autocue; this is what the hosts were reading off. Rosemary Butler was graphics, so she put up name tags and titles on the screen. Maddie Bates was the Vision Mixer; her role was choosing what camera shot was being shown on the screen and making sure the graphics came up on the screen at the right time while the show was live. Our hosts were Sarah Terry and Adam Scamell, we also had a guest speaker Mary Reeves and music from Seth Thomas and Lewis Jones.
Chloe: A lot of people were needed in the production; how did you work around the current social distancing measures?
Ashanti: Before the training and the production of the Carol Service we all took the online ScreenSkills Coronavirus Basic Awareness on Production training course. This taught us how to be safe on a production set during the pandemic. We all wore masks, tried to keep distance and limited the amount of people in each room due to the size of the set.
Chloe: How did you set up the virtual Carol Service and was it a successful in getting an audience?
Ashanti: We streamed the service on the Christian Union's Facebook page. During the live stream, we had around 20-25 viewers which was slightly more than expected as the society is quite small. However, we left the livestream on the page for anyone to watch at a later date and now it is currently at 339 views.
Chloe: Did you have to overcome any setbacks?
Ashanti: We had originally planned for the service to be a week later than it was to be closer to Christmas, but because of the Government’s COVID rules changing all the time, we thought it would be safest to push it forward by a week. Luckily, we did as it was then announced that students had a period to go home, and if we had done it on the original date most of the students would have gone home for Christmas and we would not have had a crew!
Chloe: You spent a lot of time advertising the event in the weeks prior to the live service. Once you had got to the big day, what would you say was the best part of setting up the service?
Ashanti: The best part of setting up the service was being able to get back on a production set and give other people the chance to as well as it had been months since any of us had any work experience or filmed on a set! So, it was nice to see everyone doing what they love while also starting to celebrate Christmas after a hard year!
Many thanks to Ashanti, the production crew and Solent Christian Union for setting up a great event to celebrate Christmas in a year like no other! Keep an eye out for more events like this…
Written and published by Chloe Webb
BA(Hons) Media Production
Solent Media
