CPOY

CPOY was a fantastic experience for me this year. I have never attended either CPOY or POYi, and getting to be on the promotional team was an honor. I missed out on some of what I might have gained as an audience member, but being able to produce content for the event more than made up for it. I found myself thinking that the opportunity to work with a great team while building some skills was a preferable experience to me than success in the competition itself would have been. Not that I had any. This was the first time I had entered anything in any sort of competition and all of my work was voted out in the first round.

I had some friends do well, and that was great to see. Kevin won a category with a series he shot back home in Philly, and I think the honor meant a lot to him. I was particularly excited to see MU do well in the multimedia categories. In the past I’ve thought that there was no reason Mizzou couldn’t compete in that area, and this year we did.

I was encouraged to see the sort of multimedia that did well in the competition. I feel like I’m definitely capable of producing work on par with anything I saw. I didn’t feel quite as confident about competing in the still photo categories. I know I could be a great staffer for someone, but I have some work to do before I will be making award worthy stills. The bigger lesson here is about what I’m driven to do. I want to create rich multimedia stories. I find it exciting to think about working on those sorts of projects. I don’t feel that as much for still photography. I do enjoy stills as a medium, but I could see myself devoting my life to working on multimedia projects. I mentioned this sentiment to the multimedia judges during lunch one day and they enthusiastically agreed. It was nice to see the same sort of excitement from young professionals at the top of their game.

I felt that the work we did on the promotional team was very effective. We didn’t produce all of the things we had hoped to during the week, but what we did accomplish was no easy task. Hany was organized, and everyone on the team was talented. One of my favorite things about making multimedia is seeing the team I’m working on click to produce more than any one of us would be capable of alone.

There were also a few things that I think we could have done better. The blog isn’t really laid out well to handle the amount of content we were pushing to it. Posts that were still new were being pushed off of the front page pretty quickly. It also could use a way to navigate by content type. If someone wants to find all of the videos there should be a way to go straight to them. We also had a bit of a bottleneck at the editing phase. This may be as simple as going across the street to the lab to edit like I did this year. It would be nice if we had at least one dedicated machine for editing with enough power to do multicam. If there are teams in the future pushing out the amount of content we were this year it might be worth addressing this issue. Even an older Mac Pro loaded up with ram could be the answer.

The experience as a whole was quite rewarding. Working for CPOY was outside of the scope of my normal coursework, but the rewards of being involved to the degree that I was made it something I would do again without even having to think about it. Some of the experiences I’ve had as a journalism student here that have yielded the most growth have been things that aren’t graded. I will be a better professional in this field as a result of having the opportunity to work on this team. I hope future students pick up where we left off and move forward to do even better things.