Urdd Eisteddfod - My Role

In the weeks leading up to the Urdd Eisteddfod, my task was to research technical logistics of the best ways of encoding and uploading such a massive amount of video to the web. I phoned up companies and used the Internet to find get advice on the different options available to us. I was also responsible for building the site design using CSS. The site went through a variety of different designs before the final layout was chosen. I worked closely with the web department at S4C on the final design, as it was important to keep the site looking consistent with their Summer Events branding.

As well as designing the site, I developed a custom flash video player control bar, incorporating the green colour of the design for the Urdd Eistedddfod site. I also developed an email form using flash and php that allowed people to send an email video link to their friends and family. For the home page I designed a flash RSS ticker that I connected to an xml file that displayed the most recent competition results.

During the week Wil Stephens of Cube Interactive, Mei and me worked as a team to produce the website and mobile text service. We also had a dedicated interactive editor and producer to help with the content for the website. My role was make alterations to the design layouts for the site and to help encoding and uploading video. After a very hectic Monday, the workload became a bit more relaxed in the middle of the week. This gave me a great opportunity to get out of the office and do some filming on the maes. Using a Sony Z1 camera and with help from the interactive producer and Mei we filmed some short features exclusively for the website. It was great fun and also enabled us to raise the profile of the website amongst visitors to the Eisteddfod. One of the director’s liked one of the features so much, it was broadcast on television as well which I was really pleased about.

The event was a fantastic experience for me, not only in terms of my own role and responsibilities, but also invaluable in gaining all round experience of working on a live tv production. It was also a great opportunity to get to know people from other production companies across Wales. All the feedback we received for the website was overwhelmingly positive, and I was amazed by how many video clips we managed to put up in such a short space of time. To date the site has had over 100 000 hits and 24 000 videos have been watched online. I think the site set a precedent for video-on-demand web coverage of live events and I’m really pleased that I had the opportunity to be involved in such an exciting project.