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School of Communication students create media packages for Special Olympics Athletes
Photo by: Andrea Ballocchi
Knight Center’s Trevor Green covers Special Olympics’ athletes getting ready to receive the torch coming from the sea.
Four video teams from the UM School of Communication captured the U.S. arrival of the Special Olympics torch, the Flame of Hope, on Jan. 13. The torch arrived in Miami via Jet Ski near Ocean Drive and 10th Avenue in South Beach, where Special Olympic Athletes welcomed the flame and carried it across the Mac Arthur Causeway to downtown Miami’s Bayfront Park for a ceremony.
Led by Knight Chair in Visual Journalism, Rich Beckman, the students worked with the School’s Knight Center for International Media to edit and prepare video packages for news outlets. The footage, to be used during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2009 Special Olympics World Winter Games to be held Feb. 7-13 in Idaho, will also be part of a multimedia Web site dedicated to the participating athletes.
“This was a great field experience for the students,” Beckman said.
There was a team on a boat, two teams in the back of pick-up trucks and a team at the official ceremony.
Beckman said additional students helped them edit to make the deadlines for local and national newscasts. “It was a great opportunity for our students to use their skills to volunteer for a great cause,” he said.
Jackie Villavicencio, a junior at UM Visual Journalism program, shot and edited video for the project. She said the experience with the torch run helped the students in preparation for the big event in Idaho. “Participating in the torch run was a great experience,” she said. “I was on the boat accompanied by law enforcement and was able to capture and share in the excitement of the torch carrier who brought the torch up from the water to the sand."
Professor Rich Beckman has worked with Special Olympics for many years and ambitiously led one of the largest multimedia Web projects ever attempted by documenting the thousands of athletes of the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Shanghai. Supported by a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and four universities in Shanghai, Beckman and his students created an interactive Web site containing stories, maps and information graphics. More than 300 students and faculty participated.
This year, 32 UM School of Communication students and three faculty members will join more than 120 students from around the world to document the 2009 World Winter Games, where they will create content for international Web and broadcast distribution.
For more information on the 2009 Special Olympics, visit: http://www.specialolympics.org.
