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Sidney High School's SRTV provides hands on career skills

Sidney Raiders Television, or SRTV, is becoming something to watch not only for Sidney students, but for those in the community as well.

Matt McKay, tech coordinator, and Roger Gallaway, technology facilitator for Sidney Public Schools, started SRTV as a club three years ago. The club began slow and has grown exponentially since that time. According to Gallaway, they started with a laptop computer and a few members. When the administration approached them about turning their club into class, they were more than happy to say yes.

McKay was a science teacher and Gallaway had a background in theatre. Both men were tech savvy, but had not divulged into film production before.

"We developed it from scratch and turned it into a full fledged class." Gallaway said. "This was a whole other realm for us."

SRTV now has a full running production studio, and has a crew to run it. The studio is where the students read their lines from the teleprompter, which is a homemade invention by McKay out of a laptop computer, a mirror and various items. KNOP-TV out of North Platte took an interest in the production and donated many of the items in the studio, including an anchor desk and back props. SRTV recently received a lighting grid from the television station, which will replace the ceiling fan currently acting as the grid. In fact, the crew has put a lot of homemade ingenuity to work, once using a broom as a boom microphone.

In the production room, students sit behind a multitude of large screens and equipment with an assortment of buttons. The production crew, made up of high school students, consists of a tech director, master control engineer, assistant editor and box operators. It takes 11 people to run operations, which include the news anchors and the jobs the students do. The jobs are rotated among the students, which gives each student a chance to learn every position. The students cover local school events and sports, in addition to weather, national news, world news and entertainment.

Davis Burch, a student participating in SRTV, has always been behind the camera.

"Parents used to pay me to video their kids' games when I was younger," he said.

Burch recently went to a weeklong film camp at the University of Denver, where he learned more about programs like Adobe Premium and After Effects, which he implemented in his work with SRTV. "I've always liked to look at things through the eyes of the camera," he said.

Burch would like to pursue film production beyond graduation with a possible scholarship to the University of Nebraska or the Colorado Film School in Denver.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln offers scholarships for students to film for athletic games. According to Gallaway, companies come to him and say they would give these students jobs tomorrow. Where most students start from scratch in college or at these jobs, SRTV students have hands on experience.

"This is a huge head start for anybody starting out (in film production) in college," Gallaway said.

Sidney High School Principle Chris Arent said SRTV is a rare venture.

"First of all, it gives an opportunity in a community our size for careers and possibilities that most schools don't get," he said.

SRTV students also cover Sidney High School athletic events and stream them online. According to McKay, most schools pay a subscription to stream and do not get the perks of streaming on YouTube. Youtube offers SRTV Google analytics that gives information about how many people view the stream, archived views and even the device that the consumer watched it on.

According to Gallaway, they recently had a game stream with a packed gymnasium at the high school for the boys basketball game against Scottsbluff, which had 1,000 live views and later hit 15,000 views.

SRTV has had views all across the globe. Google analytics report views in Baltimore, Md., Greenland, Canada, New Zealand and Brazil.

The class is currently first period at the high school. The show put on each morning is scripted the day before and filmed that period, then shown to the school and online durning the high school's fifth period.

"Next year the class will be second period which does not conflict with scheduling and we are hoping for a bigger class," McKay said.

Readers can check out SRTV's live and archived events at http://www.sidneyraiders.tv.

 

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