Two teams of Klein College student journalists took home top awards at the recent Broadcast Education Association (BEA) Festival of Media Arts competition. One team earned an award of excellence in the Student Sports category and a second team was awarded first place in the Long Form Video or Film Documentary category. Student submissions were sponsored by TUTV.
Three Klein College students created a 4-minute video attempting to define Temple University Athletics’ slogan “Temple TUFF,” which aired on ESPNU during the university’s Sept. 15 football game against University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“‘Temple TUFF’ is a slogan and a lot of people may not know what it means, most people don’t know where it came from,” said project editor Ben Otte, KLN 18'. “We wanted to investigate its origin and try to bring people to campus at the same time.”
The BEA Festival of Media Arts is a media competition for faculty and students at BEA-affiliated institutions. Last year, there were 1,540 submissions over an array of genres including dramatic narratives, interverative multimedia and documentaries.
The Temple TUFF piece includes interviews from current student football players, clips of former basketball coach John Chaney and snapshots of Philadelphia.
“We wanted to capture the fast pace of the Temple Tuff experience,” said Otte. “This is how campus looks like to a football player or Temple student.”
Otte, along with classmates Sarah Shields, KLN ’18, and Tracy Yatsko, KLN ’18, highlighted the importance of the tagline and delved into the history of the one-digit jersey, which is awarded to a player who shows leadership and high work ethic.
In three weeks, the trio created a piece that not only aired on ESPNU Campus Connections and OwlSports Update on TUTV, but also garnered local and national recognition.
“To have the dean there and be proud made it all worth it,” said Yatsko, the group’s field reporter.
Another team of Klein College students from the Department of Media Studies and Production created “Monumental Change,” which won first place in the Long Form Video or Film Documentary category. The piece was created over the course of a semester by students in the Genres of Media Production course. The 30-minute documentary explores the purchase of Monument Cemetery by Temple University in the early 1950s.
After the university purchased the cemetery land, the remains of 28,000 people were relocated to a different cemetery. Temple built a parking lot and an athletic complex on the land. The students related this event to gentrification, comparing the movement of dead bodies in the 1950s to the moving of living bodies today.
“We wanted to give the community a voice to voice their opinions,” said student producer Brooke Zutter, KLN’19.
The documentary took approximately 150 hours for five students to produce. They also published social media content offering a behind-the-scene look at each step of production. The students will join the “Temple TUFF“ creators at BEA’s annual convention and Festival of Media Arts on April 7-10 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Assistant Professor Kristine Weatherston said of the students, “They earned it because they learned how to work as a team, tap into their creativity and their professionalism.”