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And
the winner is . . .
BU Productions wins Telly Award for undergrad recruitment video
By Tim Stoddard
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Chris Palmer (left), Nancy Marrs, and Phil Zekos of BU Productions recently won a bronze Telly Award for “Accept the Challenge,” a recruitment video for prospective BU undergraduates. The statuette, which is manufactured by the same company that makes the Emmys and Oscars, will arrive at BU in May. Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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A television and video equivalent of an Oscar, the Telly Award, will
soon be gracing the offices of Nancy Marrs, Philip Zekos, and Chris Palmer
at Boston University Productions. The threesome recently found out that
the 15-minute recruitment video they produced for the Undergradute Office
of Admissions won a Telly for outstanding nonnetwork and cable TV programming,
commercials, and videos.
The piece, entitled “Accept the Challenge,” gives
prospective undergraduates and their parents the freshest look at Boston
University
in six years. The final cut was the culmination of 12 months of filming
and editing by the BU Productions team, which is part of the University’s
Media Group. “You live and breathe a project like this,” says
Marrs, who was executive producer on the video, “especially as
you get down to the last two months when the editing is really intense.
It’s such a team effort — we really put our hearts and souls
into it.”
Last fall, the Admissions Office presented the video
at 75 recruitment programs for high school juniors and seniors around
the United States
and abroad. “We absolutely love this piece, and we’re not
surprised that students and families have responded very favorably to
it,” says Kelly Walter, director of admissions. “We have
received standing ovations at the conclusions of our events. So we know
that the video is striking a chord with these students.”
The Admissions
Office and BU Productions have collaborated on several recruitment videos
over the past 12 years. In spring 2001, Walter and
Marrs began planning the new piece as part of a larger effort to revamp
all of BU’s recruitment materials. While the previous video, “Consider
the Possibilities,” was outstanding in its own right, Walter says,
it was beginning to look dated after six years because it failed to show
off many of the new facilities around campus.
The first glimpse that
many prospective students now have of BU is from a helicopter cruising
over the Charles River Campus on a glorious fall
day. The aerial footage is augmented by other campus shots — flowering
cherry trees in Marsh Plaza, snowy riverscapes, and swarms of students
in transit along Comm Ave. But the scene-setting quickly segues into
the main thrust of the video, which is presenting the superior academics
at BU.
“
We are really trying to target high-ability high school juniors and seniors
with this video,” says Walter. The profile of the typical BU applicant
has changed significantly since the last video was produced in 1997,
she says, and as a result, the admissions process has become more selective. “Ten
years ago, we would admit abut 75 percent of our applicant pool, but
now we admit 38 percent. So we’re competing with the best institutions
in the country for this limited pool of very talented students.”
The
academic rigor of Boston University is presented from the perspective
of 10 poised and articulate undergraduates from diverse academic, ethnic,
and geographic backgrounds. Several talk about thriving in an academic
environment that promotes faculty-student interactions. Others describe
the rewards of doing independent research, such as the Work for Distinction
and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programs.
“
Our videos in the past have focused on pretty traditional academics,” says
Walter. “We would show what happens in the classroom and then concentrate
on student life.” But the new video presents a brave new BU, with
classrooms and laboratories outfitted with state-of-the-art-technology.
In one scene, a professor and student explore a three-dimensional model
of a human heart projected on the Scientific Computing and Visualization
Group’s deep-vision display wall.
The video and the other recruitment
materials seem to be successfully attracting the high-ability students
that the Admissions Office has been
looking for. The number of undergraduate applications increased by 9
percent this year, Walter says, and “it was the strongest applicant
pool in the history of the University.”
Zekos and Palmer were the
primary cameramen for all campus footage collected over the course of
the 2001–02 academic year. They also spent long
hours digitizing the footage and editing the program. Palmer designed
two special effects montages that present BU’s vast number of sports
and activities in a short amount of time. There are even computer generated
fly-throughs of the soon-to-be-opened John Hancock Student Village.
“
It’s a beautiful representation of this University,” says
Marrs, “and it’s an honest representation, too. Clearly,
the students we interviewed were selected for a reason: we thought that
they would do well on camera and represent BU well. But they’re
telling their own stories based on their own experiences.”
As a
silent film, the footage would be handsome in its own right. But with
the benefit of an original score composed by a Somerville company,
the piece really sings. “When it finally came together and the
score was in, that’s when it really got exciting, because the music
added this emotional element to the program,” Marrs says. “The
first time I heard it, a tear came to my eye, which is exactly what you
want. Granted, I’m very invested in it, but if you can get that
kind of emotional reaction from a viewer, that is what’s the most
gratifying.”
Boston University Productions is a full-service video production group
offering professional services for the design and production of promotional,
documentary, educational, corporate, commercial, and multimedia programs.
For more information about these services, visit http://www.bu.edu/media/boston.html.
11
April 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations