New TV Spot Tips Off

This Monday evening, the men's basketball team takes the court against Davidson in its first televised appearance of the 2002-03 season (ESPN2, 7 p.m.). It will also introduce to a nationwide TV audiencethe university's new halftime spot, which for the first time, was entirely produced by a Duke student.

Each year, Duke and its fellow ACC schools provide taped 30-second public service announcements (PSAs) to regional and national sports networks for airing during halftime of football and men's and women's basketball games. This year's Blue Devils' spot promotes "eDuke," a daily and monthly summary of university news distributed via e-mail.

Nayeli Garci-Crespo, a doctoral candidate from Mexico City, created the new PSA, using equipment and resources provided by Freewater Productions, a committee of the Duke University Union. Garci-Crespo is serving as a teaching assistant this year in the Film/Video/Digital program, while working on her dissertation.

After an initial meeting in early October, the Duke Office of News and Communications provided Garci-Crespo with video footage that had previously been shot around campus and an electronic file of the eDuke logo. Her assignment: put it together in a dynamic, creative 30-second package.

"When the Film/Video/Digital program first approached me about doing this project, I was intrigued," says Garci-Crespo. "I wanted more experience editing a project that wasn't of my own conception, in essence, the type of project you would do if you were a freelance editor. It is a completely different challenge than editing your own film."

Keith Lawrence, associate director of the Duke News Service, met regularly with Garci-Crespo as she developed her creative concept. "Our goal for the TV spot," he says, "was to show the exciting range of activities at Duke, and to let viewers, particularly alumni, parents and prospective students, know that eDuke is an excellent way for them to keep up with what's going on at the university."

The spot features an MTV-style, rapid-fire montage of campus images, ranging from classroom and lab shots to extracurricular activities. Several screens show the eDuke logo, along with information about how to register for the free service. For Garci-Crespo, whose previous experience had been in longer formats for coursework, the tight timeframe proved a challenge.

"Having to come in at exactly 30 seconds, drop-frame, was demanding," she says, "and so was working with existing footage that had to be culled for appropriate material. But as with all creative endeavors, the limits actually aided the creative process and gave a form to the project that would have been much harder to come by had there been no boundaries.

"The result was a team effort, with valuable input from many people. They suggested changes in a way that made it very easy to evolve the project into its final form."

Another important element in this all-Duke effort is the music. The music used in the spot was created by Mike Day '03, a computer science major from Zurich, Switzerland. The composition was his final project for Professor Scott Lindroth's electronic music course. Day describes it as "a chopped-up bass-and-drum beat, set against steady synthesizer chords."

David Jarmul, associate vice president of news and communications, calls the eDuke TV spot "an especially good example of our effort to get Duke students more involved in the university's communications efforts.

"We've also recruited students to write for our publications and have begun talking with several students about producing video stories for Duke's web site."

The project also shows how swiftly video technology, until recently the exclusive domain of studio professionals working at costly graphics workstations, has become accessible to many more people. In Garci-Crespo's case, an Apple Power Mac G4 computer and an off-the-shelf video editing program, Final Cut Pro 3, were the primary tools needed to edit and render the spot in broadcast-quality video.

John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations, gave the original go-ahead for the project and monitored its progress until completion. He says its success provides a good example of how the university can help encourage student involvement.

"Nayeli's terrific work will help us promote Duke, and specifically the eDuke initiative, to a wide audience of fans," says Burness. "I think her production speaks well for the university's efforts to put leading-edge digital technology in our students' hands. And, of course, it shows once more what an extraordinary pool of talent and creativity we have in our student body."