denvers-2022-spring-internship

[denvers-2022-spring-internship]

Mid-Term Blog Post

Introduction

Hello! My name is Denver Morris-Lovell, currently a senior studying Strategic Communications at Kansas State University. I grew up living in Lenexa, KS and completed my high school degree at De Soto High School which is around 15 minutes from Lawrence, KS. I am hoping to be a Director of Creative Video for a sports organization or make enough money to be a full-time creative videographer in the future. 

My Internship

K-State Athletics’ video service department known as K-State HD.TV is the organization I am interning with this semester. Essentially, HD provides video coverage of all of our sports teams, video board production for games, and produces ESPN+ content for a variety of sports. Most of the staff is students which is great because it gives us a lot of good experience while still being in school. My main role this semester has been to create all recruiting, social media, and video board content for the K-State women’s basketball team. This means I am the team videographer and shoot all of their games with my mirrorless camera and creatively produces content for the team. Moreover, I also hold a large responsibility of the curation of the social media content. Simply put, my superiors do minimal help in interfering with my creation process. One major project I have done this semester is an Impact Award package that goes to a woman in sports that has had an impact with her community and also has ties to K-State. I had to do a lot for this project which included preparing questions, driving an hour to interview two subjects, finding old photos of the individual, editing, etc. 

NCAA Record Breaker

Along with the Impact Award project, one game that has stood out to me this season was when Ayoka Lee had 61 points against Oklahoma. My footage of the post game celebration reached SportCenter, Good Morning America, and many other notable media outlets. I also edited a TikTok that received over 50,000 views on the application. Something I have been trying to implement in my content is long form storytelling on TikTok and this one I was very proud of. 

Lessons Learned

One thing I have been implementing a lot to grow followers on the women’s basketball account is Instagram Reels. I have been making a ton of these this season and have started to learn what does and what doesn’t work. Moreover, I have also learned to work ahead when possible so you don’t get behind on certain projects. I do this by making sequences in Premiere and start finding audio calls for future projects and this helps for planning hype videos, player videos, etc. Overall, I am loving this internships so far and the amount of responsibility they have given me this semester. We just got done with conference play over the weekend so now we move into post season play which is when the most eyes are on our accounts so I can’t wait to see what I create. First up is the Big 12 tournament in Kansas City then the NCAA tournament will be the following weekend. Not for sure what seed we will be yet but right now it is looking like an 8 seed. I have never shot an NCAA tournament game so this will be a great opportunity for me. 

https://twitter.com/KStateWBB

https://www.instagram.com/kstatewbb/

https://twitter.com/KStateWBB/status/1485477732209287170?s=20&t=5c744Wxdjsg4mbhtWZ0LYQ

https://twitter.com/KStateWBB/status/1490134219250716676?s=20&t=5c744Wxdjsg4mbhtWZ0LYQ