Last semester was quite an eventful one for Gecko Network, and I took away many a lesson about leadership and management. This semester has been even more eventful with more projects and more learning opportunities. This post will highlight some of the projects we completed over the course of this semester, along with some goals for the future.

SAISA Art

You can find out everything about GeckoNet’s and my involvement with SAISA art at the post I wrote about it.

Gecko News

Over the course of the last semester we’ve been experimenting a new form of Gecko News; segments of GeckoNews celebrating the Gecko Athletics teams during the pep rallies. The traditional pep rally videos with just music and B-roll was getting a bit old and also quite dull to watch for a few minutes at a stretch. Moreover, those videos took more time during the content gathering stage and also during the editing stage because you need to edit the footage perfectly with peppy music in order to make a few minutes of sports footage really exciting. Therefore, for both the second and third seasons we decided to try out a new format for these videos by merging them with our Gecko News style videos.

In both cases we began the video like a traditional GeckoNews with anchors reading from a script, however to make things more exciting we used more upbeat music throughout and included brief segments of b-roll as transitions between the different sports discussed in the segment. At the end of the video we also included a montage between 30 seconds and 1 minute of the Gecko Athletes in action in order to finish on a high note and get the audience pumped. Overall, I think switching to this new format was a good idea as it was more engaging for the audience. You can see the finished videos below.

Learning by Serving

An important part of being a student at The Overseas School of Colombo is doing some service to the community inside the school walls or outside of it. Because GeckoNet is designed to broadcast all the great things at OSC, highlighting the work done by the various service groups at school is also important. However, despite having collected content about service groups last year, we didn’t really put it together in a format that can be shared and broadcasted widely. Therefore, in order to address this issue, we decided to start a new mini-documentary series called “Learning by Serving”. Each episode of Learning by Serving is around 1 minute long and aims to highlight the work done by one service group at OSC. With over a dozen service groups, we had scheduled to do a video each week, but due to the recent school closure this plan became unrealistic. Nevertheless, we have completed 6 episodes of the documentary series for 6 different service groups; namely, these are CheckMates, Recycling and Sustainability, Gecko Inc, Girls for Girls, Housing and Habitat and Care for Paws. I’m quite happy with these 6 first episodes, and I hope to finish off the documentary series as soon as we get back next year. I’m proud of the fact that almost everyone in the GeckoNet team pitched in at various stages in the process of making these 6 episodes from content collection to post processing, but a special recognition is in order for Vinuda who put together almost all of the final pieces of work. You can see all the Learning by Serving videos thus far below.

Other Events

As usual, over the course of the semester, we also covered many events that took place at school through photography and videography. Some of the notable events we covered were the Environment Day and the spring gala music concert. Covering all of these events brought more users to our website and increased the overall reach of gecko network across the wider OSC community.

This semester has clearly been an eventful one for GeckoNet. It’s clear that we’ve done quite a lot of work, and my team has developed their skills quite a bit. Parallely, I’ve grown not only as a videographer, programmer and photographer, but also as a leader. Of course my involvement with GeckoNet isn’t over yet, so stay tuned for more great content from GeckoNet in the upcoming academic year!