Gecko Network is a service group at The Overseas School of Colombo that specializes in videography, photography and technology. We provide these services to the OSC community during various school events and also play a major role in broadcasting and projecting OSC to the world. This academic year, I have been tasked with the responsibility of leading the Gecko Network service group.

I have just completed my 1st quarter as leader of Gecko Network and it has been a great experience. We have completed many different projects over the course of the quarter and I’ve learned a lot as a leader. This post will highlight some of the projects we completed this quarter, the challenges that I encountered as a leader and some goals for the rest of the year.

SAISA S1 Pep Rally Videos

The first major project we embarked on were the SAISA Pep Rally Videos for the first athletic season of the year. SAISA is the South Asian regional athletic conference that includes OSC and a few other international schools from the South Asian region. Before each SAISA tournament, Gecko Network creates a short video highlighting the Gecko athletes from each SAISA team.

The first season’s tournaments had Swimming and Boys and Girls Volleyball Teams participating from OSC, and videos for each of these teams was the first project for the 2018-2019 academic year and also the first project under my leadership. Creating these videos require quite a lot of hard work from the planning stage, to the filming stage to finally the editing stage. As a result of the large workload, I recognized that collaboration between the Gecko Network team would be throughout the project. I created three groups within the GeckoNet team to work on each of the videos.

I guided each of the groups during the planning stage by planning access to the GeckoNet equipment for filming, but when it came to the actual planning of the video I gave the groups complete creative freedom. I also supported the groups during the filming stage by teaching the many new faces how to use the equipment. When it came to the editing phase of the videos, since each group was familiar with using a video editing software, I only provided some feedback during the editing process.

We received a lot of positive feedback from the SAISA athletes as well as the rest of the OSC community about these videos. Overall, the Season 1, SAISA videos were a very successful project and a great start to my leadership in Gecko Network. The three videos we created are attached below.

Care4Paws – Voice for the Voiceless Campaign

While the rest of the group was working on the SAISA videos, the Care4Paws service group approached us looking for support with their animal rights campaign called “Voice for the Voiceless.” Care4Paws is a service group that is involved with animal welfare and this campaign was built to create awareness about animal cruelty in the tourism industry in Sri Lanka. Despite the late request from Care4Paw, I accepted the project and completed it myself since this is an issue of global importance.

I created three short 30 second videos aimed to create awareness about animal cruelty on Leopards, Elephants and Dogs in Sri Lanka. This was a good opportunity to further enhance my video editing skills. The videos were completed within a week and then presented to the secondary school. Overall, these videos also had a very positive response and achieved its purpose of creating awareness about the issues within the OSC community. The videos are attached below:

Welcome Back Picnic and Founders Day

Although the SAISA videos were the main projects we pursued over the course of the quarter, there were also a few other events that took place as well. In addition to the three groups, who were tasked with creating the SAISA videos, I created another group to cover these events. This group contained Yoosuf, Thisath, and ShoJi, who are all new Gecko Net members, which meant that I had to teach them how to use the equipment and give them some guidance, when it came to editing the pictures and videos. Teaching and training people is something I haven’t done before, and this was a new skill that I acquired over the course of this quarter.

The videos created for welcome back picnic and founders day by Thisath were creative and impressive despite his lack of experience with video editing. The pictures taken by Yoosuf and edited by ShoJi were also really impressive. The videos are attached below and the pictures are accessible through our website.

UN Day

UN Day was another key event that we covered this quarter. The challenge with UN day was the fact that many members of Gecko Network, including myself, were also involved in the organization of UN Day. Nevertheless, I managed to get Philippe and Yoosuf excused from the classroom sessions on UN Day so they could cover the event through both photography and videography. I helped them setup some of the equipment, but couldn’t be involved throughout the day due to my commitments during UN Day. Nevertheless, both Philippe and Yoosuf did an excellent job with the video and pictures respectively.The video is attached below and the pictures are accessible through our website.

https://youtu.be/DmK6MD1kycY

Overall, this first quarter has been very successful for Gecko Network. We completed a variety of different projects over the course of the quarter and in addition to enhancing my skills within the disciplines of technology, videography and photography, I learnt a lot about leadership, service and managing people.

Nevertheless, this is only the beginning of my journey with Gecko Network and there are many more things I hope to achieve over the course of this year, including the establishment of a Primary Gecko Network and a regular Gecko News production cycle.