Last quarter was quite an eventful one for Gecko Network, and I took away many a lesson about leadership and management. This quarter 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 quarter, along with some goals for the future.

Girls Volleyball Tournament

At the start of this quarter, The Overseas School of Colombo hosted the SAISA Girls Volleyball Tournament. Gecko Network was heavily involved in this event; working on the livestreams, photography, videography as well as the website. Yoosuf, Vinuda, Taneishq, Praneeth, Valentin and myself worked over the course of the weekend on these aspects along with some support from the rest of the event crew. GeckoNet was heavily involved in this project and we initiated quite a few firsts including a scoreboard on the livestream. I also learnt quite a bit about leadership and management through this experience. See more about GeckoNet’s involvement in this event and some of my key takeaway’s in my post about the event.

OSC Scholarship Video

In addition to broadcasting the happenings at school, GeckoNet is also called on by the school administration to do some projects for the school. Last year, the administration called on us to do an advertisement video for the secondary school’s scholarship program. The GeckoNet team had begun the project, completed a few interviews with current OSC students, who have been awarded scholarships, and put together a 6 minute video. However, the project had never been fully completed and handed over to the school administration. Therefore, we were tasked with completing this video and keeping it to under 3 minutes.

Over the course of this year, Vinuda from 7th grade has proven to be quite good with video editing, so I asked him to lay the groundwork and come up with a 3 minute video using the interviews completed last year. He did a good job cutting it down to 3 minutes, allowing me to put some finishing touches on the video like the name titles for the interviewees and then deliver to the administration. The video was presented to the school board and they were very impressed with our work. The final video can be seen below.

The Website

This quarter also saw the inception of the GeckoNet website – a platform to share our content with the OSC community. I explain the why and the how behind the website in my blog post specifically about the website. We also created a video in order to advertise the website to the school during the end of semester celebration assembly. This video was created with the vision of Milo Pringiers, who did the voiceover and acting for the B-roll in the video, I edited the video and was quite happy with the results. We chose to base the plot of the video around a DP student looking for pictures to finish his CAS blog (just like this one), which is a very relatable situation to many OSC students. Therefore, it was very well received by the audience at the celebration assembly. The finished video is embedded below.

Gecko News – S1 Recap

After our involvement in the SAISA girls volleyball tournament, the semester recap Gecko news recap episode was probably the biggest project of this semester. This gecko news highlighted all of the key events that took place this semester, from founder’s day to Winter Gala to UN day. Almost everyone from the GeckoNet team was involved in this project.

Aidan and Milo worked on condensing all of the information into a script for the news. Philippe and a few others were responsible for interviewing some of the people involved with the different events and getting them to share their experiences. Aidan and Philippe did the anchoring aspect and finally, Vinuda put the video together. I added some b-roll to the video and it was then presented at the end of semester assembly.

This project was quite challenging for me as the leader because I had to get a lot of people working together to deliver some great content in a short period of time. The challenge was in getting everyone coordinated and pulling in the right direction. Completing this project definitely improved my management and leadership skills. This edition of gecko news can be viewed below.

Other Events

As usual, over the course of the quarter, we also covered many events that took place at school through photography and videography. Some of the notable events we covered was the primary production of little mermaid and the winter 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 quarter has clearly been an eventful one for GeckoNet. Now that we’ve reached the halfway point of this year, 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 the year isn’t over yet, we’re still yet to setup the primary division of GeckoNet and cover the events from the rest of the year, so stay tuned for more great content from GeckoNet!