Online video channel for arts festival

Students from the New Media Lab at Rhodes University will be producing video content covering all aspects for the duration of the festival.

“To ensure that the National Arts Festival is open to a global audience, content from the festival is being hosted by MyVideo.co.za under a Creative Commons agreement. This initiative forms part of New Media students' formal journalism education experience that prepares them to operate across digital platforms and converged newsroom environments,” says Jude Mathurine, head of the New Media Lab at Rhodes.

The National Arts Festival Channel will be updated regularly during the festival with a variety of video content. “Video content will range from short issue-based features to episodic video items like Autograph Hunters (SA Arts and Culture profiles); Backstage (the making of dramas at the festival) and CueTube – a theatre review in the form of a video blog from Cue editors Daryll Accone and Brent Meersman.”

Other multimedia collaboration for the festival involves students from the New Media Lab as well as student print journalists, designers, radio and TV journalism students. They are joined by ICT reporters from across Africa and trainers from the Netherlands who will work on digital platforms that include a blog (www.schoolvoorjournalistiek.com/festivalblog), a festival news and information website (http://cue.ru.ac.za) developed by the New Media Lab's Brad Whittington and a mobile blog (www.skoeps.nl) for citizen reporting. The systems are powered by a prototype newsroom workflow management system, called NIKA (Nguni for “to give) that was developed by former New Media head, Vincent Maher.

View the National Arts Festival Channel at www.myvideo.co.za/channels/nafest.