Ralph Schaafsma

So some of you might be wondering what I’ve been doing the last six months of my life. I’ve been busy working on MJUKS a ’student tv show’ that airs and episode about every four weeks. Each episode being 15 minutes long having about 7-8 different items each being 1 to 2 minutes long.

I had multiple tasks this semester, I shall discuss each of them after I quickly lay out the hierarchy of MJUKS.

At the top we have the executive producer. He’s the man that’s the main boss, he does the external relations and basically is the main man.

Also we have the creative director. That’s the person that determines what’s get aired and what’s not. It will be the person you talk to when you have an idea for item and gives you the go ahead when he thinks your infosheet* is up to par and you can show it to the teachers for the final okay to go and shoot it.

Then we have the production leader. This is the person that arranges everything, if you need a camera or any other tool he’s the one to talk to. Having good relations with key people at the faculty is a must when trying to fulfill this roll.

Last but not least we have the lead editor. Who’s in charge of putting the entire episode together. Adjusting the bumpers and leaders, putting the items in order, adding lower thirds** and adding the voice over.

One thing I’d like to mention here, something that Sinne already said. The downside of emphasizing a hierarchy.

Now, my roll in all this. I was part of the normal crew: writing infosheets, shooting items, recording audio on set, being a camera man, editing the items together. All pretty standard but I also was responsible for some other stuff. Being part of the website team has allowed me to hone my skills as a webdeveloper, something I wanted to accomplish this semester.

As you might know MJUKS.nl is running on wordpress, the popular and mostly loved Content Management System. This semester has allowed me to understand wordpress to a degree that I can put together stuff for it pretty quickly, like my podcast website for example. But more about MJUKS.nl in another blogpost.

Another role I fulfilled in MJUKS this semester was being the voice over. How I got to be the voice of MJUKS is kind of unclear, when making the second episode me and two fellow students who are also in the website team were in charge of getting a voice actor. After having a number of people on audition someone finally decided that I was to be the voice. I was chosen for having a clear, easy to understand voice with no apparent accent, except for the Fierljeppen item in which it was very much intentional.

It’s always a lot of fun doing the voice overs. Taking place in the studio with Sinne by my side giving me directions is always crazy fun. No wonder there are a lot of outtakes recorded, which might make it on the website some time. Having Sinne in the studio with me is the reason why the voice overs actually work, it’s very hard for me to judge how my voice sounded, he’s always giving directions to get the best out of it. Another very important thing to get the best voice over is to have fun recording it, this gets you going and you can get the most out of your voice.

I’ve been asked by the executive producer of next semester to be the voice over again, I happily said yes.

*Infosheet: Where you write everything down, all the shots you want to shoot, the equipment you need, the feeling you wish to express, etc. It needs to be approved by the creative producer and the teachers before you actually go and shoot the item.

**Lower Thirds: Names on screen of the people shown.

So last Friday we launced the MJUKS site and man did it suck. First after we finished the design and workings of the site we put it online in a ’secret’ folder so it didn’t show up immediately unknowingly we didn’t realise that that would totally mess up the database structure if were to move it up a folder. So when we were able to launch it on the main directory we got a lot of nice database errors. So currently we are using a redirect untill we reinstall wordpress in the main folder or use create a htaccess redirect. Also what bites my ass right now is that the redirect is way too slow,  school has put it some kind of nifty delay on how fast you can go through webspace so there is like a 3 second delay.

However, it is working. A few days ago we installed google analytics, a spam filter, and removed the bugged RSS button. So now we can see where all those hits are coming from.

Still the website is far from its full potential. It just basically shows the videos, you can vote and comment and that’s it. We’re going to put a lot more user input into the site. Polls, behind the scenes, suggestions, forums, etc to make it more a community.

Soon the old MJUKS content will be online as well. Something that some groups failed to realise is that MJUKS is a whole and all the items should be on one webpage no matter which group made it.

Check it at mjuks.nl!

So the last couple of days I’ve been hella busy working on the MJUKS website. It’s currently ready for first release.

**I said as I positioned myself comfortably after which I bumped over my cup of coffee spilling it all over the table**

Currently it it’s functioning like a normal wordpress blog, you create a post which is shown in the sidebar on the front page and then it’s also listed within one of two category pages, either Items or Episodes.

In the future we will work towards a more dynamic approach so the sidebars acts more like a playlist.

Today we had some problems getting the site to run online, we weren’t able to create a new wordpress database as we do not have the rights to. An email to the guy in charge got quickly responded to and we are waiting for our database to be ready to receive them datas.

Hopefully tomorrow, the deadline, things will work properly and we can upload our items. If not, then I’ll host it on my own darn webspace.

Today I’ve been busy working on the MJUKS wordpress port. It’s getting along pretty well. XHTML strict is a thing of the future, right now I just want this thing to do what it’s supposed to. Some time in the future we can work on estethics. Currently the front-page is pretty much done next to a few styling issues. Tomorrow will be about making the single pages and category pages function. After that we’ll need to see how we can load movies in dynamically instead of going to a seperate post which is the case now. Although that’s not necessary for the inital MJUKS-WP release.

A few features that the site currently has are:

1. 1-5 Star rating per post
2. Easily added flash movies
3. Randomized headers
4. RSS feed

More about that when the times comes.