For Three Days, Campus Experiences a little “Movie Magic”
October 14, 2019
Three days, 36 hours, 42 scenes, 85 student and faculty actors. It all took place last week as the St. John Fisher College campus turned into a production set for the College’s newest advertising campaign.
Led by the Office of Marketing and Communications in collaboration with Jay Advertising and Optic Sky Productions, the video and photo shoot captured all aspects of Fisher. With the help of the entire campus, the campaign will highlight everything from students and professors in the classroom and daily activities on campus to the life of a nationally ranked Fisher athlete.
“This was a tall order and one that everyone in the campus community helped us to achieve,” said Kate Torok, director of marketing and communications. “It is important to be as representative as possible whenever we tell the Fisher story, and we strive to capture all aspects of a Fisher student’s experience anytime we produce a new campaign – from academics to athletics and campus life to service. Thanks to the many, many students and faculty who helped us tell the story; we hope that after seeing the campaign, prospective students can truly see themselves at Fisher.”
Emma Pyrak, the Marketing and Communications Office’s public relations writing intern, and Darienne Slocum, Torok’s executive intern, are students of the School of Business who are exploring careers in the marketing industry. During the shoot, they saw first-hand the hustle and bustle that went into the production.
Throughout the week, Pyrak and Slocum were among the student “actors” participating in the campaigns as heroes and extras in photos and videos. This is just one of the many ways that Fisher provides students exposure to real world professional experiences.
“It has been an incredible opportunity to see this process over the three days. I look forward to watching this project come to fruition throughout the remainder of my time in the Office of Marketing and Communications,” Pyrak said.
Slocum agreed. “I would have never guessed that there would be so many moving parts to a 15-second commercial. The teamwork and coordination of the production crew is truly inspiring,” she said.
Fisher students Ehsan Teymouri, Thomas Clark, Patrick Kravitz, and Hannah Dietz also spent time with the video and photography crews as production assistants. Clark, a media and communication major with a minor in film and television studies, said that production assistants handle the small, unseen tasks that help the production move along, including ensuring people didn’t walk through a set while a scene was in action to gassing up the golf carts that shuttled the crew and equipment around campus.
“The most interesting part of serving as a PA is seeing all the aspects of production. You get to work with so many different people and help so many different departments that you just get a really broad sense of the entire production process,” he said. “My experience was great. I saw familiar faces from around Rochester who I have worked with before and some new ones that I look forward to working with again.”
Look out for the launch of the new campaign coming in winter 2020.