Vocational Day - Ostrava (Leslie)

Today was our vocational day in Ostrava and I visited the regional television station and the regional weekly newspaper. Both were very interesting! I got to go behind the scenes at the tv station to see their recording studio with green screen, production, editing, graphic design and final cut. I was also able to talk with their animation producer who is working on their first animated series (about two frogs) and got to see some of his work thus far. They have two episodes finished and are working on the third one. It is going to be a series of 6 episodes. It was also interesting to compare how they do ads to how we do ads. When we think about commercials, we think about 30 second clips. At this station they have these, but they also create longers "ads" (5-10 minutes)for their clients to be used for their marketing. This is a more profitable product for them than the 30 second commercials. I thought this was interesting that they would do this at a television station instead of the client using a seperate production company.

The newspaper was interesting and very similiar to what we have in the United States but I found it odd that they don't receive or use many press releases from companies. He said a lot of companies in this region have the mind set of "no article, no problem" meaning that either positive or negative, they would rather not have the articles written about them. I explained this was much different from the United States in that companies like to have positive articles written about them to promote themselves pretty much for free.

In other happenings - yesterday we visited the Technical University in Ostrava and saw many research labs. We also split up in the afternoon and Aaron and I saw they research they are doing for Hydrogen cars and electric cars. Joey talked with University representatives about fundraising and Andrea and Dave visited a WWII Memorial close by. Later in the afternoon, we attended a concert for children with handicaps sponsored by Rotary. It was a very humbling and emotional evening seeing the children sing. They were an inspiration to us all.

Music Concert Photos