Guest Speaker: Steve Wellington

After our first two guest speakers (here and here), one of my students came up to me. "You know, my dad could be a guest speaker too." As it turns out, Mr. Wellington lives and works in the tech world, so we had him come in for a visit.

Steve Wellington is Senior Multimedia Producer at Paycor, a company that handles payroll for companies. In fact, they manage my paychecks, so this presentation was very near and dear to my heart. His specific role is to create videos that can be used for external or internal use.  The videos created for clients give information about periodic software updates.  Since people stare at text all day long, it can be helpful to watch a video instead of reading about the updates.  The internal videos tend to be more motivational and fun in nature. He showed us two internal videos, both of them being music videos of your typical cubicle workers having fun together.

In essence, he is the media department at Paycor. This means that he does it all. He will sit in meetings with the creators of the software to boil all update information into something digestible. He will then write the script and create the set and lighting before bringing a coworker to film the video. During the filming process, he is the producer and cameraman. Then, it's time to go back to editing the video before it is finally published.  He explained to the students there is a lot of "butt in chair" time in his job.

Since we already had a video producer come visit us, Steve took a different look at how the job is done.  He took us into the software to show us how the video is put together, using a video he is currently working on. If you have ever created your own video in iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, you may be familiar with the different layers in the production process. However, the videos he works on are a bit more complex than what I'm used to from making little family videos.  He was able to go in and show us how the video, speaker's words, background music, and graphics were all different layers.

Mr. Wellington explained to the students that learning never ceases. He didn't stop learning when he got his degrees in Television and Media.  There are constant changes in media, and he needs to stay on top of the game.

As we talked before and after class, I was amazed that we see similar changes and causes for concern in our separate fields.  For instance, there is a huge need for digital courtesy. Your face doesn't always need to be glued to a screen. While times are achanging and people are consuming media differently than us old-timers, we also see that using technology for technology-use sake is not always a best practice.

I always enjoy my chats with Mr. Wellington over the years, and I'm glad he came to share with the class!

Oh, and here's my Twitter feed from the presentation: