Filming the Dance East Stage at Glastonbury
Solent’s presence at Glastonbury this year was the biggest it has ever been and of course, our students were there to catch everything that went on. With their cameras and broadcasting trucks in tow, the crew captured the essence and atmosphere of the Dance East stage.
One member of the team, Sophie Colvin, who was in charge of the outside broadcast crew, explains what filming took place for the Dance East stage.
“We were filming a minimum of four acts per day for Glastonbury TV. We filmed acts such as Fat Boy Slim, Chipmunk, N Dubz, Professor Green and loads more. We were asked by the BBC to film extra bands for their feature on Glastonbury grime.”
Footage from the festival was shown on a BBC3 program documenting the rise of London Grime acts that performed at Dance East. BBC2 took several performances from the Dance East stage, shot by MarTec students, to put together a late show titled Glastonbury Grime. The footage was incorporated into the BBC Red Button function and is now available to view on BBC I-Player.
“I haven’t filmed at Glastonbury before,” said Sophie, “and neither had any of my outside broadcast crew, but we've filmed in a lot of big music venues across Southampton, so putting us in a tent wasn’t that much of a change. We all filmed last year at Glade festival too. The crew, taken from the Entertainment Technology programme, were from a variety of courses ranging from Outside Broadcasting to Sound for Film TV and Games.” 
It is a great compliment to the students of Solent University that broadcasting companies such as the BBC are using their footage for their own programs and when our students return next year, their relationship with broadcasting companies will hopefully lead to much more of their footage being used on Television.