I was introduced to STOIC at the freshers fair. Out of curiousity I ventured to the top floor to see the TV studio. Foolishly I volunteered to be one of the contestants in a gameshow called "Going for Coppers"
Apart from assisting with further episodes of Going for Coppers, my first job was the anchor man for "Into the night". This was a thursday night show devised in the years before my arrival at STOIC. The overall scheme was to show some of the programme made by STOIC in the early hours and follow this with a film from satellite.
My first filming experience was the motor club rally with Kevin Walters who was archivist at the time and was very rarely seen at the studio.
I followed this up by filming a few news reports and documentaries, including interviewing Santa Claus and the Grim Reaper
In the second year I was Publicity Officer and invented the "The Wall" which was really just an modernisation of the Teletext pages which had been shown in the previous year. This was done with assistance of a recent purchase at the time, an Amiga computer
The Garreth Belamy Hour proved quite unpopular with the student television awards (NASTA), this could be because it was too deep for them to appreciate or it could be because of all the toilet humour.
Red Hot STOIC (named after Red Hot Dutch) also affended some with it's rather suggestive advertising. The food however was inoffensive but mainly inedible. Many thanks to Ronjoy for providing a kitchen.
At the end of this year I assisted with the rebuild of the studio, expanding it out into the Green Committee room, providing much more space for the control room and video editing. Trip several years later to the studio it was been discovered that this was reversed and the control room had been returned to it's earlier location. Now the studio complex has been moved to lower down in the Beit Quad and they have replaced the old tape editing with a computer based digital editing suite.
In my final year I stood for Chairman and got the position, much to the horror of my course supervisors. I managed to hold things together for this year and avoid failing my degree. I also managed to get a paid advert from "The Sandwich Shop" shown. However due to the failing network and not being able to show the tape we never got the money from them.
The College had strange ideas about what Student Television did so we came up with a fictional horror movie just for them. This was the only scene, I'm the one on the right waving the sticks.
The end of this year saw many good programmes from Simon Hill (Song for Europe 2003 Composer) and Carlo Masarella (Producer of BBC Christmas Lectures)
My final claim to fame was a side effect of the studio refit. The old Video Distribution Amplifiers (DAs) were replaced with new ones which worked without the requirement to be kicked all of the time. I used the portable Umatic recorder and the pause button to animate these old DAs in a rather silly animation which won an award at the NASTA meet.
I managed to get an Avatar made at the Dome in June 2000. This is a digital model of me. Here's a little example of my avatar. It is purely co-incidental that I happened to be wearing a STOIC T-Shirt as I did not know this could be done when I went.
Oct 25th 2000 The new STOIC members launched a competition for producing a film in under 1 hour. The resultant entry from PSTOIC was "Eager Beaver"
My Avatar has been having fun playing Quake but I have been working on more animations.
The PSTOIC Flea Show, coming Soon....