Creative Media students hustings coverage goes viral

Students from East Sussex College Hastings have used their film making skills to cover the 2019 General Election during a hustings held at the college’s Station Plaza campus.

Using a complex five camera filming set-up they provided broadcast-quality coverage of the event for the Hastings Independent Press and created elevator pitches for all the candidates.

The first-year students, who study the extended diploma in Creative Media Production, were invited to cover the event and produce promotional videos for all four candidates for the Hastings Independent Press. Applying strict rules of journalistic impartiality the students devised a set of standard questions from a student perspective to ask all the candidates. They then put the candidates in the college’s glass elevators and asked them for their elevator pitch for the youth vote of Hastings.

Creative Media student, Callum said, “I found out that politics isn’t always what it seems, and that politics is quite a sensitive subject for a lot of people. It’s very controversial and some people get really upset.” Fellow student Hannah said, “It was both interesting and uncomfortable at times”.

Jake Bowers, Creative Media lecturer said, “Putting the students into the position of having to get quality footage from a live political event gave them an insight into the pressure journalists are under to not only get things right first time, but also create broadcast-quality footage to a strict deadline.

“Whilst I’m not sure the event totally removed their cynicism about politics, it gave the students a very real taste of the difficult balance journalists have to tread in representing controversial subjects.”

Their coverage of one of the candidate's (Sally Ann Hart) controversial views on disabled people has been featured in the national press and has even gone viral being viewed over 250,000 times in one week on Facebook.

Check out the four candidates elevator pitches below: