UW-Madison homecoming

The UW-Madison homecoming video which talked about diversity in the narration, lacked it throughout the video. Problems arose around the promotional video when a sorority member who had been filmed for this video posted saying they were not featured, and neither was any other large minority presences. The committee who made the video took it down shortly after posting it because of the comments they were receiving.

The video was just a little over a minute long and when I watched it, I think I saw around 5 minorities. I don’t know whether the lack of diverse people represented int eh video was intentional or just an overlooked accident, but it proved to be a big one. One of the hard things to look past is the committee asking a predominantly African American sorority to be part of the video and telling them they would be featured. In the post from one of the girls it says they filmed for about an hour. That is a lot of film to not get anything out of it. Obviously not everything you film will make it into the video but when your video is promoting how this is home and it is a diverse home; how can you not find one shot in an hour-long film session to feature.

When I first watched the video, my reaction was that the shots they used were not controlled ones. There were shots of the football team, crowds cheering, cheerleaders, and even some from the cycling team. Those are not things you can choose who is in the shot. I didn’t have a problem with video until it got to set up shots around the campus, with students doing random acts around popular destinations. That was when they had a large control over, who was in the video and what they were doing. From that point on it all seemed very dominated by white students. That is when they could have done a much better job of using different videos showing the diversity on campus.

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