The nice weather in Keene brought much more than sunglasses, shorts and dresses to Keene State College, as the department of Marketing and Communications filmed the campus using a drone.
Filmmakers from the event-planning and multimedia-creating company MJ Herson filmed the KSC campus on Tuesday, October 1 and Wednesday, October 2 with a small drone, Marketing and Communications Director Kathleen Williams said.
According to Williams, Marketing and Communications is gathering visual material to be included in future institutional videos.
KSC officials did not notify the student body that a drone was on campus, and that it would be shooting film around different buildings.
Director of Campus Safety, Amanda Warman stated “Campus Safety didn’t know about this until a few hours before it happened. They [Marketing and Communications] didn’t even notify me. I didn’t get any details until it was already happening.”
Williams said having MJ Herson staff come to the college was a short notice decision.
“They came quickly so they could capitalize on the good weather. It was perfect weather. Right now, in the beginning of the fall, the campus just looks beautiful. Shooting the campus in February, March, just isn’t optimal,” Williams said.
Indeed, when the filming took place, the temperatures reached 75 degrees and a clear sky hung over Keene.
“We saw an opportunity and we grabbed it,” Williams said.
However, KSC students expressed different opinions towards having a drone on campus.
“A heads-up about it would have been nice. They [college officials] should have said it because they were filming. People here are extremely big on their privacy,” KSC junior Amie Gagnon said.
Warman said alerting the campus about the drone “was a responsibility of the department organizing this [Marketing and Communications]. They should have notified the student body and the faculty that they were doing this.”
Gagnon also said when she pictures a drone, she automatically thinks about military uses and surveillance. “You hear in the news how the government uses it for monitoring different places.”
Williams explained in this case, the drone had very different purposes. “This [the drone] is something really small, almost like a remote control airplane. You operate it through a joystick control, it makes a buzzing noise and you can direct it to go wherever you want. It is really quite wonderful to watch,” Williams stated.
KSC senior Ashley O’Brien said she didn’t think filming was a problem. “If they [college officials] are just taking pictures and filming I guess it is alright to have it [the drone] around. I think if people feel bad that they are being filmed, probably it is because they are doing something bad,” O’Brien said.
According to Williams, some faculty members at KSC were aware of the filming session. “We did contact a number of faculty members because we wanted to maybe go inside their classroom and get some footage of students, but we weren’t using the drone to do that. We used a traditional video camera,” stated Williams.
Williams also said some students were amazed by the drone.
“The response of some students was tremendous. They really enjoyed watching it, they found it very interesting. Some of them stopped and talked to the videographer,” Williams indicated.
KSC senior Tyler Letendre stated he felt “skeptical” about a drone being on campus, however, he said, “Still, it would have been cool to know it was around so I can see it.”
Williams said using a drone to film the campus instead of an airplane or a helicopter with a cameraman gave “an added value” to the project. “The drone gives you the advantage of a perspective that you can bring to a video. It is unusual and really exciting.”
Shooting footage through ‘Unmanned Aerial System’ (robots or drones) has became popular among the different broadcasting and production companies.
According to the website Drone Dudes, a filmmaker’s collective based in Los Angeles, California, using a drone for filming “provides an extremely reliable and stable platform for all of your photographic aerial needs.”
“It [the drone] can fly over buildings, it can fly across them. It can do an aerial shot of your campus so it gives you that extra perspective that makes it more interesting,” said Williams.
Williams said she thought students “really enjoyed seeing the drone. I don’t think there was any negative impact from having this on campus,” she concluded.
MJ Henson has produced videos and multimedia projects for different colleges in the U.S.
According to their website, some of MJ Henson’s clients are Princeton University, Duke University, Texas A&M, Northeastern University, Brockport College, among others.
Karina Barriga Albring can be contacted at kbarriga@keene-equinox.com