Sam Kilgard
It’s not every day that a University of Wisconsin–Stout graduate answers their phone to hear that the very university they graduated from now wants to hire them for a job. In this rare opportunity, Chris Bartlett and R.T. Vrieze, the founders of Knorth Studios in Eau Claire, rose to the occasion.
On February 17, Knorth Studios premiered their alumni video to campus. “After two years of production work, R.T. and I couldn’t wait to premier this video,” said Bartlett. “After collecting 30 interviewees, we gathered over 300 hours of footage that ultimately had to be chopped down into a six-minute video,” he added.
Although the work was long and tedious, Bartlett wanted the video to convey the right message
“I wanted people to walk away from the video with a feeling of what the essence of Stout is. I wanted the audience to feel the emotion of Stout and to understand that it is a campus filled with doers.” Bartlett himself graduated from Stout in 2012 with a BFA in Multimedia Design.
When asked how he felt about the people’s reactions to the video, he said, “This has easily been our most successful project yet; the feedback we have received on this video has been amazing.” The video is about six minutes long and depicts images and footage of UW–Stout’s current climate and its climate from years past.
Bartlett incorporated footage from UW–Stout’s archives, which wasn’t as easy as he would have hoped: “Since all of the archived footage was on a VHS tape, we had to convert all of it to digital, which took time, but it was worth it.”
In UW–Stout’s 125th year of existence, the campus has compiled some incredible moments, whether it be from 60 years ago or just a couple of months. The Alumni video includes some incredible shots that have not been seen anywhere else.
The video is available for viewing on Knorth Studios’ website and the UW–Stout Facebook page.