Room 308 Productions, most well known for their Lion’s Roar broadcast, is back and better than ever this year.
308 Productions is an extension of the video classes that are offered at LHS. They create videos with unique concepts and post them on their Youtube channel. Their student run broadcast, The Lion’s Roar, is shown every Monday and Friday during fifth hour classes across the school.
The broadcast is run out of the third and fifth hour video classes, as opposed to the one class period they had last year. This allows more students to be involved, and more time to work on and perfect the broadcast as well. Segments can now be split up between the Monday and Friday episodes. The Monday episodes consist of announcements that teachers and staff want students to be informed about, while the Friday episodes focus mainly on student segments and content.
Some new elements in the announcements this year include many new student–run segments. Some of the segments include Gordy’s Game with senior Gordon Fineday Jr, Angie Attempts with senior Angela Braden–Egoavil and so many more. Starting soon, they will be featuring an outstanding athlete of the week every week.
To keep the Lion’s Roar running, there are various different roles. The producers watch over the entire process and make sure that everything is running smoothly. There are a total of five producers this year that are spread out between the two classes.
“Producers’ roles are typically overseeing segments, how they’re being put together, giving feedback and then making sure our studio broadcast is looking good,” film teacher Zach Saltz said.
Editors edit the video segments and put the whole thing together. Then there are teleprompters, news anchors, camera and audio people and more.
“There’s lots of roles that go into everything we do and it takes a big team to be able to do all of it,” senior producer Ben Willems said.
If students aren’t in one of the video classes, they can request to get a video segment featured on the Lion’s Roar announcements. Each student in the class chooses their job for the week. If they have a story to film, they get up to two weeks to complete it before it goes into the announcements. The Lion’s Roar video segments allows students to see what activities are going on all around the school.
The concept of the Lion’s Roar started in the middle of the pandemic. There was difficulty communicating with students using traditional methods, so a video broadcast was started.
“We had intercom announcements and they weren’t always easy to hear. The goal of the Lion’s Roar is to make sure that students have a place where they can go to find out information about the school and it’s really cool working with The Budget this year,” Saltz said.
One of the biggest goals for the Lion’s Roar and Room 308 is to sync up more with the Budget so that video students can have smoother stories and learn a bit more about journalism. Saltz is excited about this renewed partnership.
“It will help inform us in terms of how to be journalistically accurate, how to put stories together and how to communicate those stories, because that’s not always what the primary focus of video is.”
