Reel to Red requests votes to secure Webby win

Reel to Red requests votes to secure Webby win


By Kristen Cabrera
Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010
The WEBBYs are to the Internet as the Oscars are to the movies. And Reel to Red Productions on campus has garnered two Webby nominations; what the group needs now is for students, staff and anyone with an e-mail address --or multiple e-mail addresses-- to help it win. The winners will be announced May 4 and the ceremony will be held in New York City on June 14.

“What’s incredible,” said Chelse Benham the director of Reel to Red, “is that being nominated is an automatic win because for the year 2010 the only people that will be able to stake ‘Nominated for a Webby’ are the five of us in the running.”

Reel to Red Productions is up for Best Student Web site http://www.reeltored.com/ (best viewed in Safari) and The People’s Voice award for Best Student Web site. The latter is where R2R needs the help of its fans.

“We are going to set up computers for the next two weeks in the Student Union so that students can vote,” Benham said. “Our focus right now is the voting. We are going to make a video on YouTube to suggest they vote for us and to show how them how to do it.”

From now until April 29 voters can go online to webby.aol.com and vote for their favorite sites. R2R is in first place with 33 percent of the tally, but with the quick and ever-changing pace of the Internet, that can vary at any moment.

Voters must first register at the Webby site webby.aol.com with their e-mail and create a username and password. Then a verification e-mail is sent to their inbox (sometimes spam folder, beware, check your spam if you don't see your confirmation email from the WEBBY's) and a link is provided to verify the new account. From there the new user can click ‘VOTE’ on the top navigation bar and it will send them to the People’s Voice Webby nominations categories. Reeltored.com is under the ‘Student’ category listing.

The Web site is relatively new and has only been up and operational since October 2009. The eight members responsible for constructing reeltored.com, including Benham, have been involved with the program from anywhere from one to six years. She attributes the nomination to the dedication and skills of the student team that created the site.

“I have the best students,” Benham said. “They are exceptionally trained and are not the average student. That’s how you build a winning team: you need the best people and to you need to support them…I have the best students, that’s all there is to it.”

The inspiration for the Web site’s look and feel was generated from a tiny working space: despite being the university’s campus-wide television network, R2R does not have an actual television studio. The 30-foot by 40-foot (that’s shared with University Relations) was the reason the student team that crafted the project wanted a virtual studio.

Alexis Carranza, the 22-year-old assistant program director, was the one who pieced together all the individual page composites once they were made by the team.

“It took about seven months to make,” she said. “Everyone on the team designed a page in Photoshop. They gave me their files and I built the site in Dreamweaver.” Carranza, also a designer for The Pan American and Panorama during her career at UTPA, doesn’t consider herself a Web designer because most of her graphic design background is in print. Having never created a Web site before, she had to do some research.

“I had a steep learning curve to go by,” she admitted. “I had taken a web design class and I remember most of it was in Dreamweaver. But my biggest issue was understanding and writing HTML code.”

To register to vote click here webby.aol.com/student/connections/  and create a new user account. To go directly to the Webby's Best Student Website category page click here.