by Maile Lesica

A multimedia partnership between the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Fudan University in China brought five Chinese students more than 6,000 miles to Chapel Hill this spring.

The five students are part of the bi-national team that will test its skills by creating an innovative multimedia project covering the 2007 Special Olympics World Games.

“I am pretty lucky to be here,” said Daniel Pan, a study abroad student. “We are the first undergraduate students to come on exchange from mainland China to UNC.”

Shanghai will host this year’s Special Olympics World Games. Seven thousand athletes, 50,000 volunteers and 3,500 referees from throughout the world will convene to celebrate the potential of people with special needs.

The Special Olympics typically draw only a fraction of the coverage given to the traditional Olympics. Friends and family who cannot travel to Shanghai will find it hard to catch a glimpse of their loved one competing on television.

That is where the multimedia project comes in.

“We’re accomplishing something really big,” said Michael Lindsay, a senior journalism and mass communication major and student co-producer of the multimedia project. “We’re streaming online, all over the world, a video of every single event and every athlete.”

The project has two segments. Students from Fudan came to UNC for the spring semester to help create components of the Web site that will document the games. This includes the creation of a Web page for each of the 7,000 athletes plus informational pages on China and extended multimedia documentaries on 24 of the athletes to convey their diverse, and at times difficult, lifestyles.

“In Chinese media we relate sports games to our nation’s dignity,” explains Lei Tang, another visiting student. “We’re always focused on the winner. But the main object of the Special Olympics is not the winner but the human, the athlete. Our mass media project is not focused on the winner, but on the athletes and is very meaningful. I think this project will help the Chinese media to realize that humanity and people’s development is more important than who wins the gold medal.”

In the fall, 20 UNC students will accompany Professors Rich Beckman and Xinshu Zhao to Shanghai to record every athletic event and award ceremony. UNC students will work with 180 volunteers from Fudan University.

Beckman estimated that more than 15,000 videos will be recorded. They will be uploaded the day that they are shot so friends and family can see their loved ones compete.

In the spring, the Chinese students learned to navigate the University while taking four classes in the journalism school to advance the multimedia project: Documentary Multimedia Storytelling, Interactive Multimedia Narratives, 3-D Design and Multimedia Design.

Pan said that multimedia is viewed differently in China and that he did not know what multimedia was until he came to the U.S. “There are no similar sites in China,” he said.

The Special Olympics recruited Beckman and the journalism school to complete this project – and provided extensive funding and corporate sponsors to ensure the project’s success. To ease the participating students’ financial burdens, the Special Olympics are covering airfare and lodging.

UNC-Chapel Hill students applied to be part of the 20-student cohort traveling to Asia, Beckman said, and the
five Chinese exchange students are excited that their new American friends will be coming to Shanghai in the fall. ♦

Maile Lesica is a senior in the school’s public relations sequence.