NORTHFIELD, Minn. - St. Olaf College is a small liberal arts school located atop what locals call “the Hill,” 45 minutes southeast of the Twin Cities. A quiet college town, Northfield rarely even sees traffic, so what brings 12,000 people to the Hill each year? The St. Olaf Christmas Festival.

 

Christmas Fest, as it is known by students, has been one of the premiere holiday traditions in the state of Minnesota since its conception in 1912. St. Olaf, which boasts a 1:3 ratio of students involved in music, gathers five choirs, a world-class orchestra, campus pastors, and dancers for two hours of anthems, lessons, and carols. For four nights at the beginning of December, the college is transformed into a winter wonderland, with a Norwegian twist. The cafeteria serves traditional Norwegian delicacies, such as lutefisk and lefse. Students, parents, alumni, faculty, staff, and others gather to ring in the holiday season. But what about those who can’t physically be in attendance?

 

St. Olaf is at the forefront of college broadcast media, with 2018’s livestream of Christmas fest bringing in thousands of viewers. For several years, St. Olaf’s broadcast media team has produced both a downloadable video of Christmas Fest and a livestream, so those who can’t make it to campus are able to watch in real time. Because of the level of quality of the work done by the broadcast team, there is a lot more that goes on behind the scenes in producing these recordings than one might expect. 

 

The planning for the Christmas Festival broadcast begins months in advance. The conceptual planning comes first. The theme is chosen, the conductors decide on their pieces, then comes consultation with Broadcast Media Services. O’Donnell meets with each of the conductors, discussing their chosen pieces and decides what will be needed in terms of microphones and camera angles. With nearly 20 microphones and 10 cameras, Christmas Fest is a big production, the biggest of St. Olaf’s calendar year each year. 

“Our planning process begins probably in the summer which is when we begin to reach out to some of our contractors that we bring in to assist us on a production. Then we can start to plan out microphone selection, we can work on some lighting ideas as far as different places we’re going to have to add some other lights… starting in September, then October through Christmas break is pretty much all Christmas Fest all the time,” said Jeffrey O’Donnell, Director of Broadcast Media Services at St. Olaf College and Executive Producer of the St. Olaf Christmas Festival. 

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Photo Courtesy of St. Olaf Marketing and Communications

 

The week of the festival, Broadcast Media staff Jeff O’Donnell, Joshua Wyatt, Sean Tonko, and Rebecca Beam, along with their crew of student workers, begin setup. First they lay chords for microphones, cameras, live audio PA systems, stage lights, and others.  This process takes two to three full days of work, with students working in shifts of two. On Wednesday, they test the cameras during a dress rehearsal, and on Thursday, the show begins. The student engineers man eight of the ten cameras remotely from Skifter Hall, where the centralized production studios are, while two contracted video engineers work Jib and steadicam cameras to get tighter shots. St. Olaf’s team run their own audio, but they are also aided by Classical Minnesota Public Radio, which broadcasts a livestream of the Sunday afternoon performance. Though it has lots of moving parts, O’Donnell’s team is a well-oiled machine; once the preliminary work has been put in, the actual recording of the concerts is smooth sailing.

 

But, the Christmas Festival broadcast has not always been this way. Before the current production model, producing something like the Christmas Festival was much more strenuous. A production truck would come in, sit outside the building for monitoring, and staff would set up temporary cameras. The last time this model was used was in 2011 for the 100 year anniversary celebration of the St. Olaf Choir. The truck would arrive on Thursday, there would be a few hours allotted for microphone and camera set up, then Broadcast Media Services would record Friday, Saturday, and Sunday performances, allowing only three takes of each piece for a final product. This new model reduced the expense of producing the festival by more than half. 

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“This year, in 2019, is the first year in our new production model where we know that we are shooting this for PBS distribution, and so what that meant was extra lighting was important and we brought in a makeup artist and volunteers from the student ensembles. We try and create an exciting and dynamic visual product every year, but I think this year there was just a little bit more focus and pressure on the student operators, knowing that what they were getting was going to be distributed nationally,” said O’Donnell.

The new model takes advantage of infrastructure and equipment that St. Olaf has installed in Skifter Hall and distributes cameras across campus, which was made possible in 2015 by accumulated endowment earnings. 

 

This year’s recording will be turned into an hour long special, hosted on PBS Plus in December of 2020. 

 

What about the future of the Christmas Festival broadcast? Well, O’Donnell seems happy with the results from the last four years, with a good return on investment in equipment and well-trained engineers. He does think, however, that there will be a push to expand viewership of the livestream by publishing it to other streaming platforms. So, maybe a few years down the road, there will be exciting new ways in which to experience the St. Olaf Christmas Festival from afar. 

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