For one student, his effort to wake up at the crack of dawn and shoot a documentary has paid off with a television channel premiering the fruits of his efforts.
Junior Telecommunications major Blake Fife shot a documentary about ROTC students at Ball State University during the 2008 spring semester. Now, the cable television channel Current TV will premiere his documentary short.
Fife said he began working at the student online production Ball Bearings his sophomore year and became interested in non-fiction storytelling. Then he met an on-campus representative of Current TV who stocked his interest in making a documentary short.
Current TV is a cable television network where audience members make more than 40 percent of their short, non-fiction content.
Fife thought it would be a good idea to shoot a documentary about how ROTC students cope with workouts, class and a social life. He also wanted to examine what it was like for them to leave college and have to serve eight more years in the armed forces.
He knew students in ROTC on his dorm floors in past years and all he knew about them was that they woke up early, he said.
"To do that for four years and try to manage that with classes, I personally know that I couldn't do it," he said.
Fife's five-minute documentary was sent to Current TV's Web site, where people at the channel showed interest but asked for a different cut.
After he made his cut, he sold the documentary to the channel where representatives from the channel are in postproduction for it. Fife said he does not know when it will premiere.
Lieutenant Colonel James Girdley said ROTC students work out from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m. three days a week to work on cardio, endurance and strength. He said different cadets actually lead the work out and the students have class time.
Girdley said it was a great way to show students what they do so they can ask themselves if it's something worth pursing.
"Because I've been in ROTC before, it was not new," he said. "It was a pretty good representation of what cadets do."
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