Open Day is one of the most consequential events in the University of Otago’s annual calendar. It is the moment when prospective students and their families move from reading about Otago to experiencing it, and the video content produced around that event carries significant weight in the recruitment process. A well-produced Open Day video reinforces the decision of students who attended. It also reaches the far larger audience of students who could not be there in person.

In 2025, Uthakhamkong managed the full video production for Open Day as a sole operator. The 2025 event ran across two days, Saturday 4 and Monday 5 May, and the production requirement was demanding: a same-day recap reel for each day, a series of unscripted future student interviews captured on the day, and a long-form highlight video combining aerial drone footage, candid moments, academic sessions, and visitor interactions. The Day One Recap Reel was delivered within hours of the event closing and published on social channels the same day. The Open Day 2025 Highlight Video has since received over 3,000 views on the University’s YouTube channel.

Same-day social content production is a specific and demanding discipline. It requires the ability to identify the key moments of an event as they are happening, capture them with the quality that an institution’s brand standards require, and then edit a coherent, engaging short-form piece under significant time pressure. Uthakhamkong handled filming and editing without additional support across both days of the 2025 event.

For 2026, the approach expanded to a small team. Uthakhamkong led and directed Logan and Jensen across the Open Day coverage, providing creative direction on what to capture and how to frame it while coordinating the team across multiple campus locations simultaneously. The 2026 outputs included a recap reel, a long-form highlight video on YouTube, and a vox pop series capturing the responses of future students and parents attending the event. Leading a content team on a live event requires clear briefing in advance, responsive direction throughout the day, and a shared understanding of what the finished content needs to achieve.

Across both years, the Open Day video content serves the University’s student recruitment function directly, giving prospective students a genuine window into the experience of a day at Otago. The combination of drone footage, candid student and family moments, and structured interview content produces a picture of the University that no single piece of content could achieve on its own. Uthakhamkong delivered that complete picture both as a solo operator and as a team lead, across two consecutive years of one of the University’s most important brand events.