This paper provides a systematic review of students' multimedia projects and reveals how a complex web of institutional, local, global and gender issues influence the process of digital media creation by young adults. The significance of this research for this Special Issue lies in the study's longitudinal nature, which examined students' final-year multimedia productions over a 12-year period (2003-2014) in a university setting. The analysis provides a unique insight into how sociocultural norms, access to technology and institutional forces such as the curriculum and lecturers' subject area of expertise, as well as politics and Ireland's economic recession, have influenced and shaped student voices. It also provides the opportunity to track how the student voice changed and adapted in response to events both inside and outside the university and to identify areas of silence and question what they might mean. The potential for student-produced multimedia to carry gendered qualities, especially regarding audience orientation and media type, is highlighted. Student-produced multimedia artefacts and accompanying written documentation are analysed in terms of genre, media type, audience and purpose, with gender providing a useful overarching framework to further refine the analysis.