This week did not go to plan as we had hoped. It was the student demo where over 40,000 students went to London to protest against the rise in tuition fees. We decided that it would be amazing if we could get a reporter down there and report it live on to Winol about what was happening and get live footage. We would then fill the rest of the bulletin with the regular news stories and sport.
I was on script this week. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would but it was also more hard work than I first thought. The script relies on every other person getting their timings, in and out words and link in to the person doing the script by their deadline in order for the script to be written and printed out for the presenter and production team on time. Relying on many other people is automatically hard and with just one person missing their deadline means that the script is going to miss its deadline.
Of course, on a mad day with many different problems and trying to get Skype to work, some people missed their deadlines and as a result the script was not done on time. I also found it hard as I had never worked on the script before and very few people actually knew how to work it. This meant that I only had one or two people to help me with it and they were very busy due to trying to get the Skype to work and bring the whole bulletin together. However I did enjoy working on the script and feel I now know another production tool on Winol. The last problem with the script was that just as I had printed one lot of the script we changed some points around and added more points. This meant that the script I had originally printed was useless and had to be teared up. In order to get the script on to the auto cue it has to be copied in to Microsoft Word and then put on to a memory stick to be put on to the laptop for the auto cue. This had to be changed and rearranged then put back on to the auto cue after I had made the changes. Did I mention that this was all happening at about 10 minutes until we were about to go live.
Luckily I got the scripts printed, put in to the right order, put it on to the auto cue and ready to go just in time. I loved that I had got it all done and that it was correct however I know that it should have been done at least two hours before we were due to go live. This week we are trying to put the script together on the Tuesday so that everyone has a copy and is ready to go Wednesday morning. This means that there is one less problem to deal with on the day of the bulletin. I worked on the auto cue again this week and now feel I can fully work the system and will be able to deal with any problems arising with it.
Another problem this week was that when it came to recording the show Skype was not working. When Jake said, "over to Andy in London," the program did not work and Andy didn't come up. I think we tried this about four or five times, only once did he come on to the screen but even then he did not know he was live and as a result did not speak and did not answer any questions. This meant that the whole set up for the London demo was wasted for this bulletin. Jake did really well improvising and ad-libbing when Andy did not come up on screen though and I think this shows that Jake is a really good presenter. This week however, the filming of the London demo has not gone to waste as most of the bulletin is being allotted to the video footage we have of the riots.
Lastly, all of these problems, everything being down to the wire and nobody really knowing what was happening was made worse as it all happened when we had our guest editor in, head of training at SKY, Rob Kirk. Luckily he has visited Winol before and knows what we are capable of but was not very happy with what he saw. He noticed that our main problem was organisation and that if we were a lot more organised and everyones deadlines were not only met, but that the deadline was hours earlier then our bulletin should go on without any problems. If there are problems then we have plenty of time to sort them out.
This is what we have tried to accomplish this week. We are doing the script a day early and everyones packages are of previous bulletins so they just need to re-edit them and hand them in. These look very promising to be done in time too. We are also having five bulletins this Wednesday, starting at 9am. This means that by the fifth bulletin everything should be PERFECT and go on with no problems. With a de-brief after every bulletin we should be able to see what is wrong and correct it by the next bulletin. We are also rotating on all the different roles of production for each bulletin so by the end of the day, everyone should understand and know what each role entails.
This week, I am writing off as one bad week and look forward to getting back on track for the next bulletin.
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