Winol - 9th February

This week was our first bulletin in our different roles. All in all it was OK. With all of the technical faults and low level of training for some people we only ran 15 minutes late rather than an hour; which I had expected.

This week we were all settling in to our roles and for half my team they had never been in the studio before or worked on any of the different areas; so I was very happy that it worked out in the end.

We managed to set up the studio and everything was working perfectly, everyone had their roles assigned and everything was booked out and set up. We recorded Sportsweek and everything was OK. The lighting, sound, recording and rehearsals went perfectly. Our next job was to do the strap lines and put them on everyones packages, gather the headline footage and make the sports graphic. The strap lines looked great but with the program they were on we found it hard to change them. Thanks to Becky we managed to get them on and that was one problem down. The next problem is that I am not very good at final cut pro and thanks to Claire and Katie for helping me and getting a relatively OK sports graphic for our first bulletin. This is something we will improve upon in the coming weeks. Justina also did well at gathering the headline package parts too.

This week we had a breaking news section where 40 people were due to have their jobs cut because of the riots in November. We hoped that this would bring in more viewers, maybe of a higher age group as it was affecting adults more than the students. This bought panic to me and my production team. Julie did well in getting the breaking news footage together but because it was exported in the wrong format we had to send it back for Julie to do again. This meant that instead of filming the headlines at 12.30 as planned we were pushed back to 1.30. This was also because final cut stopped working, the computer froze and when it came to record the headlines the recorder had lost signal. This had never happened before to my knowledge and I was at a loss of how to fix the problem. Drew managed to fix it and we recorded the headlines. At least we thought we had but when it came to editing them they were nowhere to be found meaning that we had to film them again. This put us back further but they were done and being edited by 2 by Justina.

We then got everyone in place for the headlines, put the VT's in order, put the script on the auto cue and set up the lighting. The green screen kept going wrong and in the end meant that we could only have one camera that was completely clear.

At five to 3 we wanted to do a very quick run through but then found that the VT's weren't putting out any sound, this meant that we needed the technician again and thankfully he sorted it out. We then went live without any rehearsals. Many people had a quick panic but we got through the news part of the bulletin ok and the interview with Cara and Andy went well. When it was time for the handover from news to sport everything went wrong. As we hadn't practiced it Becky didn't know what she was doing on cameras, the VT person was confused and there was a confusing part in the script for Drew on sound. This wasn't clearly conveyed in the script but it went OK in the end. After recording it we went to log and capture and found that yet again we were having technical problems with the macs in Tab 9. We were due to have the bulletin on the site at 4 but it wasn't until half past 5 that we got the headlines and interview on to the site.

On Thursday 10th February, Justina did an amazing job at editing the bulletin and the whole news show was up on the site for 1pm, a day late. At the time I was a little angry, tired and stressed but after this being our first week I am very happy with my team and we have learnt from this what to do differently next week. We are going to learn form the technical problems and our mistakes and improve week on week.