Critical Evaluation of Winol - 8th December

This week I helped Andy film his piece for features about the man that ran across the driest desert on earth in six days. Josh showed me how to open the studio and how to turn everything on, ready to record. I now feel very comfortable with whole of the studio and practically every switch. I really enjoy working in the gallery and studio and now I am 100% comfortable with it too. From knowing completely that I want to be a features writer I have switched. I love the buzz in the gallery and think that it would be very worthwhile for me to learn more and spend more time in there.

The feature went really well and the interviewee was really good. He described everything he saw, felt, thought and it made it really interesting. Andy had great questions and did not look nervous at all. This can be seen on www.winol.co.uk along with the news bulletin.

The Winol bulletin went quite well. We had one major problem that happened as we were recording the live show. This was when we went to Stuart in the newsroom about his piece and redundancies made at the Council. Stuart was talking but we had no sound. This meant that Cara had to apologise to the viewers about the technical problem and then carry on with the rest of the bulletin. The apology went well and we carried on without a problem. We then went back to Stuart in the news room after the following VT and it all went smoothly. This was the only main problem this week.

I loaded the script on to the auto cue and ran it again this week as we were low on numbers and no one knew how to do the auto cue. There were a few changes to be made on it before we ran through but they were small and simple.

We had first years on the cameras this week and they did really well. There was a handover to sport where camera 2 had to change position and Josh, the first year, did well moving in time and positioning the camera quickly. This was done after a very quick 5 minute tutorial so, on that, they did really well. It will help when they come to work on Winol in the second year too. I did not know anything when I came to Winol so they will already be ahead of the game.

Again, I really enjoyed working on production and in the gallery. Josh showed me how to work the Tricaster and the new VT programme, as well as the air conditioning; this would prove very useful as it either gets very hot or very cold in the gallery.

I have decided to put myself in for the position of Production Editor for the next semester. My fingers are crossed and I am looking forward to working on production full time if I get the job. Next week is our last bulletin and I look forward to doing our last bulletin of 2010.

Critical Evaluation of Winol - 1st December

This week I did he auto cue for both Winol Life with Laura Barton and the Winol news bulletin. This job is not too hard but it was nice to be able to watch the interview with Laura Barton. It was very interesting and really good to get an opinion from her on our features.

Laura Barton is a journalist for The Guardian and has done pieces named 'Barton's Britain'. In these pieces barton roamed the English countryside and wrote about it in an almost poetic way. It is a different way to show britain and shows it in a very different light to normal articles about Britain. To see Laura Barton on Winol Life log on to www.winol.co.uk.

Cara was the news presenter this week and I think she did really well. As I was working with her on the auto cue I could see that she was reading well and not skipping her lines or getting nervous. I feel like an old pro at auto cue so I did not panic this week about ruining the whole bulletin.

From the production side of things, everything seemed to go well. There were no black holes, the vision mixing went well and the sound went well along with the pre-recorded headlines. the only problem was when the handover from news to sport the vision mixer did not know when to mix between cameras and camera 2 swivelled between the presenters.

I loved the new introduction to the bulletin. It looked very professional and classy and I think it looked much better than the one we had before.

There was a little bit of bias on the first piece about the demo, when Becky said, "the police came out on top," it is up to the viewer to make up their mind who came out on top and we should be completely impartial but it was only a small mistake and it was her first news programme. Kudos for Becky on the piece to camera as it truly did feel as if we were there. It also bought an element of nervousness to the piece about not knowing what was going to happen next with the riots.

Stuarts closed question was really good. It was direct, to the point and a question that the audience would want answered.

Julies interviewee was a little yellow, a small mistake that we should not be making after ten weeks but small enough not to really notice when you are trying to get a really great interview. I really liked the story too as i have a large overdraft with Lloyds TSB and have gone in to once or twice. I would not know of the huge rise to £10 a day for the fine if Julie had not reported on it. This is something everyone in our audience would want to know and definitely fits our target audience.

Sebs piece to camera was really long and could have been cut down. The shots of the Law Court started to get quite boring too after a while but I do understand that with that story it is quite hard to get people to speak to and pictures. Maybe just a few different pictures of the Law Court in future. The murder also happened near to where I live and maybe Seb could have gone there to get a few pictures of the victims home and maybe a few vox pops from the neighbours about the character of the murderer or victims. However this may have a legal problem so it would have to be done in a very careful way.

Another great bulletin though and once we have ironed out the very few niggling problems we have left, maybe by the time we have our last bulletin of the semester it will be near perfect.

Critical Evaluation of Winol - 17th November

I loved Winol this week. This week everyone reproduced their packages, making them better. This meant that there were no new news stories. We produced four or five bulletins with everybody swapping and learning roles in the Studio and Gallery for each one. However we did produce a documentary style bulletin of the student demo of last week. It is really great to watch so head over to winol.co.uk if you want to watch.

I have already learnt how to do the script, auto cue and the VT's but this week I learnt how to present, vision mix and PA. Look out for a blog soon on 'how to' do all of these different parts of production. I've always said that I do not want to be in front of the camera and that I would be no good at it because I do not think that my voice is very good. I was pleasently surprised, however that I loved it. I was relaxed and laid back and the auto cue wasnt half as hard as I thought it would be to read. I defintely think that everyone should give it a go.

Vision mixing was a bit harder than the rest as I had to pay attention to when the VT were coming on and what camera we were going to next but I loved doing this too. I do not think that when I did it there were any black holes but I did realise that I needed to press the green screen button a second quicker than the button for camera 2 as they were coming up a bit weirdly.

I have always dreaded doing PA as I'm not that great with numbers. As in if a package is 1.13 I find it a little hard to get half way etc. However, you guessed it, I enjoyed this too. It was not as hard as I thought it would be to coutn and I got them all correct with the help of the stop watch on my phone; who knew that was one there. The package timings wern't correct for a few of the packages though and this meant that when I told Charlotte, the director, to count down she was about 5 seconds late. This can be corrected if the timings were perfect and the people doing packages left some time at the end so it did not go to a black hole.

Overall though I really enjoyed Winol this week and can't wait to get back in to the Studio next week.