WINOL Life - 22 November

This week went really well. We had Lorelei Reddin in. She is the Entertainment Editor at the Daily Echo. Lorelei was really friendly and gave not only great criticisms but really good information about what her job is really like. I was also impressed that with six years under her belt as the editor of entertainment she still really loved her job.

I directed again this week and I am actually really starting to enjoy it. The job is very stressful when you are using multiple cameras and everything has to be done in one shot but I pulled it off again.

In this show we had a restaurant review of Giraffe, WINOL Games review and an interview with Coldplays marketing manager. Our features are getting stronger. We still have some problems with them not being 100 percent perfect on the technical side of things but we can only get better and the second years are still learning.

We are starting to get in to a great rhythm with WINOL Life and everyone is getting used to it. We were meant to have Maria Milano as our guest in our next show so we have geared all of our features towards fashion. However Maria Milano is not able to make it so we are now on the look out.

I hope you enjoy this WINOL Life, I feel it is one of the best yet and I am sure the next will only get better.

WINOL - 28 September

So we are back for another term of WINOL. This year I am still production editor but for features instead of the news bulletin. Justina and I share the same role except that I am producing the every week shows of sportsweek and anything else we want to film in the studio on a Tuesday and Justina is planning and producing the shows of WINOL Life and anything else she has up her sleave.

I am also working on a fashion feature at the moment that I am hoping will be finished by the end of November and that will be great high street fashion but it is still in the planning stages. I am currently getting knowledge from YouTube fashion videos to put mine together.

This week was just a dummy run but we still wanted to get everything together so that everyone would be comfortable and will know what they are doing for next week; when we embed the show on to the new WINOL web page. View it here:

www.winchesterjournalism.co.uk/winol2011.html

This week I was director for the first time and did enjoy it and loved doing something different but I do not think that this is something I would like to do every week. The second years have picked up everything in the gallery really quickly so I relied on them knowing what they were doing to get through it. Angus told me afterwards I needed to be louder and communicate more with everyone in the Gallery as well as the studio. I agree with this is as I know I kind of just breathed through it thanks to everyone knowing what they were doing. If I direct again I shall try to remember this and take note to commnicate more with everyone in the Gallery.

The packages were not very strong this week. There was a lot of shots out of focus as well as not a lot of white balancing but this was to be expected as this was the second years first packages they put together. The main point is that this was a learning week and they learnt how to film and put the packages together in time for next week. I hope that they will take everything on board and will just go from strength to strength.

As the second years had never edited or filmed before it was really nice to see the spare third years helping them out and coaching them through it. I helped Felicity film her package and although it was not great I think I helped show her how to whit balance, focus, use the right microphone and how important it is to put your interviewee in the right spot. Due to being in a very sunny pub we had to move the interviewee round quite a bit and finally ended up in a spot that was not great but I think it will help Felicity in future think about the interviewee and the shot as much as the equipment.

As the show was a dummy run there is no show to watch this week but hopefully next week our official first one will be the best 'first' WINOL we have had yet.

We finished UK Today last week. It is not my best work but it showed me the amount of work that goes in to producing a whole new show, not least a show incorporating five different universities. Salford are looking to do the next one so I am hoping I can help concentrate on making our package one of the best. View it here: http://www.uktoday.org.uk/

With lots of different projects on the go I think this term is going to be a very busy one but I am looking forward to producing more content than just the news bulletin; however much I will miss it.

Haute Couture...Becoming Accessible?

After reading an article in, The Guardian, about London Fashion Week I felt myself disagreeing with the writers opinion.

The article was mostly about the new fashion for the upcoming Autumn/Winter 2010 collection and the designers. The same sort of article anyone would hand in about any of the fashion weeks; Paris, Milan, New York etc. However the opinion on the clothes was that they were becoming more accessible for Jane Doe, the housewife down the street.

The hem lines were coming down, albeit not by much, but not round our crotches anymore. This was seen as a positive move from the designers as well as the different feeling the audience had whilst watching the show, "the collections that make you smile rather than making you feel cool". I disagree completely. A fashion show should make you feel 'cool', the clothes should look 'cool', they shouldn't make you smile. You're not going to remember a simple, pleated, pink, below the knee, up to the neck, knotted in with a belt dress by Christopher Kane in a years time that simply made you 'smile'. However you will remember Keira Knightley's, eggplant taffeta, Vera Wang dress she wore to the 75th Oscars. That is a dress to remember but it is only accessible to the size zero millionaires. This is how I think it should always be.

I love flicking through photos of different fashion shows and looking at different dresses, zips, buckles, wings, shoes etc and admiring them. I admire them for the imagination the designer must have had when creating the outfit, I admire the model that is tiny enough to wear the clothes and I admire the clothes themselves. The colours, patterns and out-of-this-world innovations. These clothes are not just slung in the wardrobe and thrown out to Oxfam when they don't fit anymore, they are works of art. They are to be admired and cherished and inaccessible. It is a sad day when Haute Couture becomes accessible for the lady down the street. The day I see a mother, with a gaggle of children in ASDA wearing a Dolce and Gabbana coat straight from the runway, is the day I no longer wish to watch the catwalk and the new seasons line up.

Designers should not have to think about their hem lines, the size of their shoulder pads or if the dress is a little too see-through. They should create whatever they can imagine up, with no holds barred. Their designs shouldn't be relevant to the real world, hell, they shouldn't even be made for the real (size 14) woman. Haute Couture is a world of its own, with no rules and regulations. The designers make the clothes to be looked at, to be admired and to show the world the designs for the following season. The only designs that should be accessible to the real world, on a normal wage and with a normal sized body are the knock-offs on the high street. Shops like Top Shop, River Island and Next look to the runway to see whats 'in-season', they copy it and make it accessible to the real world. It is their job to do this, not the Haute Couture designers.

I am probably within a minority with this opinion. That the catwalk shouldn't be for every woman, however this is the innovative world I love to look at. I love to watch and be inspired. I don't draw up my shopping list whilst watching the shows, I watch in awe of what has been made and how they look. This is what I truly believe Haute Couture is about and how a fashion show should make you feel.