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.
This week we had a member of the BJTC come in called Martin Herd. He looked over our whole bulletin day and the making of the bulletin in the gallery at three.
I worked on the vision mixer this week and actually really enjoyed it. Normally I stand back and make sure that everything is running smoothly and that if anyone needs help I am right behind them to help. It was nice to get back in to the actual making of it during the recording. I have actually missed vision mixing.
Martin said that he enjoyed the day and that we were very lucky in the stories we got. Some reporters quite rightly were annoyed at this. I think I can see what he means. He must have been to other universities where they do a news story once in a while and the story is not even news worthy. Whereas we do news packages every week that are newsworthy and that should be in the bulletin. We all work very hard at making contacts and editing down to the last minute to make sure that our packages are worth being put in to the bulletin.
Julie was not lucky to get an interview in Westminster with Steve Brine, she worked very hard to arrange the interview, the travel and did everything off of her own back. She travelled there with a camera by herself and asked him questions that allowed her to get great answers. It was not a coincidence and lucky that she was in London and able to get an interview with him. Luck did not come in to it.
In the laser piece Martin thought that it added another dimension to the news but there was an abbreviation in it which should not have been used as the viewer, and me did not know what the abbreviation stood for. This is a small, simple matter that just needs it explaining a little more.
This week the headlines took a lot longer than they should have done. However this was because the template had been saved wrong. I tried to fix it and make another template but I used the wrong music on the first it of the opening sequence and so it had to be changed again. In a lot of the clips there was upsot which I managed to sort out so everyone could see when the sound would come up. I also made some audio transitions so it did not just ping to life but sound much better. As the template was changed I do not know if this got changed too but it still sounded really good. So we are winning the upsot battle in the headlines. The only down point is that the straps on the headlines were done wrong, they were huge, in the middle almost and swiped different ways. This is a small problem that needs to be changed for next week.
Also, if you are putting a caption of someone in the headline do not change what they say as this could be misconstrued.
Lastly, in the form of straps, we should not have them on the screen until the person we are captioning starts talking.
Try to place the story in context. In Ali's Bournemouth piece we did not know he was in Bournemouth unless he said. This is because we did not see anything that showed the viewer he was in Bournemouth. Such as the BIC, the beach or the town. Small problems but they will help in the long run.
Overall a really great week for both news and production. The features team also did really well this week with WINOL Life and sport with Sports week. We are producing nearly an hours worth of news, features and sport every week now and we just keep improving too.
I directed our second episode of WINOL Life and although I was very nervous I actually quite enjoyed it after. I made sure we did many, many rehearsals and we managed to pull it all together.
In total we had four cameras, when we usually only use two and we used lots of different shots. For a change we had the television in the middle of the couches and instead of rolling VT and going to VT straight from the link from the presenters. We rolled VT and had the presenters and our guest watch the television. We then went to VT about three or four seconds after it started rolling. I think that this looked very professional and made it a touch more like a real feature show.
This week we had Elizabeth Barnett in as our guest editor. She is actually editor of Hampshire Life. She was extremely nice and local too. She went to university at Solent and within six years of graduating she is now the editor. This makes me hopeful that I will be able to get a job when I leave and that if I work hard I can work my way up.
Elizabeth did a separate interview after WINOL Life giving us tips and telling us how she got the job. This was very helpful and actually showed me that it is possible for me to get published in magazines before I even leave university. Please find above the WINOL Life show and find the interview with Elizabeth on the Winchester Journalism YouTube page.
This week went just as well as the week before. This week we had a lot more feedback from Angus and Brian as they took on roles themselves. Angus was the director and Brian was the news editor. This helped us by showing us what we should be doing and more information about the roles.
Julie had an exclusive story this week which came about from an FOI request. This enabled us to do something different in the studio this week. Julie did not have any pictures for this as it was about the police committing crimes themselves. So Julie and Chris made a graphic and we used it as an in-studio talk with a graphic wall. This took some planning as the graphics on the wall had to match up with what Julie was saying. This took a lot of rehearsals but finally we got it right and it came out looking great. The graphic could have been better and we need to have the edges of the graphic in another colour other than black because it does bring down the piece. It looks very dark and makes it harder for the presenter/reporter to stand out from the graphic.
We also filmed WINOL life this week which went amazingly. Justina managed to get a guest editor from the Daily Echo; Sally Churchward. She gave the features team some valuable feedback and we managed to put together a great show from it. This too took a few rehearsals but it all went to plan and looks fabulous. Everyone should be proud of the hard work they put in.
Including Sports Week we had nearly an hour of quality programming this week. We also had two guest editor, one for sport and one for the features programme. We did not have one for WINOL this week which made it possible for Angus and Brian to step in for a week.
Jack and I shared the role of producer this week so that he could learn more and it also enabled myself to learn more and focus on my skills as producer. Graham was on vision mixing, Dan was on sound and Ewan was on the autocue. We are quite a small production team but with help from features we are doing well. It also means that more second years are learning the production skills ready for when we leave.
In the gallery, the production team learnt a lot from Angus and how to direct. His directing also helped everyone in their individual roles as they received a lot more direction. Our normal directors do a great job but there is room to improve.
The packages are looking much better this week and there was actual competition throughout the day to get their packages shown as the news board was changing various times throughout the day. George, Ewan and myself made a package about the art exhibition at the university in only two hours on the wednesday. It was not used as it was too much like features but it gave all three of us good experience on reporting and reporting to a tight schedule.
As I was filming on the wednesday afternoon I was not in the studio. This meant that the Tricaster was not set up and so we were not able to stream it. Luckily we were still able to get it up live at 5 but we should definitely use the Tricaster every week as a back up.
Please find above the video for WINOL this week. Also find WINOL Life and Sports Week on YouTube on the winchester journalism page.
This week was amazingly perfect! Nothing went wrong. We stayed on top of everything and the first bulletin went up at 5 with no
problems at all.
I produced the WINOL bulletin this week as Jack was away. Justina was the director, Graham was on the sound desk, George vision mixed and Dan was on autocue.
We decided to bring all the deadlines forward an hour so instead of starting rehearsals at 2 we started at 1.15 instead. The script was still late, arriving at about 2 but this was not so much a trouble as normal as everyone was calm and had all ready started rehearsals.
We had Rachel Canter from the BBC in this week and she gave us some really great points to improve on. We always pre-record the headlines, which many broadcasters do but as they are pre-recorded we could make them punchier. They can made to be perfect as we have plenty of time to do them. This is something we need to take more care over.
We also made straps for the headlines this week that we need to make more 'tabloidy'. It has been said that if we make them too tabloidy it will make it easier to come down from but it is harder for us at the moment to make them more like tabloid news.
We had a sports graphic this week that we need to improve on. It was a little boring and stayed up for way too long so we either need to shorted the script or make the graphic do more and make it look better.
This week we had three OOV's. On the news board and on the script they were written link-OOV-link-OOV-link-OOV. This is how we did it too but Angus told us that we should have just done the three OOVs in row with a flash between each of them to indicate a new story. This should have done because all of the stories linked together and were essentially one whole news story. So it was a NIB. Our OOVs also need to be shorter as this week they were a little too long.
We recorded with the tape and the tricaster, which again helped us out as it took two and a half hours to upload to YouTube. This meant that we were able to put up the ustream version at 5.
There were not any law problems either and the reporters are getting better and better with their packages.
Next week should go just as well, if not better as everyone knows what they are doing. We are also filming WINOL Life next Tuesday as well as Sports week. We have guests for both so we should be bringing even more viewers.
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.
