Fireworks Dog

I am now in my final year of University and I am learning about magazine journalism. This is the career I always thought I would enjoy and on this course I am finding that I do love it as much as Broadcast Journalism. We learnt last week about Fireworks and creating spreads. This is what I will have to do for my final assessment but this week I had a play around and you can find what the outcome is above.

The thought bubble reads: "He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave."

Both these pictures I picked up from Google Images so they are copyrighted. As were not publishing it or making any money from it this will be OK. For my actual magazine spreads the pictures will need to be from Creative Commons or taken myself.

Week Two at The Daily Echo

Week two of working at the Daily Echo. It is not as tiring now, I know everyone's names - just about - and it kind of feels homely.

On Monday I wrote up quite a few press releases. Some were small, some lengthy but I think I am getting better at news writing now. I did 150 words on Chortle's student comedian awards. 150 words about a man that got fined £75 for letting all four of his greyhounds foul the pavement. A very small piece on The Eastleigh Ramblers meeting place and times. I also re-worked my male childcare lecturer article from the Monday before for features instead. It just needed a few more words and a little re-organising of the paragraphs. Lastly, I wrote a small article on The Hamble Point Boat Show in April. Mostly a promotional piece about what you can expect there, when it is etc. Julian Robinson, the Eastleugh reporter, also showed me how to write and put together an article from a press release. It was really helpful and showed me what I need to improve on.

I have discovered that everyone has short hand. There are notepads everywhere with little shorthand scrawlings on them. Just taking a phone message, it is taken in short hand. I managed to get 30 words a minute in my first year of university but now all that I can remember is what 'the' is. I have all the books at home and I think that even if I am not 100 percent on becoming a reporter, shorthand will still be useful. During my interview with Barbra, last Friday I found I could not write quick enough and did not have many quotes that I could put in the article word for word.

Tuesday, I went to the Magistrates court with Sian Davies for a case about a man not keeping his dog under control. It was scheduled for 10.30am but when we got there it was delayed. We went in to another court room and watched to see if there were any other stories we could get whilst waiting for the dog case. I found it really interesting. It felt like a soap opera. The amount of people coming in, one after the other, I was surprised to see. I think I was quite naiive about the amount of crime in Southampton. After a while, the dog case still was not being heard so we went back to the newsroom.

As I had some afternoon free from work I decided to research tv listings. I need the SKY television listings for the Monday 27th August 1990 for my FYP. After exhausting the Internet it dawned on me that the Echo keep an archive of all their past newspapers. It was a long shot but I asked about any magazines they had kept. It turns out that after ITV Meridian moved from Northam they gave all their TV Times magazines to the Echo. No one had seen them since they had been put in to the filing cabinet except me. I was optimistic that out of all magazines the TV Times would be the one to have the SKY listings that I needed. Alas, the only channels they catered for was ITV and Channel 4. Not even the BBC. At a last attempt I asked to see the newspaper itself for August 1990. As it is a local and it does not do TV listings now I did think I was slightly wasting my time but it had to be checked in order for it to be ruled out. Since the 80's they had been putting the paper on to film. I checked the dates and found that not only did the paper have TV listings, it had listings for SKY too. I printed them out and was able to find what I needed for my FYP.

Wednesday was a busy day and I now know that a reporter should not wear heels. I started by doing the 60 second headlines, which I am really enjoying. I then did a phone interview and arranged a photographer to meet with Debbie Beale. She has been collecting animal necesities for a local rescue centre. I then typed up the article and sent it in.

I then went out with Patrick Knox, a news reporter on a couple of his stories. The first was that there was going to be 10 million gallons of water drained from a reservoir on Southampton Common. This would be news worthy because recently people in Southampton have had water meters installed. Meaning that they are paying for the amount of water being used in their household. After walking around the common trying to find the reservoir we gave up. It was a story that needed pictures and we were not able to get any. This was not an easy feat in heels and mud either.

We then went on to interview, David Reynolds. He had recently built a scale model of the Titanic out of matchsticks. I found this interview really interesting and thought it was amazing with what he could do with matchsticks. He had an entire room with amazing models of ships. David was also a Guiness World Record holder for the most matchsticks used, when building a scale model of an oil rig. Patrick had to do a written story as well as a video. Again, short hand definitely comes in handy.

Lastly there had been a tip off that there were rats around a broken gate in a river in Southampton. A river that recently had people canoeing and rowing on it that had caught viles disease. This disease can kill and comes from rat urine. Due to the gate being broken there had been a lot of rubbish and waste build up. I thought it was a lot but apparently it had been cleaned and so we needed to come back in a weeks time to see a lot more waste and rats, to make the story more concrete.

Thursday was amazing! Easily the best day of the week and probably one of the highs for reporters that are more commonly used to finding rats than celebrities. Arron Hendy, another news reporter took me out to No Limits in Southampton. It is a charity that helps get young people off of the street and in to homes and jobs. This is where Matt Cardle was going to be, signing autographs and taking pictures with the young adults there to promote Sports Relief. We were allowed to film and interview him for 15 minutes as well as vox pop the people that use the No Limits service and the manager Liz Carter. Again, due to convergence I filmed all the interviews whilst Arron wrote them and asked the questions for a written piece.

When we were finished there and I had stopped drooling over Matt we moved on to the job centre. Arron has an article in the paper every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday about people that are looking for a job, entitled, 'Give Me a Chance'. Here we stopped four people for the column and asked them about what jobs they are looking for, how often they look, their education history and how long they have been out of work.

When we were back at the office we edited all of our footage an put it in to a two minute video. At the Daily Echo they use Avid whereas I use Final Cut Pro so this was something else new for me to learn. It did look a lot simpler than Final Cut but it did not look like you could do as much with it. We had problems with sound too which took a while to sort out. Whilst we watied for that to be fixed Arron wrote up the article which appeared in the paper on page 2 on Friday 20th January. Along with Patricks article about matchstick man, David Reynolds on page 3. You can find the matt cardle video here http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/video/

Wow was I tired by Friday. I tried to get in touch with a local woman that is planning to run in the London Marathon in April in aid of the British Heart Foundation. I emailed, phoned and left a message for her but as she is a midwife I think that she was a little too busy.

Week One at The Daily Echo

My first week at the Daily Echo went really well. The team of reporters is a lot smaller than expected and it is painfully quiet but I am starting to see what they all mean about them being a family that work together. I was surprised to see that it is still a very male dominated world with just male editors and only four female reporters out of a team of 10. There is even only one lady on sports.

My first day was spent researching the Olympics and localising it by seeing what events were happening in Southampton. Unfortunately, after a day of chasing up councillors I was told that they were not going to reveal any list of events until they were all confirmed. Thus meaning that my story was dead until the council revealed the details; which may take a couple of weeks.

Due to being on a broadcast course I am not shy around cameras and so was intrigued when I was asked to present their feature, 60 second headlines. They do this every morning and it is a simple package of a reporter reading the headlines of the day whilst the stories are on the screen. I believe we could have done something like this at WINOL, simply read the headlines of the day. This may have allowed to have a larger audience as we would have something fresh on the website every day. You can view the headlines I presented here:

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/video/1375651746001/?ref=vidshare

I also wrote a 250 word article about a new male childcare professor. The story came from a press release and was very simple but after doing broadcast journalism for the last two years I think I could have used a refresher in news writing. I finished and sent it in but I have a feeling that it may not be used or saved for a slow news day as it is all ready dated by three months.

Day two and I was all ready feeling more relaxed. Ian Murray, the editor and chief of the newspaper had a talk with me and the other work experience students that I actually felt was really empowering. He spoke of how he got in to Journalism, what he does, the history of the paper and the troublesome times that the paper is in.

After meeting with Ian I had a small meeting with Andy Bissell, the features editor and the managing editor when Gordon is not in. He was really nice and spoke about his career and what we hope to do when we graduate. He also gave myself and Rosie, the other person on work experience, two jobs to do. The first was for a magazine, Hampshire Bride. There was a column in the last issue on the prices of different parts of the wedding, done by a survey company. This year no one could find an up-to-date survey so my job was to find prices for each item. Such as tiaras, rings, honeymoons, the dress, shoes etc and to get a price for on a budget, average and luxury. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun with the luxury price range. This also took a lot longer than I first expected and I had a couple of days to finish it up.

On my third day, was the second task Andy set us. There is a new theory test coming out at the end of the month with 100 questions on it. These questions are harder and there are more than there are now; only 50. We went to West Quay and got ten people to answer ten questions on the new test. We had to have six diverse people to complete it, along with a picture, a comment, their age, name and where they come from. We then chose the six best people and wrote up their captions. For example they sounded like, 'Domonique Jenkins, 21 of Southampton was at the top with 9 out of 10. She said: "I never thought I would do so well, I took my theory test with only 35 questions".' This was to accompany an article about the actual test itself.

Thursday was my finishing of the bridal research. I put in a lot of information and what to do if you were on a budget; how to save more money. I also contacted Dilys Gartside of Cyclewise to ask her to write two articles on cycling. The paper was doing a, 'new year, new you' piece and wanted top ten tips to get in to cycling and the benefits of it as an exercise.

The last day of the week was a welcome relief. I thought that I worked hard during the week and then worked hard at the weekend too with university and working at IKEA; but I have never been so tired. A 5 day week is a lot harder than I thought.

I read the headlines again, and knowing what to expect and what the finished article would look like I think I did a lot better. Please find this one above. I also sent Dilys's articles in to be subbed and put in to the paper on the following Tuesday. Friday was my first interview of the week too. Rosie and I were sent to Fitness First in Shirley to interview a man that had drastically changed his lifestyle and lost a lot of weight. We also went to interview a lady about colonic irrigation. My interviewee was Barbra Perry, a colonic hydrologist. She explained colonic irrigation, the lifestyle, the different foods and what should be eaten with what and - no - I did not try it our for myself. Barbra says that it is very comfortable and not painful at all but I do not think that I will be giving that a go. I wrote up the article and sent it in to Andy. Sadly the interview did not make the paper as the interview was last minute and there was no room for it. However, you may find it on here in a week or so.

Overall, a really good first week. I have all ready learnt so much and seen how different a newspaper is to broadcast journalism. After studying broadcast for three years now I wanted to see what the written world was like. It is a lot quieter and instead of people running around panicking at 3pm, everyone looks very calm. News happens throughout the day and I have seen first hand that what the editor wants, the editor gets and I actually find it really interesting. I thought that I only wanted to work in broadcast but I can see myself working for a paper now too. I think I need as many options open as possible in the current economic climate.

A Guide to ... Rome

Roma! The capital of Italy, and the city with the BEST ice cream, (or gelato) I have ever tasted. Yes, the very first shop you should visit is straight to the corner shop for a tasty treat. Well, apart from the gelato there is still plenty to see and do. I stayed in Rome for four nights and five days. They were jam packed but what else is there to do whilst you are on holiday... sleep? I think not.

Of course there are the normal sights to see that every tourist must see as well as the ice cream. In my opinion the very best sight to see is the Trevi Fountain. It is without a doubt the most perfect place in the entire world. Even when it is crowded with hundreds of people it is still very serene and quiet. If you follow the path from Termini Central, I will show you what you will find along your way to The Vatican. It is a perfect tourist route that wont make the walk feel too long. I did it in 40 degree heat so I know you can.

Your first stop along my route is The Trevi Fountain, but it is a hard spot to find. We found only one sign to it down a tiny back alley. Before I went to Rome I had seen the Trevi Fountain in many films and shows and had always assumed that it was a large fountain in a large square. This assumption meant I was looking out for a large open area. Be warned the Trevi Fountain is a very magnificent fountain in a very small back alley. When looking for it, make sure you go under the road, through the huge tunnel and then turn left.

After Fontana di Trevi you will come across the Pantheon. This is a huge basilica with a dome that baffles architects today. The structure stands very tall but the walls support the huge dome above easily, which should not happen. The dome should collapse because the walls are not big enough but it is still standing. If you go inside you will notice that the design in the dome has also been copied to one of the domes in the Vatican.

After the Pantheon is Piazza Navona. It is a large piazza with three large fountains. These fountains are gorgeous and I suggest visiting early in the morning so you can see the whole piazza in all its glory. After about 11am it gets very busy, mostly people selling art. If you start my trip at about 9.30am you should reach everything along my path without too many tourists there.

Next up is The Vatican. This place is huge! Seriously, much larger than I expected. To give you an idea, there are numbers and words written across the top of the Vatican and each one is 8 feet high. This is a theme in Rome, everything is ten times bigger than you think it will be. Especially standing right up next to it. I was not sure if I would like the Vatican because I am not sure what I really believe in and I know that the Catholics have a very checkered past as well as present. I went with two friends who both had a lot of opinions on the Vatican and Catholics but when we got there it was not too overly in your face about religion. It was mostly about art, the Romans and the Popes.

Thankfully, we were approached by someone that was selling tours to groups of English tourists. It was 40 euros each for The Vatican, The Sistine Chapel and the The Vatican Art Museum. I highly recommend this as it worth every penny. Other guided tours are not, I will mention which ones later. 25,000 people a day visit the Vatican so this gives you an idea of just how busy it is. There were queues everywhere. This alarmed us slightly as we really did not want to be out in the heat for hours. This was our first bonus to having the guided tour, no queues, at all. We were first given a history of the Vatican and the Popes, I found this really interesting but we had to listen though headphones that were annoying. You get to used to them and they are must so you can hear the guide when it is busy.

Once we were on our way we started with the art museum. I expected art that I had never heard of before but there were statues, art and tapestry's everywhere that I had definitely heard of and that all had interesting stories behind. Michelangelo is the most prominent name in the Vatican. This is because he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling and wall as well as doing many sculptures for the Pope. Apart from the Sistine Chapel the most interesting story is behind a sculpture called The Laocoon.

As soon as you enter the museum you will see a full sculpture of the Laocoon and notice the way in which the priests arm is. It is shot out, holding a disc of some kind. This is not the real sculpture. This is an imitation with the arm on. When the sculpture was originally found the arm was missing. The Pope asked Michelangelo to make a new sculpture with the arm in the correct position. Michelangelo felt he could not do the sculpture justice so asked all his assistants to draw a picture of how they thought the arm should be. There were hundreds of drawings. The drawing that averaged the most was with the arm shot out, almost saluting; so this is what was made. A few years later the rest of the arm was found. It turned out that the arm was bending backwards, behind Laocoon's head. The one and only artist to draw the correct sculpture was Michelangelo. He understood the human body, the muscles, the bones so well that he was the only one to study and draw the correct arm in the correct position.

These tours tell you as much as possible about the art on show, I do not study art and I enjoyed everything I was being told about. This may be too much for some people but you can always leave the tour at any point. As I said, I went in August and the whole of Rome was very busy, especially the Vatican. We were going round the museum about midday and it was almost intolerable. There were no windows open because of the nature and age of the art and there were easily about 600-700 people in each room. This made in unbearable at time but what kept me going was that at the end of all this was the Sistine Chapel. I have always been interested in the Chapel and the painting on the ceiling and of the Last Judgement. I have also seen many photos of it but nothing compares to the real thing. If you see only one thing in Rome, make sure it is the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo never classed himself as a painter, he was a sculptor. This meant that the painting was even harder for him. The next point that made it harder still was the fact that he was painting a fresco. This is when you paint with and on to plaster. It has to be wet when you are painting and if it goes dry before you finish you have to start again. The last painful point was the Michelangelo painted standing up tilting his head backwards to the ceiling. He never laid down on the scaffolding which people normally assume. His first part of the ceiling he did was Noah's Ark with PEOPLE going in to the Ark two-by-two not animals. This first panel took him one month to paint, the last panel took him one day. He took a six month break after 28 months work and finished the ceiling in four years. There were a lot of set backs and the work itself was not your typical fresco. He had to make the people he painted look 'normal' but on a vaulted curved ceiling. Not only did he paint the panels for the depicition of Genesis but he also painted prophets, shields and the pendentives to name a few.

You may think that after reading my blog you do not need to visit the museum or learn any of the art history but you really do have to see it all for yourself, in person and I have only touched on some of the history, barely even scratched the surface. This finishes your tour to the Vatican as we have reached the end. Do not re-trace your footsteps home because getting lost in Rome means you will discover something new and beautiful. There is literally something to be photographed down every street.

The Coliseum is a must see. You will be surprised constantly how close everything is to each other. It is a short walk away from our hotel and literally down a little side street. This is another place for you to expect queues. To give you an idea, the queue literally went three quarters around the outside of the coliseum; this is a large queue. We again had people approach us to give us a tour and because of the length of the queue we took them up on their offer of 30 euros. This was including student discount so if you have a student card take it with you because they do offer discounts in some places. After our amazing Vatican tour we thought that the Coliseum tour would be just as good if not better. We were severely disappointed. The ticket to get in to the Coliseum is only five euros, I advise get there early and queue. This is much better than paying more and being time constricted. The tour was for about 20 minutes in the Coliseum, we then had 20 minutes to explore before we had to meet the tour group outside. You probably do not need much more than 20 minutes to explore but I would say about 30/40 minutes would be good. As I have said the Coliseum is huge and it has such a deep and long history that you want as much time as you can have to explore it.

The tour continued across the road to The Roman Forum. This was included in the tour and we did start it but the heat was too much. Anyone that has done a module in Romans at school will all ready know pretty much everything they talk about during the tour. I would not recommend this but again there is a queue before you go in and our tour did skip the queue. It is a very pretty place but not worth the 35 euros and shortened time in the Coliseum.

Lastly, Pompeii. This day trip was 60 euros and completely worth it. You can get more expensive day trips that stop at Naples but from what I have heard about it, it is not normally worth it. We got to the coach station, which was very close to the Central Terminal for trains, and very close to our hotel, only about a ten minute walk. The coach trip is about three hours but it really felt a lot shorter. They have one stop half way though too. We had a tour guide on the bus who told us about Pompeii and meeting times etc. She did not carry on with us in Pompeii though.

Again, once in Pompeii we had, yet another queue. This one was not as long as the others but took longer time wise. We got half way through before we were offered another special trip. I think it was about 10 euros plus our entry ticket and we skipped the queue and had a tour guide for Pompeii. This is a tour I would definitely suggest. Pompeii is huge, much larger than just a couple of rocks in the ground. Our guide was really nice and although he walked fast he did make sure we were all OK and spoke to us in the shade. He also answered all of our questions and made sure people were out of the way for our pictures. Once we finished the tour we were able to look around by ourselves. There is a bookshop and a restaurant here too. Just outside are little stalls selling tourist souvenirs so these may be a cheap way of getting something from Pompeii.

If you can afford it and are in Rome for long enough I would really recommend going to Pompeii. We pre-booked so we knew we definitely had a trip and the payment was done; it did not take anything from our spending money.

I stayed in Hotel Ariston for four nights in the first week of August for £300. This was a nice, modern hotel in perfectly situated part of Rome. It was close to the trains, and had plenty of places to eat around it; cheap, middle of the road and for the more expensive taste. There were cheaper hotels but this was the cheapest four-star we could find. Definitely take a map too, they had some in our lobby which really came in handy. Have fun and remember to explore, do not stick to the main roads, you will find something beautiful.

A Guide To... Putting an image on to the Vision Mixer

As I said in my last blog, we had a problem with all of our green screens being deleted in some way. In this blog I will tell you how to put an image on to the SD card for the Vision Mixer and I also have the pctures of our backgrounds on here so you can take them from here whenever you need to. Lastly, we now have no backrground for WINOL Life so a new one will have to be made if you carry on with it next year. You may want to make a new background for everything so that they all link. These are not perfect, especially the WINOL bulletin background as that is only a captured image but it was OK for our last bulletin as we had no time to make anything else.

"So, my only idea for making sure that we had a background for the following day would be to look though all our tapes of WINOL to find a spot where there was no-one being filmed and just an empty room with our background. It took five tapes but I finally found a tiny spot, about three seconds long that had no-one and nothing in. I captured this, grabbed it, then saved it to the desktop.

To get the picture on to the SD card you have to open it in photoshop. You then have to change the image size to 720x576 pixels. You then need to save this as 24 bit.bit map or 24 BMP. Put in the SD card and move the background in to the file marked, 'images' and you're done. When it is put into the vision mixer it should download properly. My next blog will have the Sportsweek and WINOL backgrounds in for any future use, best to back everything up."

Hope that is OK. Here are the pictures of the backgrounds for WINOL and Sportsweek but please keep in mind you may not be able to drag them straight on to the SD card, you may have to go through the above process. Also there is no photoshop on the computers in Tab9 but there are in the MMC if you can nab a computer.

WINOL - 7 December

Au revoir my beloved WINOL. My very last show and it was much more emotional than I first thought. For the last 11 weeks I have been counting down the shows as things have gone wrong every week and I was not enjoying WINOL as much as I used to. I expected to just feel relief when I finished and we packed up the studio but it does feel a bit like the end to an era. I have been on production for WINOL for the last three semesters and I have learnt so much. I know every part of the gallery and the studio and I really do hope that this will not be the last time I am in a studio.

The show went well, Dan directed, I was on the sound board, George vision mixed and Justina was on autocue. I think it is quite ironic that I was on the sound board and enjoying it when only three weeks ago I dreaded it. The show went so smoothly, everyone was relaxed, happy and calm. The packages were great, and the presenters did really well too. It felt bittersweet because we were all tired and just waiting for the end but on the other hand I felt quite sad that it was all finished. My three semesters have flown buy, it feels like only yesterday that I was working with third years before me on their last WINOL. The only advice I can give to anyone working on WINOL is; enjoy every minute. From the complete lows to the ecstatic highs, enjoy everything because it will all be gone in the blink of an eye.

The only problem we had this week was that our green screen was no longer on the SD card and ALL of our work had been deleted from the computer in the studio. When I say ALL I mean absolutely everything, even the routes and backgrounds to the files were deleted. Suspiciously Media still had all of their work on the computer though, and in fact had more work; plastering the entire desktop. I worked on getting back the green screens whilst Jack focused on putting the beginning sequence together.

Luckily on the Tuesday I found all of our music for the opening sequence in ten second parts which helped Jack as he then only had to find the video of the opening sequence and put the two together. I remembered that Chris had saved the Sportsweek background on Flickr so after trolling it for a while I found the background. The WINOL news bulletin background was completely lost though. I realise that this is partly our fault as we should have backed everything up but I do not think it entered any of our minds for a moment that we may loose all of our work.

So, my only idea for making sure that we had a background for the following day would be to look though all our tapes of WINOL to find a spot where there was no-one being filmed and just an empty room with our background. It took five tapes but I finally found a tiny spot, about three seconds long that had no-one and nothing in. I captured this, grabbed it, then saved it to the desktop.

To get the picture on to the SD card you have to open it in photoshop. You then have to change the image size to 720x576 pixels. You then need to save this as 24 bit.bit map or 24 BMP. Put in the SD card and move the background in to the file marked, 'images' and you're done. When it is put into the vision mixer it should download properly. My next blog will have the Sportsweek and WINOL backgrounds in for any future use, best to back everything up.

That was my feat for this week. Getting our green screens back and having them working in time for our bulletin at three.

Please find above my very last WINOL Bulletin show. Enjoy.

I wish good luck to everyone that is carrying on with WINOL or just starting. I hope I have guides that are relevant for you on my blog. Such as my OB Kit and Tricaster post and my next one with the green screens in. Best of Luck.

WINOL Strike Special

This week has been a lot of hard work preparing for the strikes. I am happy to say that it was all worth it and we all pulled together an amazing four hour show. I had my reservations about not doing in the studio and going to the Unite the union offices. My gut feeling was that we have a studio that we all know how to work and will only have a very few technical problems; if we do there is always Dave or Corin there to help us. I also thought that the day was going to be hard enough without moving it to another location and taking all the equipment there.

The reasons for which it was moved were: it was easier access for guests, no picket lines to cross, it was a better backdrop for the audience than just a green screen and we were in the heart of the action being in the middle of Southampton.

After visiting and starting to set up on the Tuesday I soon started to feel excited about what we were going to attempt to do. The offices looked great, and had a real old air about them. We had the desk in front of the window where you could see The Avenue behind and the room was plenty big enough for everyone to fit in and work. Rehearsals did not start off as we had liked but within an hour we had been rehearsing and nothing had gone wrong. The hour literally flew by. My role was to work as the director for packages and adverts, worked on the vision mixer, sound and VT's but this was extremely hard with the Tricaster because you could only do everything via a mouse and a keyboard. Jack fixed the vision mixing problem by finding the correct wire for the vision mixing desk and plugging that in but it was still too much work for one person so on the day Katie Rowles and I worked together.

After the rehearsals I felt much better about the strikes on the Wednesday. We still had a few problems to work out but it did start to look like we were going to be able to pull it off.

We started more rehearsals at 10.30 on the 30th. They started out all right but the Internet connections in the room were not as good as they could have been and a problem that we should have fixed the day before. We had guests arrive at about 11am so we were not rehearsing for long before we had to start being professional and working as if it was a live broadcast.

Once the interview had finished we were left with about 10 minutes to prepare ourselves before going live. The interview was no scheduled and I think it left a lot of people worrying and panicking about not having a proper rehearsal and time to breathe. This may have been one of the reasons that in the first hour we were broadcasting on ustream with very little to no sound. The ustream was also behind out filming by about four minutes. The problems with the microphones meant that we had to shut everything off and practically start again. This was not a good start but once this problem was fixed we did not have any others that day.

Working on the vision mixer. the only problem was the lack of cameras and the fact the once we started broadcasting we could not shut the program off. This meant that when we got more packages in on the memory sticks, we had to keep the sticks until we had aired the package otherwise it would go offline. We also only had three memory sticks that were programmed with the Tricaster so we had to alternate with these.

Katie and I also found a way of writing straps and putting them on the live cameras as we were rolling. This was a large feat for us because this enabled us to put names up as well as naming the different areas of the studio. For example when the guests came on we had the strap, "WINOL Live Debate", this made it look even more professional.

The reporters did an amazing job with all of their packages and if we did not have as many as we did all ready save and in the bank we would have had a lot less content and the beginning few hours of the show would have been really boring and hard to get through. Towards the end of our broadcast we started to get some really great content of the strikes, however, the strikes had also started to calm down and in some places they had gone home.

Our Skypes did not work as well as we had planned, or as we had rehearsed. We had one from London Metropolitan, which had to be cancelled half way through and a couple from Liverpool which worked really well but that was it.

Louis O'Brien did really well with getting in the guests that he did. We had Seb Miell, a student, some union members and some councillors. It was really well rounded and we got some great answers from them about the strikes. Jake Gable was great at interviewing them as was Hana Keegan and Cara Laithwaite at presenting. They had all really got a firm knowledge in a lot of the points of the strikes. This was a necessity but they managed to pull it off really well and left myself and the viewer understanding what was going on during the day.

As we streamed to ustream we do not currently have the full show for upload. You can watch above the OB's though, so enjoy.