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.

WINOL - 9 November

The standard this week was not as good as the quality we have been producing recently. I worked on sound with Ewan shadowing/helping. I actually quite enjoyed it as I have not worked on sound as much as I have on other jobs on production. The only problem was that I did not have a script and so this meant that I did not know when there was an OOV or a package. It does not help that in the sound booth I can not hear the director very well and that the music and sound from the bulletin is very loud in the booth.

We had to re-film the handover as the first time round, in the 'live' version we cut to camera 2 when it was still framing George; our news presenter. This is a split fault of the camera person, (Jack) the director, (Graham) and the vision mixer, (Justina). We have a television right in front of Justina and Graham that shows what all the cameras are looking at and the frames. Before we cut to camera 2, Graham and Justina should have watched the television and seen that Jack had not finished framing the shot. This is something we do a lot but by sheer luck it turns the frame always turns out OK. We all need to focus on the television showing all the frames a lot more than completely focusing on the output television.

The pictures in the headlines were too long and "flabby". They need to be "tightened" by making them shorter and showing our best pictures. They need to be about two seconds longer than what the presenter is going to say. This is a problem every week but this week it stood out a bit longer because Jack tried a different way of filming the headlines. This way made it harder to fiddle around with the headlines but after speaking with him he did not know the simpler way. We have now discussed this and hopefully next week the headlines should be a lot tighter and more tabloid-esque.

This week we also need to freeze the last shot of the headlines as we always go to a black hole. This is because the headlines end very abruptly and it is hard for the director and the vision mixer to cut back to camera two quick enough. Freezing the last shot will make it easier for us and there will be no black hole.

We also had our first live Skype of the year. I went in to town on the Monday and found posters about a demo happening in London by students about tuition fees again. I phoned the story through to Becky, the news editor and she put a reporter on to the story. Tom and Ali then went to London for the demo but they had to film in a Starbucks for their WiFi. This meant that we did not have any views of the demo happening. What we could have done would be to ask Tom and Ali to take some stills of the demo earlier in the day and then to send them back to us so we could cut between Tom and the pictures. This did not happen so it was continuous talking from Tom and George, blurry, against a white back ground. This could have been done in the Starbucks in Winchester and not London. We did not exploit the fact that we were in London at all and did not get any filming from the actual demo. It was also very hard to hear Tom.

Please find the bulletin above. Thank you, also the first years that helped out on production.

Winol - 2nd March

The production team has got this job down. Every week we accomplish everything that is asked of us and to a perfect standard. This week we even met last weeks goal of using the tricaster to broadcast live, this then meant that we got the bulletin on to the website for 4pm and no later.

Tuesday was a very hectic day for the bulletin, much more so than normal. Hana's package included a live interview to Bahrain. Ali Al-Jamri set up an interview with his father who is a Journalist in Bahrain. It took us quite a while and we needed quite a bit of help from the technicians but we managed to get the Skype to run through the gallery and out from the vision mixer. This made the shot look better as it came straight from the screen instead of a camera filming a television or computer screen. Everyone was very silent in the gallery and it had a weird, very well accomplished feeling that we were all apart of something much bigger than our normal WINOL packages.

After this we recorded Justina's Polish bulletin; which is doing very well for viewers then lastly Sportsweek. Sportsweek took quite a while this week as we were trying different shots and I found a way that we can change the green screen without going straight to a VT. I was very proud of myself and think that it looks really good, we then included this in our WINOL bulletin too.

We have also decided to get parts ready this week for our Entertainment show; ready to record next Tuesday. We have decided to call it, 'Good Morning Winchester'. It is not as catchy as we would have liked but it does sound good and fits well with what we want the show to be like.

Wednesday went really well. Again, we were all relaxed and calm, even TAB9 seemed much more calm this week. We had guest editor, Tom Hepworth in, who gave ideas to packages and the script. He also congratulated the production team on how well we worked together and the feeling in the gallery.

We did film 20 minutes late but this was a great call from Katie as director as it gave us a small amount of time to do a rehearsal. It was not the production teams fault that we ran late but Katie dealt with it accordingly. We may have recorded later than normal but we still got the show on the WINOL website by 4pm.

Next week we would like to be more ambitious but we are hoping to accomplish this with 'Good Morning Winchester' and maybe an OB that is not only needed but out of the newsroom and in a place that is actually needed.

News was very strong this week, an improvement on the week before and Sport also did well. We mixed up with Andy and Karen as presenters this week and the sports table added something a little different to the bulletin.

The team did very well this week. Justina was on vision mixing, Natasha was on autocue, Sam on VT's, Drew on cameras, Katie as Director and Claire on the sound board. Everyone had a role they were not too used to and did really well with very few proper rehearsals. I look forward to introducing Natasha on to the team properly next week and hope that she enjoys it as much we do.

Well done guys, another great week for production.