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.

Students Forever in Debt?

There are articles all over the papers about the Governments spending costs and the rise of tuition fees. As a student myself paying £3,290 a year to attend the university and be taught on the subject I wish to have as a career one day I am already in debt. The question is, "how much debt is too much debt?" £3000 or so is a lot of money to pay for an education, however it is nothing in contrast with how much the potential hike to £12,000 a year is. I am looking at paying back about £20,000 when I have finished university and I am in a full time job. If the rise happens students could be facing a pay back of £40,000 after they have finished their course.

I have always wanted to be a journalist, for as long as I can remember, attending university was just the next step in accomplishing the career I want. However I question if I would attend university if, at the end of it I had to pay back around £40,000. There are other ways of becoming a journalist. Courses sometimes run by newspapers, the British College of Journalism run a 12 or 24 week course on how to be a freelance journalist and even ''Guarantees Your Success'. From the site you can request a free 24 page booklet about the program and your preferred news you would like to write about. Alternatively it is also recommended for you to get work experience and build on it until you become hired. With all these different ways of becoming a journalist, could university's become irrelevant when the debt is so high and it is possible to work in the industry without a BA in that subject.

I read in the Daily Echo an article, written by the editor, Ian Murray, about tuition fees and university life. After not attending university himself and still working in the top post of a newspaper, this shows for itself that the university degree may not be as important as actual experience; or maybe just sheer luck. In the article he writes how it is understandable that the university's need more money and that the Government have to make changes for the economy but he also adds a solution.

Murray's solution is to turn three year courses in to two years of study. I currently spend about five and a half months in University, not counting the month off for Christmas or the month for Easter. I also have roughly have about four months off for summer. This would then mean that if we halved the summer break and had two weeks for Christmas and Easter we could spend only two years at university; leaving with a debt of £30,000 instead of the proposed £40,000. Of course this would work for a majority of courses but not the extra long ones like Architecture and Medicine.

As a student that is desperate to start my chosen career with as little debt as possible I would be very happy to do an immense two year course. However if the only change is the rise of tuition fees I can't help but ask, "could this lessen the amount of people that attend university in the long run?"

www.britishcollegeofjournalism.com