Praise from Roger Perkins (Daily Telegraph, Sun and Birmingham Post) for our Journalism course at the University of Winchester :) Feels great to be part of something that is being spoken so enthusiastically about! Thanks Mr Perkins for your feedback on Wednesday after our live bulletin!
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Thursday 18 March 2010
Scripting and Counting - naah
We got through another week of Winol. We were 20 seconds under the golden 10 minute limit though. Not brilliant. But not bad. We're on a medium middle kind of standard. But I know we can do better. We need to get more original stories, and not only depend on finding them in the newspapers on Monday or Tuesday -or on the University's Portal page on the Wednesday. This week we kind of ended up with, as Brian said, a top story and lots of 'and finally' stories after that.. Like I said, not brilliant - but we've seen worse.
My role this week consisted of scripting the entire thing together. Quite a slow work as nothing seems to happen for days - and then all of a sudden a million things get thrown at you and you don't really even know where to start. It's not too hard, you put the stories, their links and other vital information into the scripting program, ENPS, and woop it counts out the time for you and tells you whether you're spot on (which never seems to happen at the moment) over or under the 10 minute golden limit. I think I have discovered that my dream would not be to end up as a script writer, but who knows what the future may bring.
As well as scripting this week, I kept my fantastic job - keeping track of the time during the live production in the studio (see previous blog). It is good fun and a little bit nerve wrecking every week as 1 second can screw everything and everyone up - badly! But I think we got through without any difficulties in the end, and even though we were 20 seconds under the 10 minute limit, it worked out much better than we thought it would do an hour before we went live - when we thought we might even had been 1 minute under the limit as a package got cut out of the bulletin with short notice.
In the short debrief after the live broadcast, we got told that we are doing well, but that we can do better. That we still need to think both twice and three times when it comes to legal problems so that we don't end up in dangerous water with news concerning crime and such. Also, all reporters were told that they have to bring their own stories, preferably three each, on Monday mornings so that we have something to play with when we're creating our bulletin, otherwise we will get stressed out every week if one story collapses, and we cannot afford that as we are not that experienced yet. We also need to think a bit more about the hard news vs the softer fluffier news so that there is a nice balance between these two that the audience will appreciate, and return to the following week.
I think that we are doing a great job and I could never have thought that I myself would be working in a TV studio during my Uni time, applying my skills to real life situations and experience what it takes to be a journalist 'out there'. I thought it would be more of a theoretical course where you sit reading your literature everyday, all day, but luckily it isn't! I really do appreciate all the experience we get every week through Winol, and hopefully this will make us more confident once graduated and out there looking for the future job- which hopefully won't be 100% script and counting based...
My role this week consisted of scripting the entire thing together. Quite a slow work as nothing seems to happen for days - and then all of a sudden a million things get thrown at you and you don't really even know where to start. It's not too hard, you put the stories, their links and other vital information into the scripting program, ENPS, and woop it counts out the time for you and tells you whether you're spot on (which never seems to happen at the moment) over or under the 10 minute golden limit. I think I have discovered that my dream would not be to end up as a script writer, but who knows what the future may bring.
As well as scripting this week, I kept my fantastic job - keeping track of the time during the live production in the studio (see previous blog). It is good fun and a little bit nerve wrecking every week as 1 second can screw everything and everyone up - badly! But I think we got through without any difficulties in the end, and even though we were 20 seconds under the 10 minute limit, it worked out much better than we thought it would do an hour before we went live - when we thought we might even had been 1 minute under the limit as a package got cut out of the bulletin with short notice.
In the short debrief after the live broadcast, we got told that we are doing well, but that we can do better. That we still need to think both twice and three times when it comes to legal problems so that we don't end up in dangerous water with news concerning crime and such. Also, all reporters were told that they have to bring their own stories, preferably three each, on Monday mornings so that we have something to play with when we're creating our bulletin, otherwise we will get stressed out every week if one story collapses, and we cannot afford that as we are not that experienced yet. We also need to think a bit more about the hard news vs the softer fluffier news so that there is a nice balance between these two that the audience will appreciate, and return to the following week.
I think that we are doing a great job and I could never have thought that I myself would be working in a TV studio during my Uni time, applying my skills to real life situations and experience what it takes to be a journalist 'out there'. I thought it would be more of a theoretical course where you sit reading your literature everyday, all day, but luckily it isn't! I really do appreciate all the experience we get every week through Winol, and hopefully this will make us more confident once graduated and out there looking for the future job- which hopefully won't be 100% script and counting based...
Saturday 13 March 2010
Emotionally detached?
As a human being you would normally feel sadness when your mum dies.
As a human being you would normally feel happiness and loved when someone is in love with you.
As a human being you would normally feel guilt when killing someone.
As a human being you would normally feel scared and depressed when in front of a court for a murder.
As a human being you would normally feel anger and unfairness when sentenced to death by decapitating in public.
Emotionally detached.
But Mersault does not feel these things. Mersault does not express any emotions. Mersault seems to have this protective layer surrounding him which keeps anything from harming him, or from pleasing him.
Even though the story, The Outsider; Albert Camus, is quite short, it took me quite some time to get through – mostly due to the depressive atmosphere that follows you page in and page out. Somehow I felt all these feelings that Mersault didn’t feel, and on and off I was filled with anger. I got so engrossed in the story that I even became angry with him for not feeling, for not expressing and for not being human.
Instead of describing his own feelings, Mersault tells us all about surroundings, details, people, basically everything that exists and happens around himself, but he never touches the subject himself. When he commits the murder – which is a revenge act – he does not regret it, because; “As an existentialist, he has no reason to regret what he does because it is done; regret is redundant.”
Existentialist’s, and Søren Kierkegaard (who is regarded the father of Existentialism), say that it’s up to each and everyone themselves to give a meaning to their own lives, and to live “that life passionately and sincerely” not being interrupted and wander astray even though many obstacles such as despair, alienation and boredom stands in its way. Mainly this way of thinking became in fashion after the Second World War when people wanted to stand for their own rights, claim that their opinions were the right ones and make sure that the human freedom and individuality would not get in the hands of a tyrant or similar kind of leader, as it did during this war when Hitler had the power. Nietzsche had similar thoughts and ideas before Kierkegaard but his concepts and theories were not really talked about until this period of time (after the wars), when he was already dead.
Existentialism is a very wide subject, lots of different theories within the concept as such. But this is all I'm gonna offer you today. Next - fascism.
As a human being you would normally feel happiness and loved when someone is in love with you.
As a human being you would normally feel guilt when killing someone.
As a human being you would normally feel scared and depressed when in front of a court for a murder.
As a human being you would normally feel anger and unfairness when sentenced to death by decapitating in public.
Emotionally detached.
But Mersault does not feel these things. Mersault does not express any emotions. Mersault seems to have this protective layer surrounding him which keeps anything from harming him, or from pleasing him.
Even though the story, The Outsider; Albert Camus, is quite short, it took me quite some time to get through – mostly due to the depressive atmosphere that follows you page in and page out. Somehow I felt all these feelings that Mersault didn’t feel, and on and off I was filled with anger. I got so engrossed in the story that I even became angry with him for not feeling, for not expressing and for not being human.
Instead of describing his own feelings, Mersault tells us all about surroundings, details, people, basically everything that exists and happens around himself, but he never touches the subject himself. When he commits the murder – which is a revenge act – he does not regret it, because; “As an existentialist, he has no reason to regret what he does because it is done; regret is redundant.”
Existentialist’s, and Søren Kierkegaard (who is regarded the father of Existentialism), say that it’s up to each and everyone themselves to give a meaning to their own lives, and to live “that life passionately and sincerely” not being interrupted and wander astray even though many obstacles such as despair, alienation and boredom stands in its way. Mainly this way of thinking became in fashion after the Second World War when people wanted to stand for their own rights, claim that their opinions were the right ones and make sure that the human freedom and individuality would not get in the hands of a tyrant or similar kind of leader, as it did during this war when Hitler had the power. Nietzsche had similar thoughts and ideas before Kierkegaard but his concepts and theories were not really talked about until this period of time (after the wars), when he was already dead.
Existentialism is a very wide subject, lots of different theories within the concept as such. But this is all I'm gonna offer you today. Next - fascism.
Thursday 11 March 2010
Winol Week 5!
Verrrrry important week as we were told we were having the BJTC coming around to inspect our progress as journalists and how we work with our stories, content, interviews, and such to make sure we follow the curriculum for our course and know about for example the law and how to approach different stories to make justice for all the parts included.
When the live bulletin went on air, we discovered that the BJTC weren't around and we all breathed with a bit of relief cause I think we all kind of knew that this week was not as good, content wise, as the week before. We got through the bulletin and everything went quite smooth. The production team pulled it off well, and everyone seem much more calm now and I think part of that is the fact that we've had quite a lot of practice and we've taken the opportunities to run through old scripts just to get the feel and the flow of producing the bulletin and knowing what to do when and how.
Story wise this week was a bit slow. Added to that, the news team was short on staff so once stories started coming in, there was not enough reporters covering the stories. This left the production team, which went out to help covering the stories the news team didn't have enough personnel to cover on their own. Me and Veronica ended up in a spam email drama that took place at the University of Winchester, and we had to tackle different legal issues, such as privacy, and with this learn extra bits and pieces about the law and the different rights you have as a journalist, or 'simply' as a human being in the English society.
On Monday I spent a good few hours trying to sort out the web page once again, tidying it up a bit, making it look a bit more professional and easier accessible. Chris showed me briefly how to work with Fireworks, a problem where you can build different images to look the way you want them on your website. It's brilliant! Apart from the fact that you cannot link different web pages on here, that is using html language to make a direct link to whatever that picture is telling you to read more about. To do this we have to upload the picture we made in Fireworks into Flash to insert the html language from here and eventually upload to the web via another web domain and FINALLY use it from everywhere to access the finalised piece... Sigh... Quite complicated, and taking forever!
Tuesday and half Wednesday was spent trying to get the images, the right people and right information about this spam email going out via the Universities email system due to two members of staff 'ignoring the rules of not giving out their personal details' and therefore indirectly inviting these spam emails to our servers and them being able to access our data bases to multiply themselves to thousands and thousands other email addresses being stored in the University's web base. We managed to turn it into a package in the last minute and it went on the bulletin, which was quite a relief seeing we had spent so much time trying to build it in the first place.
This week I kept my role, which means keeping track of the time all the time within the gallery, making sure everything runs smoothly and no black holes appear on the screen. When I first heard about this role I thought it sounded as quite an easy job, seeing as counting down from 10 can't be too hard. Mistake. It is very intense and time consuming as you have to be absolutely 110% focused all the way through the running time of the bulletin, if you don't give the right timings and keep everyone up to date with what's going on there will definitely be black holes everywhere in your bulletin and it will look absolutely crap! I quite enjoy doing this but I have done it for three weeks now and I feel as if it's time for a new challenge.
Overall, good week. Not great. But on the other hand not bad at all. We've still got things to work on, and my main issue is the fact that we haven't got very many text stories coming through, and therefore not enough material to publish on the website which makes it look out of date from time to time. But we will get there, sooner or later. I'm sure, it just takes its time, like everything else.
Friday 5 March 2010
SUCCESS!!
This weeks edition of Winol was a great success! Everything got puzzled together in time, and we all had a few spare hours to practice the live edition and to change bits and pieces that didn't work and needed slight changes.
The week overall was quite busy. Monday was spent, as usual, for the news team with them focusing on their news stories, interviews, GV's and such, and it seemed they managed to work very well as a team this week, cause almost all the stories met the deadline - which hasn't been the case previous weeks! Monday on the production front was spent to redesigning our webpage, and I learnt a great deal about how to do these things, how to work the different modules around and import audio and/or video from other URL's and being able to use them on our site to make it a bit more alive. Chris guided me through Joomla, and even though I have always seen these technical IT things as very complicated, I think I understood way more than I thought I could learn about URL's and html in my life.
Tuesday was a quiet day in the newsroom as team News were out and about sorting their stories out, sports more or less done with theirs - as always, they've been spot on time every week so far (I think!) - and we, production team could focus on the few written stories that had been submitted over night and publish them on the website.
Wednesday is always the most stressful day when being in the production team, since this is the day we are going live, but even though most Wednesdays so far has been stressier than anything else, this Wednesday brought a bit of a calm atmosphere and we were able to focus on minor details such as scripting, sound, minor glitches in packages and such, thanks to most of the things supposed to be submitted at a certain time, were submitted on time, with headlines and everything else that's required.
This helped us a LOT as we could go into the studio and practice, practice, practice over and over and over again! This made all of us more comfortable, knowing that we could do it! I think most important when going live, whether it is for two minutes or two hours is that you know exactly what is going on around you all the time during that time. If you, and everyone else know, confusion won't happen and everything can be handled in a more relaxed, yet professional way.
It sounds close to perfection! But of course there are things to work on still. We need to create sexier head lines, a more inviting and engaging script and not rely on the viewer to know everything already - we need to provide all the information in our package for them to watch it without any knowledge and still understand what message we are trying to deliver to them. Production team, which did the best job so far, must start providing the entire team with in and out words from the packages so that everyone knows when we're going from a package back to live in the studio and the other way around, so that sound for example knows when to change the output sound to avoid glitches in sound, so that vision mixer knows when to change back to studio camera to avoid black holes and so on.
Overall, we are very happy with this week and what it has given to us. Everyone seemed to cooperate more and thanks to everyone being aware of the time and deadlines this week, the final product is close to perfect.
That deserves a pint or two tonight!
The week overall was quite busy. Monday was spent, as usual, for the news team with them focusing on their news stories, interviews, GV's and such, and it seemed they managed to work very well as a team this week, cause almost all the stories met the deadline - which hasn't been the case previous weeks! Monday on the production front was spent to redesigning our webpage, and I learnt a great deal about how to do these things, how to work the different modules around and import audio and/or video from other URL's and being able to use them on our site to make it a bit more alive. Chris guided me through Joomla, and even though I have always seen these technical IT things as very complicated, I think I understood way more than I thought I could learn about URL's and html in my life.
Tuesday was a quiet day in the newsroom as team News were out and about sorting their stories out, sports more or less done with theirs - as always, they've been spot on time every week so far (I think!) - and we, production team could focus on the few written stories that had been submitted over night and publish them on the website.
Wednesday is always the most stressful day when being in the production team, since this is the day we are going live, but even though most Wednesdays so far has been stressier than anything else, this Wednesday brought a bit of a calm atmosphere and we were able to focus on minor details such as scripting, sound, minor glitches in packages and such, thanks to most of the things supposed to be submitted at a certain time, were submitted on time, with headlines and everything else that's required.
This helped us a LOT as we could go into the studio and practice, practice, practice over and over and over again! This made all of us more comfortable, knowing that we could do it! I think most important when going live, whether it is for two minutes or two hours is that you know exactly what is going on around you all the time during that time. If you, and everyone else know, confusion won't happen and everything can be handled in a more relaxed, yet professional way.
It sounds close to perfection! But of course there are things to work on still. We need to create sexier head lines, a more inviting and engaging script and not rely on the viewer to know everything already - we need to provide all the information in our package for them to watch it without any knowledge and still understand what message we are trying to deliver to them. Production team, which did the best job so far, must start providing the entire team with in and out words from the packages so that everyone knows when we're going from a package back to live in the studio and the other way around, so that sound for example knows when to change the output sound to avoid glitches in sound, so that vision mixer knows when to change back to studio camera to avoid black holes and so on.
Overall, we are very happy with this week and what it has given to us. Everyone seemed to cooperate more and thanks to everyone being aware of the time and deadlines this week, the final product is close to perfect.
That deserves a pint or two tonight!
Thursday 4 March 2010
There's an angel on your right shoulder...
The movie being screened at today's lecture, Wings of Desire (by Wim Wenders), was very different, in a very good way using an existentialistic way of telling a story which made me think about people and how we actually exist on our planet - if things happens because we want to, or because there is actually a little angel on our right shoulder telling us what to do next...
Angels can't taste or smell things like you and me, but they can hear other people's thoughts. This is what we hear in the biggest part of the movie, while watching their daily duties being performed in a black and white format. Humanbeings thoughts in a big messy stream of consciousness kind of way when our main person, Damiel, who obviously is an angel, travels around on our planet to learn more about our way to live. When being amongst the mortals, the angel tries to inspire them and give them hope to want to keep trying and to retrieve the will to live again. A lot of the thoughts coming through is normal day to day thoughts, such as what we need to do next, but a lot of them have quite a dark and depressing twist to them, and we can for example see one guy committing suicide and just before this action here his last desperate thoughts before throwing himself down a roof top.
Throughout the movie they keep repeating how everything was massively different and much easier when we were kids, when we weren't as bothered about the problems we are as adults, and how much simpler life was.
Angels are not really supposed to stay on Earth and become mortal, but as in so many other scenarios we've heard about before, our angel falls in love with a mortal girl, Marion, who works at a circus. As we follow her and her life story we come to understand that she is tired of life and it also occurs to us that she is not far of maybe committing suicide when flying around on her trapeze - the suicide thoughts might also have to do with the fact that this is the circus last show and with her losing her freedom whirling around in the trapeze, she probably starts feeling trapped in herself with nowhere to go, looking for an easy way out.
As this happens time speeds up, rapid camera movements and people shouting take place on the screen, and it kind of feels a cry of desperation. It's about this time the suicide with the guy I mentioned earlier happens as well.
After several weird and confusing conversation with anyone and noone the angel sets his first footprint on Earth and stays down here with us mortal, choosing to become a mortal himself as well. As this happens, colour is added to the screen and we understand that the black and white way of telling the story is through the perspective of an angel, and the colourful way of seeing things is through the perspective of a humanbeing. For the first time our now fellow humanbeing tastes things and sees things in a mortal kind of way and he sets off to find Marion, the love of his life and the reason why he decided to become one of us.
The story ends with the two finding one another and living happily ever after... I guess? But for me thoughts came alive in my little head... Is love reason enough to give up on yourself and your previous life? I'm not sure. I guess if you get something out of it yourself, other than love that is, or is everything in this world actually revolving about love and the relationship between to partners for the rest of their lives?
Even more scary, is there actually someone else making our choices? I know for example sometimes when it feels like someone is watching me or knocking some sense into my head when I'm totally off track, but if that's the case, what do I actually decide for myself? Or is my life totally controlled by some kind of a big brother angel, who works to create some kind of an equilibrium within the society? Either way I don't want to think about it too much cause it does really freak me out a little bit that someone else is in charge over what I'm doing and not me myself...
Existentialism...
What do you think?
Angels can't taste or smell things like you and me, but they can hear other people's thoughts. This is what we hear in the biggest part of the movie, while watching their daily duties being performed in a black and white format. Humanbeings thoughts in a big messy stream of consciousness kind of way when our main person, Damiel, who obviously is an angel, travels around on our planet to learn more about our way to live. When being amongst the mortals, the angel tries to inspire them and give them hope to want to keep trying and to retrieve the will to live again. A lot of the thoughts coming through is normal day to day thoughts, such as what we need to do next, but a lot of them have quite a dark and depressing twist to them, and we can for example see one guy committing suicide and just before this action here his last desperate thoughts before throwing himself down a roof top.
Throughout the movie they keep repeating how everything was massively different and much easier when we were kids, when we weren't as bothered about the problems we are as adults, and how much simpler life was.
Angels are not really supposed to stay on Earth and become mortal, but as in so many other scenarios we've heard about before, our angel falls in love with a mortal girl, Marion, who works at a circus. As we follow her and her life story we come to understand that she is tired of life and it also occurs to us that she is not far of maybe committing suicide when flying around on her trapeze - the suicide thoughts might also have to do with the fact that this is the circus last show and with her losing her freedom whirling around in the trapeze, she probably starts feeling trapped in herself with nowhere to go, looking for an easy way out.
As this happens time speeds up, rapid camera movements and people shouting take place on the screen, and it kind of feels a cry of desperation. It's about this time the suicide with the guy I mentioned earlier happens as well.
After several weird and confusing conversation with anyone and noone the angel sets his first footprint on Earth and stays down here with us mortal, choosing to become a mortal himself as well. As this happens, colour is added to the screen and we understand that the black and white way of telling the story is through the perspective of an angel, and the colourful way of seeing things is through the perspective of a humanbeing. For the first time our now fellow humanbeing tastes things and sees things in a mortal kind of way and he sets off to find Marion, the love of his life and the reason why he decided to become one of us.
The story ends with the two finding one another and living happily ever after... I guess? But for me thoughts came alive in my little head... Is love reason enough to give up on yourself and your previous life? I'm not sure. I guess if you get something out of it yourself, other than love that is, or is everything in this world actually revolving about love and the relationship between to partners for the rest of their lives?
Even more scary, is there actually someone else making our choices? I know for example sometimes when it feels like someone is watching me or knocking some sense into my head when I'm totally off track, but if that's the case, what do I actually decide for myself? Or is my life totally controlled by some kind of a big brother angel, who works to create some kind of an equilibrium within the society? Either way I don't want to think about it too much cause it does really freak me out a little bit that someone else is in charge over what I'm doing and not me myself...
Existentialism...
What do you think?
Monday 1 March 2010
A quick debrief..
Monday morning = Debrief morning
We had quite a good bulletin on Wednesday, we're definitely getting better and better. Considering we are continuing to try on new roles within the media team, it feels more safe and secure now with s knowing more what is expected from us.
The stories are getting better as well as the news team seems to focus more on what the actual story is and how to put this forward in the most interesting way to the audience. Chris gave us some good and interesting tips on how to write links and voice overs, and also how to get the crucial quotes from the interviewees that are needed to create a strong news story. As a journalist, your job is to tell the story with your words and your voice to give the background information - we don't want to hear any background, facts or figures from the interviewee, they are our object for quotes. We want them to give life to the less interesting facts and liven it up with views and opinions, what they think and want to do about the subject being reported on.
Wednesday's stories covered a seasonal bug's outburst in Winchester's Hospital, a court report, students and their parking problems, Trinity Winchester and a lighter story about a one woman band performing at the University of Winchester. There was also a few sports reports covering rugby and non-league football. An alright mixture, but a few too many heavy, hard stories that might not concern our main audience as much as it could.
As always, when covering court reports, legal issues are a big part of it and it must be handled with extreme care, so that no one can accidentally get identified when not supposed to. This weeks court case met all these standards, and was meeting all the legal requirements for being broadcasted live.
Technical issues will always exist, and every week there's something new that decides to mess up in the last minute. This time the green screen caused a lot of hassle before we finally got it to work, and the auto cue did once again stop working on us. But with issues like these we learn to work under pressure and cooperate as a team to explore new ways of coping with the difficulties - just as we will have to do in real life.
Traffic was better this time, almost twice as many hits, which is very good news as it inspires us all to work harder to gain an even bigger audience for this week. I think a big part of this has to do with us keeping the website up to date all the time even when it is not Wednesday's and live bulletin days, cause the people interesting in our news would most likely visit our site more often and rely on us more if news, sports and small features would pop in all the time to keep a consistent flow of new material coming in.
Overall we are growing stronger as a team, and I am convinced this week's bulletin will be even better!
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