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!