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...
Showing posts with label production. Show all posts
Showing posts with label production. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 March 2010
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!
Monday, 8 February 2010
Ready, Stea(u)dy ... Semester Two!
Year two, semester two - time IS flying!
I'm now into my second semester of my second year as a journalism student and cannot believe that means I'm actually halfway through this course! Time to reorganise WINOL and get assigned to new tasks, exciting and terrifying! After last years stress and struggle as a news reporter, I decided to try my luck as a sub-editor/director to be able to gain some more knowledge in how to actually handle the productive side of things, for example uploading stories, both text and video to the web, getting all the technical bits and pieces together to be able to produce a finished bulletin at 5pm every Wednesday... I'm looking forward to my new role, and will hopefully feel as if I gain as much new experience as possible throughout these weeks before the Easter holiday that's coming up in March/April.
This semester we've decided to focus on the news and sports, and produce video stories and text stories (for the web bulletin and the site) and keep the website up to date with what is going on around us and effects us everyday - to do this we have cut out the features that we tried to keep up with last semester. Luckily, the third years are gonna focus on keeping the features alive on our website through he feature magazine, LIFE, that can be found on the website as well.
I'm now into my second semester of my second year as a journalism student and cannot believe that means I'm actually halfway through this course! Time to reorganise WINOL and get assigned to new tasks, exciting and terrifying! After last years stress and struggle as a news reporter, I decided to try my luck as a sub-editor/director to be able to gain some more knowledge in how to actually handle the productive side of things, for example uploading stories, both text and video to the web, getting all the technical bits and pieces together to be able to produce a finished bulletin at 5pm every Wednesday... I'm looking forward to my new role, and will hopefully feel as if I gain as much new experience as possible throughout these weeks before the Easter holiday that's coming up in March/April.
This semester we've decided to focus on the news and sports, and produce video stories and text stories (for the web bulletin and the site) and keep the website up to date with what is going on around us and effects us everyday - to do this we have cut out the features that we tried to keep up with last semester. Luckily, the third years are gonna focus on keeping the features alive on our website through he feature magazine, LIFE, that can be found on the website as well.
Hopefully there will be time to cooperate with both the news and sports team throughout this year, so that I can develop my skills with technical equipment, get even more news sources, new ways of looking on stories and so on, to provide me with a wider and deeper understanding in how the entire news organisation works.
I am very much looking forward to it!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
