TV Production Blog

TV

Package

I was disappointed with my TV package, not due to my own work but due to technical failures. I chose to cover the Boscombe surf reef because it was a contemporaneous story as the “official” opening was the week before our hand in. I was also interested in the effect the surf reef would have on the local community and economy. I chose my interviewees because I wanted to get a better insight into the community as opposed to the council or other authority figures viewpoints. I interviewed a surfer and a surf shop owner and then spoke to numerous members of the public to gauge their opinion of the building of the reef.
I was pleased with my interviews and with my vox pops and felt I had enough good audio to put together a great package. However, on reviewing my shots, I discovered that due to a technical failure, a broken microphone, I had no audio on most of my clips. This meant I was forced to redo my vox pops but unfortunately the surf shop owner was unavailable for another interview before the deadline so I had to do without this interview. I think, however, that the good use of shots, including GVs of the beach, pier and the section of the sea where the reef is, as well as a good voice over and use of info graphics held up the piece even with the missing audio.



Youth Show

As one of the first groups to do the youth show, it was harder to brainstorm ideas for a format that we had never used before and one for which there are so few existing examples. However, we took to the challenge and came up with a few original ideas for our show. We came up with our name, ‘Rewind’ after some discussion, deciding that this title represented an opportunity for viewers to sit down, relax and rewind to hear about recent news. I created the graphics for the show and was quite pleased with them, although with more help from lecturers on the technical side we could have improved them.
The content of the show was simple, with news, entertainments and features sections. We ran several good features including one for a student travel site. The idea behind this was that we could hypothetically sell a slot on the show to companies, which was informative for viewers but also acted as advertising for the business. This could be a way of using the youth show to generate revenue. We also included a celebrity interview with x-factor contestants, Kandy Rain which was a good exclusive but could have been better presented.
I was the vision mixer for the show and felt I did a good job switching between our live and recorded content. I think the team worked well together as a whole and I was happy with the youth show overall.

News Magazine Show

For the news magazine show we put all of our packages together to create a “BBC style” bulletin. The show was to be presented live in the studio in a more formal manner to the youth show. The packages were placed in order of importance and relevance in the view of a local station and intros were written for each package for the presenter to read out. Vicky was the presenter for our show and did an excellent job. Her tone was formal and she read the script well. We also wrote sport and short news bulletins for the end of the show because in such a small group (4) we needed to do so to fill more time. Again, I was vision mixer for the show and was pleased with my performance. The show ran smoothly and completely to deadline so we were very pleased with it as a whole.

Documentary

For the documentary the team got together and brainstormed ideas. We decided early on that we would try and give the documentary a more artsy feel, in the style of “3 minute wonders” and other channel 4 documentaries. We felt that this brief provided an opportunity to move away from the usual news and journalistic styles we use on the course and allow us to do something different. We decided on a war documentary because at the time of production there were a lot of deaths in Afghanistan and it was also coming up to Remembrance Day.
We did a lot of research into how we would present the idea and decided that the writing of slogans on peoples’ hands would be a visually stimulating and eye-catching way to present the public’s thoughts and opinions on war. One criticism of our documentary was the lack of ex-soldiers or authority figures. In response to this, we set out originally to allow the public to voice their opinions on war as we often hear the words of ‘talking heads’ but the public rarely gets the opportunity to have their say. I wrote and recorded the music for the documentary and feel it helped to add to the ambience of the piece. Overall the team and I were very pleased with the documentary and felt we had created something we could be proud of.