Digital Broadcasting Production Diary: Part Six

To fill the news magazine we wanted to ensure that all of our packages ready, as it would give balance to the national headlines in our show. I chose to feature a new on-line advent calendar by the RNLI, as it ran all the way through December and had strong Christmas themes.

I was able to interview the main fund raiser and ask questions relating to how the calendar came about. I was pleased with the amount of footage I was able to capture in and around the Poole RNLI training college, including volunteers practising and various Christmas decorations. To add a human interest angle, I wanted to interview RNLI volunteers and ask them whether it was difficult to encourage donations over the December period, or if being on call during Christmas Day was stressful. They were all surprisingly positive, explaining that donations were increasing and that they were all fully prepared to be on duty.

Therefore I had to focus my package’s narrative on the advent calendar itself. To improve, I would have liked to add some balance of viewpoints; though this would have probably meant selecting a more controversial, hard news story.

During the news magazine I presented the news, also writing a selection of our headlines and making sure everyone’s packages were ready to be uploaded to the tri-caster. Our news agenda was varied and suited our older audience, including an update on Copenhagen and VAT increases. Our weakness was in our running time; at 11.5 minutes we should have either shortened our packages, or cut down on the amount of time spent on national stories.

Digital Broadcasting Production Diary: Part Five

We all felt that our youth show should try and differentiate itself from the formal presentation of hard news programmes. Our main influence came from ‘Live From Studio Five’, where presenters discuss and banter with the news. The youth are often portrayed as violent and anti-social, so we decided to be creative and instead showcase them as exemplars of society. Re-editing our documentary footage of Emma was efficient and gave us the opportunity to rectify last week’s mistakes.

It was paramount that we incorporated social networking into our youth show. It was my role to design our logo in Photoshop and then transfer this as a wallpaper and avatar to our Twitter and Facebook pages. I used the same logo in our opening and closing credits so that it gave a sense of branding and continuity in our show.

To represent Noel and the student demographic, a section in our documentary was devoted to buying and cooking a Christmas dinner. The colour and range of people talking in this ‘mini package’ made it one of our strongest segments. Unfortunately, by filming so much footage we had given ourselves very little time to cover the news. Our news agenda was catered well to our audience, but had to be glossed over with passing comments from the three presenters. If we had had them standing and discussing the news in more detail, our show would have improved. Our studio work, including the use of the auto-cue and tricaster was particularly strong on the day. My roles included both editor and vision mixer, which I felt were carried out with appropriate leadership and teamwork.

Digital Broadcasting Production Diary: Part Four

For our documentary, we filmed a local football coach named Emma Hankins. Having taken on many youth coaching roles in Dorset and now waiting on the result of a prestigious American placement, we all agreed that she would lend herself well to a dramatic, human angle narrative.

In the style of Channel 4’s ‘3 Minute Wonder’ documentaries, we needed to record an interview with Hankins that could be used as the underlying bed. Unfortunately we had problems with the microphone and could only record a sequence relating to her present coaching, rather than her future in America. It meant that we had to change the angle of our documentary and focus on the difficulties of juggling her university life alongside being a young football coach.

To add energy to our documentary we wanted to film Hankins coaching her squad. Including teenage players was problematic because of censorship issues, but we were vigilant in ensuring that the head coach had given his full permission. Close ups of football boots, goals being scored and Emma Hankins giving orders was a great way to reflect some of the dialogue we had recorded earlier. An interview with the male head coach was lost because of a faulty microphone and to improve our piece I would have liked to conduct the interview again.

During editing, we found it difficult to work with our limited interview and regularly had conflicted opinions. To improve efficiency we split into pairs and worked in shifts. I was pleased with the production values and the music we chose (Coldplay, Life in Technicolor), which added to the overriding tone. However, the inclusion of the American work placement could have made this much stronger.