WINOL 17/02/10, Week 2
As our current director was ill I was the closest person to cover for her, and so I had to take another new challenge pretty quickly. This week I sub-edited (Article Manager) about six stories, mostly from the sports team. I also got rid of alder articles until the date 16th November 2009.
I have also tried to keep an eye on the progress of script writing so that I could have an overlook on the stories for the bulletin. We kept the background image on the green screen the same for the news bulletin. The Sports graphics were improved visually and this time we had to cut down dramatically on mistakes and tendency to repeat the bulletin before the final recording. We had only one go this week and we had to keep it together no matter what, I had to keep it together regardless technical difficulties.
To make the vision mixing smoother the packages have to have 2seconds of a picture running at the beginning of the package and 3 seconds at the end to make the switch onto the presenter in the studio better. The same sign off has been established (a name, surname, Winchester News Online and a place of reporting). Each Headline had to be no longer than 5 seconds.
On Wednesday, after we had recorded screening for students applying for our course everything seamed to stop working properly. It was not a good day to have a first experience in directing when everything hat is essential for a recording a bulletin kept failing. First of all, after we had couple of run through on Headlines with the moment we wanted to record it, the VT computer froze, and we could not play headline shots at all. It was not easy to keep everyone focused and actually start recording because of chaos caused by VT not working, and disorientated team members. As a director, I had to try my best to move on from the chaos atmosphere and keep it together and make a decision over the Headlines. Chanin advised that we have two options, either to run Headlines straight before the news without pre-record and hopefully by then the TV computes would start working properly, or run the Intro music over the presenter’s (Joey) voice reading out the headlines. I have decided to try to pre-record it with Joey reading headlines over the intro music and then if that could not be corrected we would have to record the headlines along with the rest of the news bulletin straight away and trust in Chanin’s excellent editorial skills in Post-Production Editing.
And so we did, unfortunately the sound did not get record it and we had to go to plan B. If it wasn’t enough of technical complication with VT, the Auto Queue started playing too and pieces of script kept disappearing from the screen. Then it kept freezing too.
The pressure was on and maintenance assistance on the way, time was running out and we still had no run through the script whatsoever. Thankfully we got TV computer working but having Auto Queue down completely we were stuck waiting till the very hour of going ‘live’. I knew that there will be hick-ups as we had no run through the script and didn’t even speak about cameras handover from news to sport. I counted the very 10down for going live knowing that I will have to trust my instinct and observe carefully when to call on ‘TVs’ or ‘Que’ presenters to read the following parts of the script. I had to be expecting the Auto-Queue going down or VT freezing any time.
And so TV froze, I got presenter to read the same piece of script twice (to be able to edit the frozen part out in post-production) but then the VT skipped to the next part and I had to tell Joey to stop reading when he was meant to start again. Eventually, VT run again and we managed to go through the main part of the news. Joey did a fantastic job and apologised for technical trouble and smoothly moved on to the next part.
The part that went horribly wrong was the hand-over from News to sports reporters, having to run through before I did not call on switch onto the full shot of the both presenters (probably camera 1/could have been camera 3 depending on the establishment before the recording). I definitely need to practice the concept and style of handing over between the cameras in vision mixing as well as noticing beforehand the cameramen on the studio’s floor to prepare for the switch. It was the part that I was mostly afraid of because of lack of run-through. The team on the studio floor as well as bothe the reporters still managed to keep it together, and even though there are visible issues with the hand over, I was proud of my team to get through that difficult part and carry on the ‘And finally…’ part and sign of. Joey and Glen did an excellent job as reporters. They were reliable and very focused as well as great in delivery.
As we had only one go to record everything along with the Headlines and no runt-through it seamed to me like one big guessing game led fully by intuition and observation. Generally, the content of out bulletin was better and we appeared stronger editorially however, our traffic was still low - only 90 UUS, which would mean roughly the same as last week (88).
From the feedback as well as after we had watched the final output we could notice that there were still sound level issues in some of the packages and some of the picture choices didn’t fully give the story away. The main weakness of this week’s WINOL reporting was the political story. Its script appeared to be biased by mixing up local and national elections, if the election was officially on we would have been in breach of the OFCOM (equal air-time). As it happens we have to have a balance ‘over time’, so the 'plug for the Tory balances up the pro-Liberal plug we had last week' (Chris Horrie), efectively, the story was balanced.
We also need to think about promotion and work on something similar to ‘Date with Fate'. Catherine deserved a special congratulations for making a genuine national story by covering a guest lecture visit and making an Orange advert story from it.
