Rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal! WINOL 03/02/10
Thanks to having multiple rehearsals before recording the necessary adjustments and improvements could be made which affected greatly the outcome of the bulletin, was it just not so much better?!
The gallery felt a lot more professional and fully under control. And as we can see now smaller and smaller mistakes are being pointed out which automatically put our work in higher standards and shows how we are improving within the WINOL experience.
This week was our first fully deserved success. Our joined efforts effected in a best so far news bulletin. Technically we did an amazing progress, which was in a big part thanks to rehearsals and continuous practise as well as very detailed handover to new roles.
What would make it even better would be making sure of good headline pictures and also ensuring of handing in all the headlines in the afternoon on Wednesday and then making sure of handing in the LINKS, IN/OUT-WORDS as well as the length of the news/sports packages always soon after the headlines. All this allows the Output Editor finish of the script for the bulletin and give the Gallery-team sufficient time for rehearsal before recording the bulletin. All the roles within Winol are incredibly dependable on each other and that is why the team work and respecting the deadlines are crucial. As we have learnt from the past bulletins missing the deadline for packages or handing in the headlines late affects the whole look of the bulletin. In the first few weeks we had hardly time for rehearsing if any, and we were still learning the roles, this week we could hand over the roles that some of us have already practised, like operating VTs, directing or vision mixing, which allowed for giving advises and helping the next person to adjust quicker and practise on old scripts. Every new person can be trained in Gallery on previous script and VTs.
When I did directing I found myself having not even one chance of going through the script myself, once I didn’t even get the script till the very time of recording the bulletin live. Handovers from sport to news and coming in and out of the packages was one big guessing game. Also being one of the first students in the team as a director there was no one to hand me over their role or teach me how to do or not to do things which effected the bulletin. Winol is a sea of surprises filled with different experiences and lessons that we take out of it.
Being an OUTPUT EDITOR this week, I found myself learning how to use ENPS and write the script for the bulletin. I knew how important it was to deliver the script on time so therefore, I put my best affords to get the relevant information to finish of early enough for the new Gallery team to rehearse before going live. It is very responsible and detailed role, it is crucial to make it accurate and on time as well as making the bulletin a worth to watch peace attracting viewer’s attention with catchy headlines and interesting Links before the packages. Main difficulty is to chase the information like, headlines, links, length etc, I had to make sure that I took relevant information from reporters and finish it in time for pre-recording the headlines followed by decent rehearsal for the bulletin. I am still going to have to work on making the script crisp and catchy and learn how to re-write a good Headlines and Links.
Editorially, our news stories were stronger with a lot better angles.
Joey’s package came across as very engaging, was very strong technically and had a good set up. He is pretty confident in his PTC and delivered an ambitious news package. Jon’s package was brilliant technically but it was a “puff peace”, meaning it was talking about the topic only in superlatives, there were no negative comments about the simulator. For example Jon’s sign off-s should or could have brought is a balance. We should always remember about the BIG “BUT”, balancing the piece. We also didn’t see any pictures of the actual simulator and the interviews were slightly too long. The story about the Fair trade was not explained fully, vix-pops were interesting exposing reporter’s good interviewing techniques. In Kayleigh’s package we could notice a classical Expo by the reporter, as she explains details of her story for quite a long time; other two examples of expo story are ‘Bexpo’ - short explanation or ‘Lexpo’ - long exposition, there is also a third, unofficial one called ‘Flexpo’ - f****** long explanation(:o)
In Sports, we would like to see more of tighter shots. Grant did well with his PTC which added a value to the whole feature. The sports team, however, should remember not to assume the viewer’s knowledge about the topic.
Additionally, we were also reminded about the OfCom regulations, ‘underdue perminance’ – danger of giving more air time to one side of the argument/political favour which makes a piece unbalanced and therefore not broadcast able. As a recap we also heard about ‘subterfuge’ - going undercover (Section 7 of Human Rights Act), this stile of investigative journalism can only be applied when we act in public interest, must have prior permission and also can be done in no other way. ‘Equal air time’ (Section 6 Human Rights Act) is very important especially with oncoming election, this is a major restriction to broadcast journalism during the period of a general election campaign. The Ofcom Privacy act (Section 8 Human Rights Act), forbids identification of young persons under the age of 18.
Generally we got 200 user sessions, which means that we are still falling behind the amounts that we reached in the last semester (around 600) so we really should focus on advertising and trying to make the site better known around the campus and not only. However, as we all know in second semester there is generally less students around than in semester one therefore having the same amount of user session will be a considerable challenge for us. Despite these and other difficulties we will be trying our best to bring the traffic up and improve the quality of the bulletin as well as work on the website layout to make it more attractive.
The University of Winchester Journalism Course
Multimedia Production , WINCHESTER NEWS ONLINE WEBSITE
