Exhaustion showed its fruits after the big Election Coverage but our winol team has not finished fighting for a great content and production of another great weekly bulletin this week.
We made the decision to use the latest technology of tri-casting (as we used on the election coverage) and we allowed the deadline for the packages to be 3pm on Wednesday. As the control of the production flow is very important we were assigned new roles. Apart from the continuous news planning, I found myself to be part of Script writing on Tuesday and VT operating as well as PA (time counting) Director at the same time. As my news planning role requires, I had previously set a separate blog and kept posting new ideas and listing of events and latest press releases to help our reporters in finding an inspiration. I found that hardly anyone went on my blog and no one actually decided to be a follower. Thanks to Glen, our News Editor Rob from production, we managed to remind reporters about the existence of my ‘News planning for WINOL’ blog and hopefully following weeks will bring new followers to it.
On Wednesday, I decided to take over the responsibility of chasing the packages and making sure they were all transferred onto the hard drive and then imported onto the VT in the Gallery. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts nearly all the reporters missed their deadlines which resulted in a delay of our rehearsals, our reporters did not seam to have taken their deadlines seriously, and we found ourselves running after the links and writing them ourselves even a lot after the deadline.
Effectively we did couple of run thoughts of the script and we practised before going live. The tri-caser worked very well and we streamed live onto our winol website. The only hick-up technically was that the VT computer froze for about 10sec on during the headlines but Madde handled it well, as usual, kept the gallery calm and told John to keep reading the script. Thankfully, VT computer run smoothly till the rest of the bulletin and I managed to fulfil my role as a PA and VT operator without further failure.
As we later found out in the feedback our bulletin’s script contained too many clauses and we learnt that we should simplify it and focus on a very basic structure of subject, verb, object clause which would make it a lot clearer for our audience. We should also ensure of a factual structure of the script rather than poetic and complicate. When setting camera 2 on the main presenter we should ensure of a tighter shot and asymmetrical alignment rather than central to make it more interesting and professional.
“Always deliver, always have an idea and have contacts appropriate to our level” is the key to our employability.
In overall, or reporters did an excellent role on content and cooperating that with our production site we managed, once more reach quite a high level of news making.
Stu’s story was genuinely great news, holding a great live news atmosphere and had lots of energy. It’s script was generally well written and confidently executed and it brought a completely new standard to our package making ‘outlining Westminster University’s standard of package making’ as our tutor said. Grant’s council story was also an excellent piece covering equally well researched subject in council matter. Grant did a fantastic PTC with expo of the issue and confident performance in front of the camera. He had a right authority member to discuss the issue, used ‘nod-dies’ which he could have probably avoided. Joey’s piece about the race raw after the vault’s hockey team girls appeared wearing inappropriate costumes was also a fantastic piece that added another strong content story to our bulletin. It had a brilliant usage of our BIG ‘BUT’ showing the apologies of the hockey team captain. It was interesting and had quite dangerous content but very well executed. But, there was also a problem in it, as our tutor noticed were 2 spelling mistakes that had put the package in the fatal error area in the legal aspect unfortunately. Claire covered very interesting subject on teenage pregnancy but it left dissatisfied feeling of not entirely well covered topic. As our tutor spotted it was a ‘vox-pop heaven’ and was lacking in good pictures. It also contained Claire’s opinion containing an expo on the issue and became a feature piece rather than a news package. The ‘and finally’ story was a good choice of not for serious piece type of package lifting up previously hard news content. The only problem with it was that is wasn’t fully balanced as it looked as a puff piece, ‘advert like’ package and so there was a danger there on an ‘innuendo of slander of goods’ there. However, we know that the ‘and finally’ piece is usually not to be taken fully seriously that is why we could use it.
