This Monday our Winol team heard not only a feedback from our tutors but also our audience, the first years have been blogging about our last Winol bulletin and it is worth we listen to their view as they are our focus group. Overall, they were very impressed by the professionalism of our work, however they did raise a few points that are worth looking at. They noticed inconsistency in our sound quality for example and mentioned that the strap lines with name captions disappear too quickly. Moreover, we should perhaps try better to express more enthusiasm in our voice tracks, it will probably help to engage the listener/viewer more. As for the story order in the bulletin, our news team could work a little bit harder on set of the running order.
It is was important for me to mention these comments as all above apart from the running order can be also applied to our feature section of the video production. As a feature editor for winol I give more detail on week 4 of our creation of the Feature content and progress of my team in a separate article as well - here.
Between last and this week our Alexa statistics rose significantly, I dare to believe that it is also thanks to our features development and weekly schedule of uploads of our articles and videos onto the website, as our tutors always say "people come for the news and stay for the features", at last we make it happen, thanks to our features our audience stays longer on the website, our videos are longer and represent variety of feature formats to suit many tastes.
Watch our latest News bulletin below:
On Friday, 08 October 2010 WINOL got over 300 views on You Tube Wed/Thurs - which means we are getting a higher interest in our news. We are all experiencing difficulties in terms of dealing with all the technical issues like slow network and dropping frames during editing but even in a real workplace there are always technical issues occurring and we are here to learn how to overcome them and plan better to make sure to keep the deadlines. The site as a whole was not launched this week, as the tutorial and production team is setting up a lot of new features - which have longer lead times. Generally, there are still some works done of the production and formatting work for the features section. For now not all of our feature videos and articles are on the website, we have to be patient as the winol production team is limited in the men power, at the same time I will make sure that all the content that my team is producing will be uploaded successfully onto the website.
The video of my production - a short interview with our guest editor of the week will be available to view shortly in here.
His tips and feedback can be also related to feature making, even though he predominantly talked about the bulletin I find few of his tips also useful for my Feature team.
He talked about opening shots, good opening pictures, that are making an impact on a viewer and grabbing attention. choosing the right opening pictures is as important for news packages as it is for feature videos. They should be equally attractive visually as well as content wise. It is essential to remember what are we doing the interviews for, if it is for features is is crucial to think about the set up for the interview, background, the mood, lighting etc so that it could add to the story of our interviewee and allow better reception of the content.
Also, we should always think about the relevance of the cut aways of fillers we are using, they have to match the content of the interview, making the film not only more attractive visually but also adding up to the story.
And finally, as a good general tip for all of us as trainee journalists, we should always put our best affords before meeting our potential employee, prepare and do our homework on the knowledge of the industry or perhaps even particular workplace we chose. Our potential boss will give us as much attention as much we payed into preparing ourselves for the job opportunity he/she would be willing to offer us.
The video of that interview will be available to watch shortly.
