TV - Youth Show

For our youth show, we found it difficult to find news stories which were aimed at a younger audience, particularly the 15-24 year old age bracket. However we decided to go with Jack's story of the Boscombe surf reef as it is likely to attract younger people and is a softer news story, as well as Lucy's package on a library. My news story was also used as it affected students and is more light hearted. We used imaginative graphics for our youth show to make it more interesting and entertaining – a technique I did not know how to do before this project. We did encounter some problems throughout this project, for example the autocue was not being ran correctly by Sophia. This meant the presenter faced some difficulty in fluency, however luckily the problem was resolved before the final recording.

TV - documentary

At our initial group meeting we came together and discussed potential ideas for our production. We eventually decided to go with the idea of homelessness as it is a constant issue which usually tends to be disregarded by most people, mainly because of guilt, and if we focussed on one homeless individual it could evoke more emotion from our audience.
Our group of six split up into pairs, with me and Laurence going into town with some equipment in order to film GVs, try and get an interview with a homeless person and also to head to the Big Issue office. We managed to secure an interview with the Big Issue area manager which worked well because she is of course a major figure in relation to the story, and it helped give our documentary more substance and authority. We also gathered shots such as cutaways of myself nodding (filmed after the interview) with the interviewee in the foreground, and a number of good quality GVs of the office etc. However, after filming we checked the clip on the camera and discovered that there was no sound. This, unfortunately, made us look rather unprofessional and amateur, but luckily the woman was terribly nice about the whole ordeal and let us conduct the whole interview a second time, this time with sound! Here we learnt a valuable lesson of always checking the audio before recording - it's just a shame that we had to learn it the hard way! We also gained an interview with a Bg Issue vendor and a number of GVs in town and of homeless people, giving us more material to work with in the editing suite.
We then all rendezvoused in the editing suite with all the material that we had gained and began sieving through it to figure out which bits were most useful. During the editing process, we all pulled together quite well and chipped in with our own personal criticisms/praise of what we thought of the documentary so far, meaning that everyone had a positive impact on the quality of the production. We faced some problems whilst editing, such as the voiceovers were echoed, meaning that I, as presenter, had to go and record them again. During this project, I learnt a number of new skills, such as pull focus', which me and Laurence did quite well on our day of filming. We also used effective techniques such as blurs, for example when getting GVs of the Big Issue vendor. The bluriness kind of gave it a feel of disconnection with the outside world, almost summing up the life of a homeless person.