Radio - Package

Ideas for my radio package were quite difficult as the possibilities were pretty much endless. However I have a friend who just had her benefits stopped completely because of her leaving her last job, so I decided to focus on this as I thought of her case as rather unfair. Gaining authoritative interviews was also difficult, but I finally managed to secure an interview with a local councillor who dealt with benefits. To make my package better I could have included music beds and layered the audio so that it was more interesting and varied in sound, as going from sound clip to sound clip can become quite monotonous.

Radio - Talbot FM Newsday

As we knew, the audience for this newsday was much younger than that of South Coast Radio. I was nominated as the editor for this newsday, meaning all the responsibility was with me. I found choosing stories for a younger audience relatively easier, and during this project I learnt some essential people managing skills.

Radio - South Coast Radio Newsday

The audience for this newsday was an older one, which presented us with some difficulty in choosing news stories and material. But we listened to other bulletins on Radio 4 and Solent to see what stories they were running with. My job was to go into town to gather vox pops on the stories that the rest of the team decided on, which as unnerving as I may have found it, added good quality material to our news day.

TV - News magazine show

The news magazine show was probably the simplest one to put together. As we all already had created our news packages, it was basically a case of writing the intro for our package and then cueing them up and deciding on the order. We also included images and clips for all our stories to make the show more interesting and in-depth. To spice it up a little bit, we took the imaginative decision to have the presenter throw a football across the studio to the sports presenter, myself. However, I resented this idea as the show was supposed to be aimed at adults and was a serious production, and I learnt that next time, to get my opinions across will have to be more assertive in what I say.

Tv - Package

I decided to make my package on the cancelling of the A bus route in Bournemouth, as it has potentially left many people in town stranded with no way to places such as Boscombe or university without getting a different/more expensive. I was also aware of a campaign ran by students to get this route back, so there are a number of options for interviews etc in relation to my story. On completion of my package, I realised that I had not gained enough footage to fill the required amount of time. It is now clear to me how much raw footage it takes to be able to fill just a small amount of time, and next time I will be sure to gain more interesting and varied Gvs in order to make my production more successful. Also, when I interviewed someone from the Student Union, the framing could have been done better as there was way too much headroom making the shot look unprofessional. The sound quality on this clip could also have been improved if I had held the mic closer to the subject. I think my package could have benefited if I had got some vox pops, gaining a more general opinion on the story and adding more variety to the production as a whole.

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.