Wow, two weeks worth of bulletins have gone by already! Well I'm sure you can tell from the lack of updating my blog that I've been swept off my feet with work so allow me to explain whats been going on....
WINOL- bulletin number two.
They main thing that sticks in my memory from this bulletin is the fact that I had to stand in as director because Leanne was unfortunately struck down with the flu! I was asked to do so with only a short amount of time remaining before the bulletin was due to be recorded and I had to say I was very nervous! I'd previously been the director for our news bulletins in year two but we had the luxury of three weeks to work on these!!!
Luckily the bulletin went well with only a couple of slip ups. I was quite happy with my performance but I could have improved it by using some of my time to ask the news team to describe the stories to me so I knew what we were working with. I also need to learn not to panic at times but I thought I remained fairly cool in the live bulletin- especially when we had a baby babbling away in the gallery just behind me!!!!
As I said the broadcast went well with the stories showing clear improvements from last week. Everyone worked well as a team and we were all happy with the results.
We were lucky to have Andy Steggall of Sky Sports and ITV to come and be our guest editor. He offered us some really good professional advice such as the need for our links to be longer and being aware of moving the guest from the set when we were live. He was really positive about our bulletin and I think he gave a good boost to the team's moral!
During this week I also began working on the 'barker' - this is the banner at the top of our news page that draws people's attention to the features. More often than not magazines' and newspapers' barkers comply to the same model:
- Win
- Free
- Sex/Glamour
To make the barker Chris introduced me to 'Adobe Fireworks'- a programme similar to 'Photoshop'. It is very complex and requires a lot of patience to use. Because of this Chris did most of the work whilst I observed and made notes. My job was to establish with the Features Editor, Alice Rimes, what would be placed in the barker. It was also my job to find the photos and to make sure that they were legal to use. Using photos from places such as Wikipedia is safe as it has a Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons visit: http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc. We mostly used our own photos though.
To sum up I learnt a lot this week and was looking forward to the next week!
WINOL- bulletin number three.
This week there seemed to be a far more laid back and relaxed atmosphere within the news room and I have to say this was a bit unnerving. I wondered where our buzz had gone!
We did have a fair few technical difficulties this week which would inevitably make this a bit a bogus bulletin. First the tape deck in the studio decided to eat our tapes and refused to spit them back out without force and by this point the tapes were wrecked. This meant that any recording for our feature, sports and listings channels that usually happened on Tuesdays would have to wait until the following day. So I think some people felt at a bit of a loss that day and didn't have much to do.
In this time I did some further work on the barker. This time I used the previous one as a template and chose to only change a couple of the images. This still proved to be hard work as I had to, again select the correct images, cut them out, ensure the edges looked smooth and then add a shadow effect to the make them stand out from the page. This was the final result:
I'm very keen to continue working on this as I want to be able to perfect my skills on such a complex programme. I also want to learn how to use 'Flash' as this enables us to put the barker on to the web site so this is my aim for next week!Anyway on to the day of broadcast. The tape deck was luckily fixed but this meant we had three items to film, edit and put up on the website before run throughs were due to begin for the bulletin. Luckily this happened and I have to say that there were clear improvements on people's delivery to camera. Glenn Hutt's listings piece was done in one shot this week as his diction and confidence has improved greatly!
This week Matt Clifford was using ENPS to construct the the script and running order. This is an advanced programme that many professionals use and it makes the job easier. However the final layout was new and there was an air of confusion amongst the team when these were landed in our laps 30 minutes before recording. Because of this there seemed to be a chunk missing on the auto prompt which lead to a mistake in our bulletin. Hopefully these problems won't happen next week and can be easily resolved!
As well as an issue with scripts and the auto prompt, there were technical difficulites with the microphone and the computer running the VTs.
To sum up it all seemed to go wrong even though most of it seemed to be out of our hands! This week's lesson: technology will always let you down, so be prepared!!!
Oh and just to add we were lucky to have another professional editor this week! Chris Ship, ITV's Political Correspondent, was a great help when it came to writing links and editing the script. He also gave some good advice to the presenter and it was great to have him about!
