This week was good as I bounced back from last week's problems and got a story that delivered.
On Monday in the news meeting, I explained my story this week, which would be an update on the ongoing debate of the housing development of Barton Farm in North Winchester with the angle of showing how Winchester City Council need the development to meet it's housing pledge. I would balance this with another topic, which came out of the question-time style forum, which again sparked the debate with the council ignoring the location and worrying about the priority of building affordable housing and more council housing in Winchester.
Tuesday was very straight forward as I had my two interview sorted with Councillor Leader George Beckett from Winchester City Council and Patrick Davies, a former city councillor and Labour parliamentary candidate for Winchester. What I needed to ensure was I got some good shots and GV's as I felt this is where I had been lacking in my previous packages. I was lucky that I stubbled across a few good locations for long shots of housing and that the shots for Barton Farm were easy and accessible.
I finished filming my shots and edited the package together, knowing I would only have to record a short piece to camera in the morning to summarise the piece. I filmed the PTC on Wednesday morning, but due to the location and the lighting, I had to edit the colour to make it look more natural as the light made me look yellow in the footage.
Then I had to help finish Tom's sculpture mystery piece by filming a few more GV'S of the sculpture from different angle and obtain Vox-Pops from students on their opinions of the sculpture and what they thought it could be. This was then edited together, but it was spiked from the final bulletin as it was revealed close to air-time that the university press office has discovered the sculpture was in fact a wind chime and had found out who created the piece (Personally this was another last minute discovery by the press office who seem to be the thorn in our sides....this thorn seems to be hard to get rid of as well!)
In the Debrief, Angus thought that my piece was good with good pictures, however the scripting was sloppy as the link confused the angle of the story. I did not use the most relevant, up-to-date information until my PTC at the end and that was needed in the opening few words to allow the viewers to gain the latest angle of the story. News needs to be up-to-date and should not be dated, therefore it is essential that every package, even if the story is ongoing starts with the newest, most relevant information.
Angus also felt that I needed to be careful with my shots as one of my shots was a sudden,violent zoom out as it can make the piece look untidy. Again the problem with the speed of my voiceover was mentioned, however this was balance as I again show good inflection and intonation in my voice. I know that I need to try and have move voice training in order to help gain the right pace to my voice as I know that I have perfected the pitch and tone of it, but this will come with constant practice.
What I have not been doing is reviewing WINOL as an overall piece and I will now each week make a critical reflection of my own piece and the bulletin as a whole. I felt that this week's bulletin was good, however there was not eye-catching pictures or any story that leapt out and screamed WATCH ME!!!!
We did try another new element this week, with a live Skype feed from London with Tom who was covering the national student demonstration against tuition fees, but the sound quality was not good, therefore it was decided that the bulletin would run with the pre-recorded piece. It is good thought because we are trying new things everything week and adding these new elements that will help in the long run as WINOL is primarily a training camp to help fine tune our crafts to help us be the most-trained, employable Journalist when we graduate.
The bulletin was solid thought as all of the stories had balance and we are starting to gain the quotes we needs from our stories to make them relevant and make the viewers want to tune in, but we need to remain focused on our target demographic as the bulletin has in places started to sway away from focusing on students and more to what is going on in Winchester for local residents in the city
This week was good as we had a balance of stories, focusing on both our primary and secondary demographic. It is key that we keep this up in order to obtain the largest number of viewers possible as it reflect in the number of views on youtube and the traffic to the WINOL website. Overall so far, the bulletins which have gained the largest numbers of viewers have either been due to us sticking to the targeted demographics or because we have had a story, which has been an exclusive (Julie's investigative piece on Hampshire Police) or with a high-profile personality (Steve Brine).
I think that WINOL is going in the right direction, we need to keep the balance of stories every week, but now need to focus on the pictures and making every story interesting and eye-grabbing for our viewers. I know we all can achieve that goal with the looming November 30th National Strike coverage being the centre stage for that challenge.
No comments:
Post a Comment