WINOL Week Four

I've had a pretty fantastic week; all I did was go out film myself playing with Lego. A few weeks ago I had seen a press release about how a museum was going to host this 'Lego Mania' event where a massive model would be built of Basing House, a ruined castle in Basingstoke.

I did want the main focus of my story to be on the man that was building it - his full time job is to play with lego, after all! - but it didn't work out that way in the scripting.

Chris told me that the best way to introduce the package would be a drop intro, with pictures of an actual building site (one of which was usefully sitting 2 minutes from the newsroom) and me walking around looking like a twat in a hard hat. As hard as I tried, I couldn't get access to the building site, so like a voyeur I filmed some builders from a distance and did my piece to camera standing by the fence. I was only in vision for 2 or 3 seconds - any longer and it might have looked a bit weird that I was on the wrong side of the fence, but I think I got away with it.

During the debrief both Richard Burton and Angus said that I really needed to visually convey a sense of the scale of the thing that was being built - I had a shot of a bag of bricks, but it wasn't enough. I needed to ask the bloke if I could move things around and pile all the bags up in the middle, or find some sort of structure that would be as tall as the finished model and stand next to it to give the viewer that sense of size and comparison. It didn't even cross my mind to do something like that, but I can see that it would have been much more effective to do that rather than saying in my script how tall it will be.

Henry was again a great help in doing the filming/carting me around and it was his idea to film the sign off with a lego microphone. After we were finished in Basingstoke, we went to film an OOV about the library offering free language tuition to people, which I liked but unfortunately didn't make it in to the bulletin.

Angus said to me during the week, and to George during the debrief, that court reports are now banned unless we have some compelling pictures to go along with them because a minute long piece to camera just isn't very interesting. That's fair enough, I wouldn't want to watch that on the real news either.

I hope that next week I can find a story that isn't a court report or something fluffy, because that's all I seem to do.

WINOL Week Two and Three

Week Two was a good week for me - I got to do a fluff piece about a baby giraffe at Marwell Zoo. I'd set it up over the weekend and was ready to film on Tuesday afternoon. Henry came with me and between the two of us we got some really good shots - especially great were the ones shot from up on the raised platform that the keeper suggested to us.
I feel like my scripting was okay and I used my best picture first, but I was told that the bed of music was perhaps too cute and cheesy even for an 'and finally', which is something to bear in mind in future.

Week Three was a little bit trickier. I had tried my best over the weekend to secure interviews for a story about a supermarket trying to establish itself in the suburbs of the city. It looked like it was going okay until the press office for the supermarket got back to me on Tuesday morning and said that they couldn't get a statement to me within the next two weeks. I gladly let it go because visually it would have been dull. I had already hedged my bets and spent three hours at court on Monday - which unfortunately didn't provide anything interesting. I went back on Tuesday and stuck around for another few hours until I found something sort of newsworthy. I filmed my piece to camera on Wednesday morning - and a piece to camera was all my package was.

The guest editor, Chris Coneybeer, spoke with me and gave me some great advice. He rightly said that my package needed something else - a mugshot of the guy, footage of him walking in to court, even a GV of the place where the incident happened. I had already filmed cutaways to use on Tuesday evening but when it came to editing they seened pretty irrelevant so I couldn't use them.

He said that having these things won't only just take the stress off of me by making the PTC shorter, but make scripting easier too - you can tell the story around the images, perhaps introducing the story while showing the picture of the man, the place, and then coming in to vision. He also said that, as I'm reading out a quote from the judge, I could cut to and end with a GV of the court to signify that it's the crown's words.

I'll admit that it didn't even occur to me to go and get a shot of the pub, but that would have been brilliant and would have helped to tell the story better. The only issue is that it's twenty miles away out in the sticks and I can't drive, but in real life (and when I bother to learn how to drive) I guess that wouldn't have been an issue.

WINOL Week One - again

After two weeks of training and other stuff that wasn't training, we geared ourselves up for our first bulletin with our new team of us + the MAs.

I spent Saturday filming a local homeless charity's fundraising day; unfortunately, the news angle that I had wanted just turned out to not exist (funding was no longer an issue) and so it couldn't really be used as a news package.

Instead, I went to court on Tuesday and came away with a court report about a man who had fraudulently gotten some heroin from a number of pharmacies around Hampshire. I was quite happy about that, but I was concerned about the script and if I could make it simple enough to explain to an audience. My script was initially pretty poor, but my lecturer went through it with me and changed a lot of it - cutting away the fat and making sure my top line included the who, what and where, which I'd failed to do on my first go. It's strange how you can forget to do what you think might be quite an obvious thing, but it goes to show how much practice you need to put in.

What I felt the most proud of this week was definitely not my PTC, which was, in line with last year, quite poor. It was my reconstruction which was only a couple of seconds of someone filling out a prescription form, but it made the world of difference and split up the monotony of the PTC. To do this, I prepared the night before and spent time tracking down and printing my own props for it. I feel like it worked nicely and I just wonder why I never did a reconstruction last year, as it makes editing much easier.