These past couple of days have been the most stressful and physically exhausting ones that I've ever had at uni, which either speaks volumes about my ability to cope or says more about what a breeze the first year is. A bit of both?
Like Chris and Brian have said, it's better to make mistakes because it shows that you're doing something. I did a lot less last week, and felt positively serene compared to the way I feel now; but I didn't learn as much. I understand what they mean now - it's much better to touch something hot and get burnt rather than simply being told not to or watching someone else burn themselves. Nothing that I've learned this week will be forgotten any time soon.
My week
Over the weekend I had attempted to get an interview with some local students who had had their house broken in to and 7000 pounds worth of their stuff stolen, but it soon became obvious that they didn't want to talk about it, which was fair enough. On Monday, I went out to film an interview with a museum curator about the theft of lead from the building's roof. At the news meeting an hour later, I found out that this story was unlikely to go anywhere so I dropped it and instead went with Chris's suggestion about filming Conservative club members watching Kenneth Clarke's speech on law and order.
The following morning, I went out to Totton to the nearest club to film, but unfortunately no-one was around at 11am; when people finally did start filtering through, they would speak to me but point blank refuse to be filmed. I still should have made the best of a bad situation and came back with anything at all, which was the first mistake I made. I wasted my own time and effort and came back empty handed.
Tuesday afternoon wasn't so bad; on the journey back from Southampton and the walk through Winchester town I met a local councillor who was pleasant, helpful, gave me times and dates for various meetings and said that I could personally come along as his guest. It was complete luck that I was walking to the uni at the same time he was, but I'm glad that it happened. There was a fire in town a few hours later so Henry and I ran out to film that, and I went back to edit it during the evening. It was made in to a 30 second OOV which I was proud of as now I at least had something to contribute to the bulletin, but it was riddled with issues that were mentioned in the debrief.
A planned council worker strike was reported on Wednesday morning and we tried to pick up on that and present it as breaking news. I rang the union and the council to find out some facts about the strike and was instructed to write a short script telling viewers what had happened and what was going to happen. I ended up in the studio as a guest speaker talking to Hana about the issue.
Debrief notes
The biggest, most fatal error I made this week was relying on technology to see me through my chat with Hana on screen. If I'd made any effort to take in what I was supposed to be talking about, learn my script or even have it there in front of me on the desk then it might have been okay.
Even if the auto-cue did work, my eyeline would have looked weird anyway, so in future that is never going to be an option. Hopefully no-one else will make the mistake I made, because it didn't feel great.
Angus also mentioned that my choice of words was strange and that instead of 'citizen' anyone would just say 'person.' I'll bear that in mind in the future and keep my script simple.
The guest editor, Rachel, commented on the overlay of the previous bin men strikes and said that I should cut the pictures myself so that I know the timings. This will help it to flow well on screen – she said if it doesn't flow then it can look quite odd.
In terms of my OOV, the pictures were in the wrong order (I should have started with the burnt out sports car) and I should have gotten a wider selection of shots so that we could see what the eyewitness was talking about - it's TV, not radio. I also needed to make the eyewitnesses interview shorter - she took up about 20 seconds which is way too long in a standard package, let alone a short piece. As I left in the bulk of the interview it made timings difficult in terms of the presenter knowing where to talk over the underlay/oov and where to stop to allow the actuality/upsot to be heard.
So yeah, this week has been a bit of a baptism of fire, but I'm still looking forward to the next one.
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