WINOL Reflection - Week Four

I feel that this was the first week that went smoothly for me.

On Monday at the news meeting I said that I wanted to cover an appeal about rhinos that Marwell zoo had just launched, and to go down to Southampton to see Princess Anne open a police station. I was given the go ahead and so I set about confirming interviews.

Tuesday was an absolutely incredible day. I went to Marwell in the morning and got some shots of the rhinos, some tigers and a snow leopard (which we didn't use for the package in the end, but we've got them if we need them in the future.) Then I tried to do my interview with the rhino zoo keeper and there was a small problem; the sound didn't work. We chalked that up to some loose connection inside the camera because the levels weren't even moving. It was my fault for not checking my equipment before we set out, even though we are constantly being told to do just that. I won't make that mistake again.

That was annoying, but we asked there and then if it would be okay to come back in a few hours and they said that was fine, so we went back to uni, grabbed a new camera, and came back. I did my interview and then did my piece to camera inside the rhino enclosure – as we were messing around trying to get a decent angle, one of the rhinos decided to come over and see what was going on. The result is that I'm tentatively patting a rhino in my piece to camera. Anyone reading this is probably absolutely sick of me bragging about it, but I don't care. Sula the rhino completely negated how technically bad I was in my PTC, and saved the day. I should thank Karen as well for climbing around on the bars with the camera to get the best shot. Cheers!

For once, I was prepared on Wednesday morning and already halfway through my editing. Brian helped me write my voice-over script and told me that I wasn't writing to the pictures and instead I was imposing some sort of essay over them: I can see what he means. I was also being too literal and writing as someone might for a radio piece. It's a hard habit to shake but I'm going to try much harder in the future to let go of whatever I seem to think the story should be, and lead with the pictures, rather than using them as aids. Brian told me to write a drop intro, which is setting the scene a little bit more and getting the viewer involved, rather than just chucking facts at them like I was originally.

I finished with time to spare and tried to see if there was anything I could do to help the others. I was told to operate camera 2 for the bulletin, which was both dull and nerve-wracking at the same time. It's still nice to have the experience.

I got lucky this week. Even though a story about rhinos isn't exactly hard hitting journalism, it was an enjoyable experience. I got to go to the zoo twice, for free, so I'm checking this off in my head as my first ever job perk.