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.