Thursday, December 06, 2007

No more broadcast journalism...EVER!!! You do not know how good that sounds. No more calling up and asking permission to film here and there, no more embarrassments/inadequate feelings over not being able to edit the 'right' way or letting anybody down. For today I had my final assesment- the TV newsday.

It meant getting up at 6am, watching the news for breaking stories or anything happening in Sheffield and then going in for 8.30am so as to discuss relevant stories with the group. Then present them at the 9am 'news meeting' where Katie, Matt and Julia Lockwood (a reporter/journalist from Calendar,the local Yorkshire news), came to assess our newsday and to help us out along the way of course. The briefing was part of the assessment so we had to throw loads of news stories in there, which I think some of us did just to get a few extra marks :p can't say I blame people, hehe.

So me and Jack went to film some homeless people at the EIS. (English Institute of Sport), but it turned out there was no actual sports happening at these workshops. Only discussions and as beforehand we were waiting on permission from the EIS for us to film there/get an interview, we decided to write the cue/script for a story about a guy who was killed, driving the wrong way down the M1. Later we shot some clips of traffic too.

So we went to St Anne's Hostel in Woodhouse and filmed some homeless people playing football instead. That was cool, we had an interview clip of the homeless football team all together talking about why they enjoyed it (which Julia later commented on as being quite unusual but worked well for a news bulletin) and we were like go 'ed :p get those points in there for us babeh :D hehehe.

It was stressful though trying to get all the right shots. As camerawoman I felt a little bit daunted by how many shots I had to get. But we got some decent ones I think, from different angles, including down below shots of people scoring goals, missing them, etc. Higher ones, mid-pitch angles, etc. Which were interesting.

I did kind of wonder a few times through the day, why anybody would want to be a broadcast journalist...and I later learnt the Calendar news lady who came in to assess/help out on the day, regularly says she thinks she's going to have a heart attack every day on the job. I mean, is that worth it?! I don't think so. Although you do get paid more than in print, I'm not sure I could handle the stress levels and would yearn for a 9-5 job. Journalism is very much for those who are dedicated and like to work to deadlines I think.

We were back in the newsroom (after ages stuck in traffic jams) for around 2pm'ish. Then we got stuck into editing our piece. Jack did most of the editing whilst I wrote the cue and script (because I'm good at writing and didn't want to muck anything up technically). Also because I can't remember how to edit that well it would take me a lot longer. If only I'd of been allowed a practice edit the day before, that would've been great. Nevermind though, we got on with it.

The afternoon was very stressful from this point onwards and I literally was dreading the minutes because time was going too fast, in my opinion!!

After a lot of stress, asking for help from Matt and doing the voiceover, we finally got it all polished off (as polished as we could get anyway) and sent off to be put in the finished TV news bulletin which went out at 4.30pm.

I managed to sort out/help out by doing the pictures for the recording of the sports bulletin. We put all that together and I just clicked 'play' and it seemed to work. So I did that part at least.

We went 'on air' at 4.30pm exactly and by 4.45 we were watching it all through together and analysing our performance. I personally think we got a lot of news in and covered a lot of different stories which was good and we ended on a nice piece about Christmas lights at the children's hospital, or something like that. So that was nice.

I'm really pleased with the way our package turned out and some of the filming was particularly good. Although, the whole news bulletin was not polished at all. It was very good and it had a lot of positives but it fell back in many places, perhaps because we had set ourselves very high expectations and when they fell down...it let some of the pieces down (one group struggled with the editing because they'd been really busy all day doing various filming in various places). But nevermind it's a learning curve and I'd be surprised if we got any less than a 2.1 for our efforts.

It's weird to think broadcast is over now. I'm glad it is though, means I can focus on other things like my patch stories and I can start laying them out etc, writing up my Stiletto article and also, start revising for Free Speech and Censorship. Yep.

Today was worth 60% of the module, so I better do well is all I can say :D hehe.

Right, I'm gonna go to sleep. Another busy day tomorrow (can't wait for the weekend!) :D

xx

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