Our News Show Recording.

Our final recording for our news show had a number of ups and downs to it. Some things worked extremely well, whilst other things barely worked at all. The main issue that the majority of us had was that the script was not finished until during the lesson that we were recording it in, meaning that none of the presenters could have rehearsed properly before the day, and we couldn’t edit or revise the script if we had any problems as there was no time to do so. The vision mixer also did not have a copy of the script to refer to, so they were unsure when to play VT clips, or when to cut to which camera. The other thing that bothered me and the rest of the production team was that Connor (our script writer) said at one point that it ‘doesn’t matter because (he) can make another in a month or two.’ This annoyed us because it felt as though he wasn’t taking into consideration that this was our project now,  and the rest of us wanted it to go smoothly the first time, and not have to re-do our show.

Another big issue with our group was the communication between members of the production team. From the very beginning of the project, decisions were not made as a group, which led different people to think different things about the show and how it was planning to run. This was confusing, as some of us were telling people one thing, and others were telling them another which didn’t help at all. I also suggested that David (the floor manager) and Jemma (the director) both have a headset, so they could communicate better in the two different rooms. I suggested that Jemma have a script, and tell Ellis (our vision mixer) when to cut to what camera, and when to play what VT, but nothing really seemed to be said and Ellis was left to seem to try and guess what should be shown on screen at what time, which could have been easily resolved through better communication.

One other major problem was the VT clips. Jemma and David both stated that they wanted to re-do their VT clips as they were not happy with the way that their clips looked. However, neither of them got them finished before the date of recording, and so we had to use their original ones. Connor also made another VT clip, as his original was more or less only the Robocop trailer, but the new clip was corrupted and did not play properly, so we had to play half of it that worked, and ask the presenters to apologise for the 'technical difficulties' afterwards. As I knew previously, my VT clip was far too quiet to really hear, so I made sure that before the show, I raised the volume of it to suitable levels for it to be used on the show.

For the majority of the show, Connor was running the auto cue after we put his script on there, but the presenters were having problems as at some points Connor was scrolling through the script too fast, and other times too slow so that they couldn’t read it properly. To fix this, during the final rehearsal and the live show, I took over the auto cue as I could somewhat read the script mirrored on the laptop so I knew how slow or how fast the presenters needed it to go, and they said that this was better for them to read from.

At some points, the show was extremely stressful and it didn’t help that it fell on a rough time for me, so I tried to cope as best as I could. Admittedly, I had to step outside for five minutes to take a breather, but I tried to stay as calm as possible throughout the show, which I found extremely difficult. Some of the crew members made this worse by not following instructions, and messing around on set, and the miscommunication between the members of the production crew only added to the stress, but I think overall it was a reasonably decent show. Of course, it could have been far better, but for our first attempt at recording a live news show, it wasn’t disasterous. We managed to get a recording done, with three working VT clips and a decent amount of discussion in the studio floor between the presenters, and although it didn’t end up anything like our original proposal and treatment that we had decided on, at least we managed to record something on the day.