WINOL Games

Just an extremely short post to say I was a part of a possible new WINOL programme, a currently irregular gaming review show called WINOL Games.

You can give it a cheeky look here and I'd appreciate any feedback.

The 4th and 5th WINOL - It's different from one week to the next

Last weeks WINOL went extremely well in some aspects, in fact some would say the most important aspects as we got the broadcast out on time with no legal issues. We had no guest editor on the fourth WINOL but we were run in a more hands on way than usual by Brian and Angus. Brian took control of the newsroom, spiking any stories that weren't good enough to be broadcast on the BBC and cutting most things to OOV's because they weren't quite good enough but weren't bad enough to be spiked. I had a slightly less stressful job than the week before, back on the straplines writing headlines which is always fun, (favourite was Princess and the PC, wish it was me who'd written that, well played George). We used a different format script this week when it came to WINOL time, one more like the standard you'd get on an actual news show. It looked very much like the scripts I saw on my trip to Al Jazeera last year which makes sense really as Angus took control of it and directed from the gallery, showing us production people how it should be done really.

The week didn't begin with WINOL however, on Tuesday we filmed the first WINOL Life of the year. A One Show style programme in which our presenters are joined by a guest, usually related to feature production, and talk to our features team after being shown their efforts. The guest we had was Sally Churchward, a local journalist on the Southern Daily Echo and a features writer primarily. We had so many technical difficulties in the run up to the actual show, the vision mixer was just impossible to get working although eventually one of of tech friends managed to work their magic just in time for us to get a rehearsal in before the actual recorded broadcast. Unfortunately however, one of our questions suggested that music features were Sally's specialty and in Ewan's package about girl gamers he may have suggested girls only want to play games with unicorns and flowers. Sally is also a vocal feminist. This made things a little awkward to say the least. We persevered though and got a decent broadcast out and with the sound issues we had to deal with, Justina did amazingly to make it sound as good as it did in post production.

Sportsweek went as well as it always does. It's such a fun and easy thing to film and it's great experience for people who want to direct on the Wednesday so they can do it without the pressure of being live. It also gave a George a chance to do what he loves, speaking terrible French phrases to Julie.

When we finally made it to WINOL on the Wednesday we were feeling pretty confident. We'd had a few decent weeks and the production schedule that Dom put together a few weeks back had been great for us on production and I think helps the rest of the team to keep on track as well. I wanted to be on vision mixer again as for some reason, even though it can be stressful trying to set up green screens and making sure the camera changes at the right moments on handover and there are no black holes between VTs. I also took charge of the hard drive for another week on which we collect the headlines and the packages for the bulletin. I personally find that job really stressful but I had all the headlines ready in time to record them and I had the packages ready long before rehearsals started so I should really calm down. The stories themselves weren't particularly strong. Technically our news team is getting better week by week and we've ironed out a lot of issues that we encountered in the early editions. We're still pretty new though and that side of things will keep improving. The stories themselves however are different. We need to all be thinking about stories, reading local papers and asking questions, listening to local people and going to meetings in the hope of securing a story.

All in a all a good couple of weeks on WINOL. I'm going to add a bit more to this blog during the week as I misplaced my debrief notes. Once they're found I'll mention a bit more constructive criticism.

Seminar Paper - Sigmund Freud

Let me make it clear before the paper that I was always a bigger fan of Clement Freud, Sigmund's grandson, for his appearances on Just A Minute, but I guess that's not as relevant to the course.

Sigmund Freud Seminar

This week we’re looking mainly at Sigmund Freud, one of the first thinkers in psychoanalysis. It would be wrong to say he was the founder, as philosophers like Schopenhauer looked at that side of human behaviour before him; but you could say he was the mother, I mean father of the psychoanalytical movement of the late 1800’s and into the 20^th century.

As in last week’s lecture I think one of the most important aspects of Freud’s work to look at is the idea of a tripartite self. Freud looks at human behaviour in much the same way as Plato and Marx but where Plato had reason, spirit and desire as his three parts of the self, with reason controlling desire, Freud saw it as weak because people are irrational. Plato used the allegory of the chariot rider to explain how he saw the self, with desire and the spirit as the horses and reason as the rider, reining them in. I think, seeing the pessimistic way in which Freud tended to approach life, he would either reason as a weak rider, or desire at the reins, driving human behaviour like his Id. More of which later.

Freud’s theories are all encompassing; you cannot just take one aspect, as his psychoanalysis is a theory of everything, or at least it attempts to understand everything. In today’s psychology, Freud has less relevance to its practical application but in the lecture Brian pointed to a quote which sadly I forgot to note down who said it, “We all speak Freud now.” The influence of Freud on popular culture and media, even down to certain rules from society that we now take for granted, is we all have a similar construct now in our minds if we think about a therapist, we see the patient on a couch and some pseudo-Freud character sitting back asking odd questions until suddenly it’s about your mother. It was this, his obsession with infancy and sex being the cause of all psychological traumas that led to a breach with a former colleague Joseph Breuer. It was around this time, in isolation from his medical colleagues, that he published what Anthony Kenny calls the “most important of his works”, The Interpretation of Dreams. In this he argued that dreams were nothing more than neurotic symptoms which were actually a coded expression of sexual desires that we are repressing. The usual assumption here is that once again, as it’s Freud, all interpretations of dreams must be sexual, Freud himself debunked this saying, “The assertion that all dreams require a sexual interpretation, against which critics rage so incessantly, occurs nowhere in my Interpretation of Dreams ... and is in obvious contradiction to other views expressed in it.”According to the citation on the website where I found this quote, it was printed in the back of his 1919 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams.

When it comes to interpreting the pattern of the unconscious mind however, Freud goes back on all the nice things I’ve said and goes straight back to sex, and more importantly sexual development. Yes, we’re getting onto all things Oedipus and phallic. Freud believed sexual development is the key to the pattern of the unconscious mind. He looked at infantile sexuality, something the Daily Mail would get you done for, and concluded that it starts with an oral phase, in which pleasure is focused on the mouth. An anal stage follows, although this is not entirely explained in Kenny’s book. A little focused internet searching and a feeling of gladness that I didn’t just type “Anal Stage” into Google, turned up this “Toilet training is the child's key anal-stage experience, occurring at about the age of two years, and results in conflict between the Id (demanding immediate gratification) and the Ego (demanding delayed gratification) in eliminating bodily wastes.” If you’ve ever really enjoyed dropping the kids off at the pool, then this is why. Thanks Freud! He went on to say that the parental demands put on the child at this stage will affect them later in life. So if the parents make immoderate demands of the child, by over-emphasizing toilet training, it might lead to the development of a compulsive personality, a person too concerned with neatness and order. Toilet training can make you OCD, you heard it here last. We’ve now made it to the phallic stage where the child becomes focused on its genitals where, according to Freud, we suddenly become attracted to our mothers, jealous at our father’s possession of her. This is generally the most ridiculed of Freud’s ideas but he’d probably just say it was an unconscious desire, and the Ego is preventing the Id from getting what it wants. Fortunately for us, (and our mums), our hostility towards our fathers eventually makes us worry that he’ll castrate us, so we abandon any designs we might have on our mothers, (are you freaked out yet?) and gradually identify with our fathers. Freud did recognize that there was almost certainly a feminine equivalent of the Oedipus complex but it was never fully worked out in a convincing manner. I think he was right though, based purely on the fact that his own daughter Anna followed him into psychoanalysis to finish the work he started.

If Freud did anything he helped pioneer a philosophy of mind, he probably wouldn’t thank us for including him in a course where philosophy is the key topic, but like the empiricists he tried to understand everything and so his place here is valid. Freud would have seen himself as a scientist rather than a philosopher although when his theories have been made precise enough to allow for experimental testing, they have been shown to lack foundation. In Kenny’s book he claims that medical professionals disagree how far psychoanalytic techniques are effective forms of therapy and, if they are, where they derive their worth from. Freud has had an enormous effect on society though, in our understanding of mental illness, our appreciation of art and literature, and on interpersonal relationships of many kinds. All of us directly or indirectly have taken in a good deal of psychoanalytic theory. We often, with friends or with family, have talked unself-consciously of repression and sublimation. People who have never read Freud can quite easily identify their own and others’ Freudian slips. Kenny claims that no philosopher since Aristotle has made a greater contribution to the everyday vocabulary of psychology and morality and says that it is hard to fault the judgement of W.H. Auden who mourned Freud’s death in 28 intricate quatrains one of which he quotes and that is how I’ll end my seminar.

“If often he was wrong, and, at times, absurd,

To us he is no more a person

Now but a whole climate of opinion.”

Third WINOL - It had to get better eventually

We're not quite perfect yet but after the shambles of last week, the on time, full with packages and legal issue free WINOL we put out last Wednesday was a relief and a release. The atmosphere in the gallery and in the newsroom after the broadcast, and even the debrief, was such a contrast to the way we all felt last week.

There was some good constructive criticism to take away though. Whilst we were better prepared, something I pretty much contribute to the large amount of lists drawn up by Dom, we didn't meet all our deadline. OK so at least the broadcast went out on time this week but there's no harm in being even more prepared, the rehearsals which we missed out on last week proved invaluable even if the main outcome was the delightfully cheesy snow puns (Scores were frozen, snow way we can continue, on this this slippery slope etc). They were probably too much, even for the regional news style that we're going for but at least we weren't so stressed that we couldn't have fun with the script. We do need to do some extra work on the script though, I know for a fact that me and Dan were panicking slightly when the script didn't arrive for Dan to type into the autocue. When we got the script we attempted to copy and paste it into the autocue program which wouldn't work at first; a quick bit of computer know how and George managed to convert the word file to a compatible version using an online converter. A simple enough thing to do but well done to him for being calm and collected and sorting the issue out as quick as possible.

I learnt another skill on production as I worked on the sound desk during the broadcast. My main job in the day though was getting the headline clips and packages from the news reporters and sports which is one of the worst jobs, not because it's particularly difficult, but because you spend your entire day just bugging everyone to get the clips. I lost count of the amount of times I said, "I'm really sorry, but..." I probably didn't make any friends doing that job but at least I got it done.

In summary... YAY!! We got a good WINOL out. You can watch it here.

Second WINOL. Have we improved?

The simple answer to that question is probably a no. We had more technical issues than even the most vindictive person could imagine, I even remember Ali at one point exclaiming "I've had every technical difficulty imaginable, haven't I?" Well despite those, we still managed to get the WINOL bulletin done on ti- Oh wait no it wasn't on time either. Balls.

Remember those technical difficulties? Well they plagued us in the studio as well. We couldn't get the talkback feature working on the headsets meaning the newsreaders couldn't hear a word that was being said in the gallery. Eventually we found one headset that worked, attached to one of the cameras, meaning our editor Will had to cue the newsreaders from what he was being told by production editor Jack up in the Gallery. It wasn't an ideal situation to say the least.

We'll learn from this though and I think that's all you can do from a situation like that. We messed up. But we're still only two weeks in and we can't be perfect this early on, it's just ridiculous to put that sort of pressure on ourselves. The third years had this all last year and hopefully they understand that we can only really get better, the mistakes we make will help us to put better packages together and to pull together as a WINOL news team much better than we have done so far. In our debrief Angus said there was no sense of urgency and he was right, we're putting out a news broadcast in the hope that it becomes a real source of news for the students of Winchester and beyond, we can't let our deadlines slip.

On my part I was doing the straplines again and working from the template we had last week, I had them all finished by about 11, too late for a start but at least they were done. Suddenly though I was informed we had a new logo, meaning new straps and that I'd have to do all of them again. Annoying yes but I think I managed to pull together well and get the new straps out and to the reporters, learning a new skill in the process as I'm now able to make the straplines and put them into the reports for the reporters or show them if they're willing to take a minute to learn, (although it's bloody hard to find a moment sometimes when you're rushing to get something edited on time).

This week will be better. I'm going to really try my hardest to do my jobs as soon as I possibly can so that I'm not at fault, and then help anyone who is struggling because WINOL is a team effort, we're a news team in a news room. News team! Assemble!! (http://youtu.be/PVlXYoVZHfA)

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

First Week. First HCJ. We're back baby!

Woooooooo!!! Spring Break!!! I mean, erm, HCJ!!!! Well we're back at university and of course, it's not all fun and games. The lectures return and this year HCJ is going hard. If we thought we'd seen it all with Romanticism, Empiricism and the rest, we haven't seen anything yet.

If we're going with definitions, I'm going to need some help from my old friend Collin(s online dictionary). Modernism is defined as an early and mid twentieth century movement in art, literature and music that rejected traditional styles and techniques. Well that's all very well and good but what does it mean to us in our HCJ course and in a wider context of journalism?

The lecture had a fairly loose structure to it, taking in many of the topics we will cover in more detail later on in the course. Firstly we looked to William Randolph Hearst, one of the most influential men in the history of Journalism. To give him a brief (and I mean very brief) history, he was an extremely successful businessman, owning a newspaper chain with nearly 30 titles in major American cities at its peak, expanding later to magazines. His life story was the inspiration for the Orson Welles film, Citizen Kane which we watched after the lecture and which I will talk slightly more about after the main thrust, (possibly a poor choice of word) of my blog.

The 19th century was the paradigm of change. The paradigm of modern movement where everything relates, no idea is right and there is no real self. A lot of angst and Schopenhauer concluding that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled, (more on him later in the course, nothing like a bit of suspense). We also looked at Wagner, and heard Wagner a whole lot of a Wagner. With good reason though as we discovered his place as the overarching figure of high modernity. Head of the course Chris Horrie called Wagner's The Ring Cycle the central artefact of western culture.

The final most important character we looked at in brief was Friedrich Nietzsche whose most famous work is arguably God is Dead. I'll admit that at the moment I don't really know much about Nietzsche but I hope through the reading we have been set and the lectures I'll get to know more. I think I'll definitely need to read the Nietzsche chapters from Anthony Kenny's book and also go back to our reading from last year and Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

Lastly, I really rather enjoyed Citizen Kane. It has clearly aged but as an 'almost' documentary of William Randolph Hearst it's a invaluable source of information for us in his study. Also, Orson Welles is amazing.

This blog was slightly disjointed, as is the nature of a first lecture back. Hopefully they'll improve again and the Alexa rankings will soar or something.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.