WINOL Games 2

Completely forgot to post this. Just thought I'd throw up the second WINOL Games on the blog in a shameless attempt to get it more hits. Tell your friends!




Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL No. 819411771380228...

It's getting to the stage in the year when WINOL is becoming much more of a drag. We've been working hard on making WINOL the best it can be and now, here we are nearing the Christmas break and knowing that the 3rd years will be done with WINOL soon doesn't make this any easy for them or us. Still, we had a bulletin to do and nothing has stopped us from doing one yet. After directing the week before I took a bit of a backseat for this WINOL, going back to doing strap lines and collecting packages etc.

We had a few really good pieces but we started with an in studio guest (Becky) talking about youth unemployment which was a good story but why didn't we have a package was the question Angus asked. We finally got a court story into the bulletin which was brilliant but what we had wasn't really a story for television, essentially it was the conviction of a paedophile and all we could do was show a picture of him and have Flick doing her piece to camera which was a very difficult thing for her to do. It had to be legally watertight which it was but during the debrief on Monday it emerged that something wasn't quite right. As we did last year, the first years watch WINOL on Thursday or Friday with Brian and during Gareth's link they all looked interested and the tone of the piece was right but Brian said some of the first years sniggered during Flick's piece to camera. I instantly went "They laughed at paedophiles" but Brian went on to say they laughed because the tone was wrong, and it was in a way, perhaps it needed a touch more gravitas but it's a hard skill to learn to do an effective piece to camera on a story like that. Laughing at it just seems wrong, even though the tone was slightly off.

I think generally we've been getting better week after week. I'm really pleased to have worked on a programme like WINOL. You really do feel part of a team and hopefully that will help when it comes to our November 30th production, a whole day almost of broadcasting. I'm sure everything we've done this year will stand us in good stead when it comes down to it.

I honestly don't have anything more to say on this week. We had some other comments about a possible Section 8 issue but it was never going to be a problem.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL 9/11/11 - I dun directed

Another week of WINOL is upon us and this time, like George and Daniel before me. I had to direct. Well since all (and all is a pretty odd term to use here as there's only three of us, it's technically correct but yeah, stuff) the newbies in the production team had directed bar me, it was only fair I step up. Not that I wanted to though. I was terrified at the thought of having to be in control of the bulletin. OK so I was relying on others to do their job so that we could get the best rehearsal time in possible, but when it came to the actual bulletin I had about 10 or so people relying completely on me. We tried to do some fairly complicated things as well which didn't quite come off but as an exercise for the 30th were very valuable. The most useful and also the most complicated was having Tom live in London for an outside broadcast (OB). To do this, Tom had to be by an internet connection and in fact, used the free Wi-Fi of a popular coffee shop chain. During the day this seemed to be fine, the connection was good, sound was good and Tom seemed in high spirits. By the end of the broadcast it was a different matter. The connection to Tom had worsened significantly by the time WINOL went out and the answers Tom gave, whilst we knew they were good, were near impossible to understand. It meant we had to use footage that Tom recorded in the day of the protesters and his piece to camera.

The rest of the bulletin went fairly smoothly until the sports handover, it went well handing from news to sport but on the way back, a miscommunication from the gallery to Jack who was on camera 2 meant we had camera 2 zooming out and then swinging round and zooming in on the news presenter again. As I remember it, I said camera 3 and cue Cara and George, but it may have stayed on camera 2. We have the luxury of post production however and were able to re-film the handover after finishing the rest of the bulletin. It's good to have this luxury but we need to only use it if it's absolutely necessary. BBC News at 10 doesn't have that luxury and we're aiming to be as professional as we possibly can as students with near industry standard equipment.

I practiced the directing that week on Sportsweek on the Tuesday which was a lot of fun. It's a professional program the same as WINOL but because you're just recording the links it tends to be a lot more relaxed in the gallery. I was very nervous about directing but I'm glad I've done it. I feel I could have done better but maybe that will just inspire me to do it again and do a much better job of it.

With WINOL we have a very split audience. The stories that we ran worked well but the people watching can range from students like ourselves to Professors of politics. OK so a story about Chris Huhne's opinion on the eurozone is great from our perspective and someone interested in politics would love it, but we didn't sell it right. We said 'Eastleigh MP' which of course he is but Brian was telling us what the first years thought and some of them just assumed he was a random local MP rather than a cabinet minister which is a big deal for us.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Sepp Blatter - Step Ladder

Pretty self explanatory title there, I'm going to talk about Sepp Blatter, the FIFA President since 1998 and at the moment caught in a storm of controversy over comments he made about racism in football. Essentially he said that football doesn't have a problem with racism, or at least that's the way his words have been interpreted. "There is no racism [on the field], but maybe there is a word or gesture that is not correct," Blatter told CNN. "The one affected by this should say this is a game and shake hands." Now whilst this may seem harmless enough what you have here is the president of an international football federation saying that any racism on the pitch can be solved with a handshake.

The BBC reported the angry reaction of some footballers including England Defender Rio Ferdinand who tweeted "Tell me I have just read Sepp Blatter's comments on racism in football wrong....if not then I am astonished." Former Spurs striker Garth Crooks also commented saying "Clearly Sepp Blatter is a man who's never suffered from racism," he went on to say "I'm shocked and somewhat dismayed." The original statement from Blatter came on the same day as Liveverpool striker Luis Suarez was charged by the FA for alleged racist comments made towards Manchester United defender Patrice Evra. The accusation is denied by both player and club and Suarez says he will plead not guilty to the charge. England and Chelsea captain John Terry is also at the centre of an investigation following allegations made against the player that he used a racist slur towards QPR defender Anton Ferdinand.

Today though Blatter has said he will not quit despite calls for his resignation from a large number of British players, managers, administrators and politicians. He has apologised to the BBC saying "It hurts and I am still hurting because I couldn't envisage such a reaction," he went on to say "When you have done something which was not totally correct, I can only say I am sorry for all those people affected by my declarations." Chelsea manager Andre Villas Boas is supportive of Blatter however, saying to the BBC "To put in doubt the leadership of Sepp Blatter as FIFA president is not for me to say or managers to say." Another supporter of Blatter's decision to stay on and fight is current Minister of Human Settlements of South Africa and anti-Apartheid activist, Tokyo Sexwale (no really). "It takes a big man to say 'I'm sorry'," said Sexwale "In Fifa, we kick the football and not the man."

What worried me most about the whole thing was not Blatter's comments, whilst ill-timed and possibly offensive. What worried me was that the media reportage of this incident has come almost entirely from this country. Why are other countries not as upset or affected? The BBC's chief football writer Phil McNulty tweeted "Getting quite a few tweets from people suggesting Blatter's words only headline news in England/Britain. In which case we should be proud." I think it's time people were a little more proud of the media we have in Britain.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/15782265.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/15757165.stm

WINOL Experiences - 1st and 2nd November

This weeks WINOL was one of the hardest so far technically. The three news headlines all had a piece of upsot in them, making the timing on the headlines extremely important. The rehearsal time for these was vital as the director, Daniel this week, had to cue our presenter in exactly the right place so that they could finish their headline by the time the upsot came in. Upsot is essentially a telly term for a piece of an interview in the headlines where the sound comes up after the newsreader has said their line. The production schedule we have is working well because even if we're slightly late on some of the deadlines, as long as we're aiming for those times the schedule does allow us to be up to half an hour late, maybe even an hour in some cases.

First though we had WINOL Life which as a whole is less stressful beforehand, no struggling for packages and straplines for example, but during the broadcast it's a completely different beast. The One Show like style we're going for means the guest editor and guest on the show really could say anything and it's up to our presenters to deal with it. This week our guest was the lovely Elizabeth Barnett, the editor of Hampshire Life magazine. Having a guest on is great and makes it seem a lot more professional in a way as it's not just us going, "Look how lovely our features look." You can watch WINOL Life here and it's definitely worth a watch, especially if you think the only output this University has is the Wednesday bulletin. The episode is technically difficult because of the amount of cameras and microphones we use. It means the director has to be really on the ball with a good team around them, someone who really knows how to use the vision mixer is essential as the camera switches from a close up on the guest to a shot of both sofas, and then close ups of the presenters. We even plugged another camera in to the system in order to have one of feature writers, Becky and George one of presenters get up to do some yoga. The sound desk is complicated on a WINOL Life as well. I was on sound that week and I remember someone saying to me the other day that sound must be easy on WINOL Life because you can just leave the mics up. If anything it's the opposite. The only mics that are practically on the whole time are the presenters Hannah and George and the guest, although during packages even theirs have to be taken down. Becky started on one mic and Ewan off camera had another, once Becky finished her yoga piece her mic had to be taken down straight away as she swapped it to either Cara or Jake and the same goes for Ewan after he chatted about WINOL Games. The sound of the VTs also have to be tweaked as they all have completely varying sound levels. In the yoga piece I had to keep a close eye on the levels as the piece swapped between voice overs and natural sound and interviews actually recorded at the time instead of being dubbed over.

The actual WINOL broadcast was quite smooth this week and we were fairly pleased with how it all went. The stories we had with an exclusive interview with local MP Steve Brine and the coverage of Occupy Bournemouth showed a really good side to WINOL. We had a BJTC inspection on that day with the head of the BJTC and at one point he said we were really lucky to have got those stories. Thankfully Angus stepped in at this point to say it was anything but luck. We all work really hard on WINOL and when Julie brings in an interview with Steve Brine it's not luck it's serious hard graft. Same goes for stories like the Occupy Bournemouth package, Ali went down two days in a row with Flick helping one day and George the next. I'd like to make clear though now about an issue nearly all the first years picked up on which sadly wasn't an issue. In the Steve Brine interview he makes a throwaway comment when asked about whether the voting 'rebellion' was a humiliation for the Tories saying, "Ed Miliband has his own humiliations on a daily basis in this place." A huge amount of the first years then went on to blog about how we had defamed Red Ed and were in serious trouble. Firstly, had there been any real issue of defaming Miliband then Chris and Brian wouldn't have let the story go ahead. Secondly he is an MP and whilst this doesn't mean he can say what he likes, standing on the Parliament grounds he is near enough covered by parliamentary privilege. Lastly and I think most importantly, someone saying that Ed Miliband is humiliated on a daily basis is comment, he's not stating it as a fact with bogus information, he's just commenting and 'Fair Comment' is one of the best defences in a libel case. Not the absolute best of course, for a refresher on libel and defamation, head this way OBVIOUS LINK. I was on the usual jobs, making straplines, collecting headline clips or packages and the like. I really feel now that I could do any job on production, only directing left to try.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Philosophy of Language - My 100th Post

My my, has it really been 100 blogs full to the brim with Anchorman references and pseudo intelligent ramblings? Well according to my Blogger, yes it has. Some of these blogs were published and then taken away in a more lucid moment once I'd seen how terrible the writing was, but 100 blogs nonetheless. To continue the trend, here's yet another blog in which I attempt to understand philosophy and boy was this one difficult.

I'm going to throw you in right at the deep end by asking you to think about this statement for a second: 'The present King of France is bald'. May not seem earth shattering on your first look but is the statement true or false? Is it even meaningless? The first thing to consider is that there is no present King of France, making the statement false, but the negation of this statement, 'It is not true that the present King of France is bald' and its logical equivalent 'The present King of France is not bald' are no more true than the original statement, even though that is also false. Some philosophers would suggest this makes the statement meaningless, especially since it fails to refer, even though it seems to mean something we can clearly understand. Confused yet, because by this point in Anthony Kenny's book, my head was spinning. This is without a doubt the hardest philosophy we've had to do so far but it's also one of the most important. The logic that you need to solve problems like this was what gave us the ability to programme today's computers. Whenever your computer crashes, you have to ctrl+alt+delete, you get the spinning wheel of death or the computer just gives up on you, it probably means you asked to do something that it couldn't process logically.

I really enjoyed the seminar this week though as the discussion we had really helped me gain an understanding of the subject. The lecture and the reading only succeeded in confusing me but the examples we used in the seminar, whilst still confusing, definitely helped me. I felt that the most interesting thing whilst looking at the philosophy of language was its influence on the computer world. To think that if we had stuck with the Aristotelian logic of, 'All men are mortal, Aristotle is mortal therefore Aristotle is a man' you wouldn't be reading this blog, and arguably you'd be better off. It helped me understand the sense and reference mode of logic that can make even nonsense statements have sense... yeah exactly, that shouldn't work. The phrase, "The morning star is the same as the evening star" is stupid when viewed logically because the morning star and the evening star are both Venus, however you can understand it. You take the sign and the word and come up with the sense with a reference which is the connection you make in your mind. In works of fiction we force a reference onto things that can have no reference to make them understandable. The meaning of a sentence arises from its structure, the predicate (or an object) gives the subject meaning and then we are able to understand it.

To deal with this sort of logic and the philosophy of language, you can't become hung up on the nominal meaning of words like a school teacher would. You need to be thinking about it with cold hard logic of a computer. The phrase "There is nobody on the road" seems simple enough, but it could mean a whole host of things to a computer, it is not logical enough. If there's nobody on the road does that mean there's somebody? Is it just this road or all roads? This can only work if you say "For all possible roads, on this one there is a man. False." Computers work in true or false, in binary in fact. Phrases like "you're evil" have absolutely no meaning to a computer, first you would have to define what evil is. You need to have the three elements of language (words, grammar and syntax) for a sentence to make any sense at all. The main philosophers of language, Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell all see music as the perfect language because it is logical and has grammar and syntax.

As a final point, a statement becomes truer with the more sources of verification there are so if, as in the seminar, you decide that all people who wear blue shirts are evil (I was wearing a blue shirt, read what you will into that) the statement would need to define what evil was, but if you could do that then you would only need to find more examples of where someone in a blue shirt was evil to make your statement truer. It was AJ Ayres who said "The truth of the statement is the verification." Probably with the italics.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.