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.