Tuesday 8 November 2011

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.

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