This is a slightly belated review of our latest bulletin from a production point of view.
Our main problem this week was not getting the packages early, and not getting them into the gallery in good time. There’s obviously only so much we can do about when we’re given the packages. But there was far too much of a kerfuffle with getting them into the gallery. At one point I think there were four or five HDDs/ USB drives with all of the packages on. For next week, we’ll set one HDD to have the packages, and as soon as they get into the gallery they have to be put onto the desktop so that the HDD can be taken out again.
The OB helped communicate with the newsroom somewhat, though the messages tended to be a little garbled. It may be worth simply making sure someone is near to it but not necessarily sitting on it. And also if, there is a specific person the gallery wants to talk to, simply put them on. No more second hand conversations.
The filming went pretty smoothly in my opinion, we had a couple of hiccups from missed timings and changing sound levels, but they weren’t too bad. The credits at the end having no sound as my fault as I just forgot to add it.
There was a bit of a glitch in the headlines where Hettie pronounced “Winchester” in a rushed way. We should have spotted that before that point and dealt with it. Somehow we all missed it and it got cleared up in post-production.
Overall, probably our best bulletin so far, we had a fair amount of practice time which allowed us to get to grips with the VTs and allow the presenters some breathing space.
This Wednesday, I think we can do the best so far. I can’t stress how much we want headlines to come in long before packages. Both early would be great, but the earlier we can get the headlines done, the sooner we can start practicing the main bulletin.
Let’s make this a leap year to remember!
Power trip over.
Tuesday 28 February 2012
Thursday 16 February 2012
WINOL Bulletin 15/2/12 - What went right, where we went wrong, and why is this title unnecessarily long? That rhymed.
Well overall I think this weeks bulletin was a pretty convincing affair, well done to everyone for performing well under the scrutiny of the dreaded BJTC.
However, from my side of things there were definite wrinkles in the system that we need to iron out. Most importantly we had major issues with scripting, this was brought up somewhat in the debrief but I'll go over the problems again because I like the sound of my own typing: Essentially, it's taking too long, and more often than not, the scriptwriters don't know enough about the packages. what I think we're going to try and do is make sure that the reporters write links (where possible) on tuesday, maybe with a summary of the story, so that we don't have to back and forth all the time.
The biggest scripting problem we had was in the headlines. Captions not matching what's being said etc. Plus it took so long to write the headlines that we were behind on getting them filmed.
More stuff for the reporters, make sure that you're packages have a second or two at the start and end of your piece. If we don't have that then it makes it very difficult to vision mix smoothly. For an example of this, check out the start of Lou's piece, as well as Flick's. Flick, I know you tried to get one in and thanks for that, but it has to be done when you're filming you're PTC/ voiceover. That said, some of the problem on Flick's was a slight mistiming on the gallery's part (We have to make sure that the VT is rolling before we change inputs or we're left with an awkward freeze, again, check out the start of Flick's :P)
Thank you to everyone in the gallery and studio for helping out, the only real problem we had once we got going, was in sound, we have to make sure that we kill the mics when a VT is on. I know it only happened because there was confusion with the headline VT so that shouldn't happen if we have more practice time (fingers crossed for next week!).
Thank you to Ali for redoing the straps, they look much tidier now. Hopefully soon we can get some fancy ones made up with bevels edges and posh stuff like that. But as it stands, they are a huge improvements.
For anyone I haven't moaned to yet I was in tab9 until about 8pm on Wednesday because we were having so many issues uploading it. Some is down to our Macs being old and broken* and some down the file somehow ending up as being 3.3 gig. Part of that may have been me making a mistake somewhere in the post production process, but I think we'll need to seriously consider setting bar on how long the bulletin can be. I'll bring this up with Tom and Lee on Monday.
And finally we need to try and keep the WINOL2012 twitter feed free from random chat and what is essentially patting ourselves on the back which looks bad from a viewer's POV.
I think that's everything, if not I'll mention it on Monday.
Power trip over.
****In an effort to fix our broken "technology", on Monday (20/2/12) we will be doing a systematic cleanup of all the Mac desktops (with certain exceptions). Anything saved on them at that time will be deleted so if there's anything you want to save, get it onto a hard-drive. You can book them out for a month at a time and keep renewing them so there's no excuse.
However, from my side of things there were definite wrinkles in the system that we need to iron out. Most importantly we had major issues with scripting, this was brought up somewhat in the debrief but I'll go over the problems again because I like the sound of my own typing: Essentially, it's taking too long, and more often than not, the scriptwriters don't know enough about the packages. what I think we're going to try and do is make sure that the reporters write links (where possible) on tuesday, maybe with a summary of the story, so that we don't have to back and forth all the time.
The biggest scripting problem we had was in the headlines. Captions not matching what's being said etc. Plus it took so long to write the headlines that we were behind on getting them filmed.
More stuff for the reporters, make sure that you're packages have a second or two at the start and end of your piece. If we don't have that then it makes it very difficult to vision mix smoothly. For an example of this, check out the start of Lou's piece, as well as Flick's. Flick, I know you tried to get one in and thanks for that, but it has to be done when you're filming you're PTC/ voiceover. That said, some of the problem on Flick's was a slight mistiming on the gallery's part (We have to make sure that the VT is rolling before we change inputs or we're left with an awkward freeze, again, check out the start of Flick's :P)
Thank you to everyone in the gallery and studio for helping out, the only real problem we had once we got going, was in sound, we have to make sure that we kill the mics when a VT is on. I know it only happened because there was confusion with the headline VT so that shouldn't happen if we have more practice time (fingers crossed for next week!).
Thank you to Ali for redoing the straps, they look much tidier now. Hopefully soon we can get some fancy ones made up with bevels edges and posh stuff like that. But as it stands, they are a huge improvements.
For anyone I haven't moaned to yet I was in tab9 until about 8pm on Wednesday because we were having so many issues uploading it. Some is down to our Macs being old and broken* and some down the file somehow ending up as being 3.3 gig. Part of that may have been me making a mistake somewhere in the post production process, but I think we'll need to seriously consider setting bar on how long the bulletin can be. I'll bring this up with Tom and Lee on Monday.
And finally we need to try and keep the WINOL2012 twitter feed free from random chat and what is essentially patting ourselves on the back which looks bad from a viewer's POV.
I think that's everything, if not I'll mention it on Monday.
Power trip over.
****In an effort to fix our broken "technology", on Monday (20/2/12) we will be doing a systematic cleanup of all the Mac desktops (with certain exceptions). Anything saved on them at that time will be deleted so if there's anything you want to save, get it onto a hard-drive. You can book them out for a month at a time and keep renewing them so there's no excuse.
Saturday 11 February 2012
8/2/12 Bulletin Feedback - Don't You Talkback to me!
Okay, looking at the debrief of our last bulletin with Mike Smartt as our guest editor, we were giving a pretty thorough look at each of our stories.
Starting at the top, Eddie’s coverage of the Harry Redknapp trial was a great achievement and gave WINOL something more of a national look to it so well done Eddie and Nathan for getting that sorted out. It’s possible that the piece to camera was a touch rushed and somewhat unnecessary I.e. “I’m here at Southwark crown court…” but I think considering everything it was a triumph. From the production side of things, it’s unlucky that the footage was stretched off the screen. I think this was down to the footage being MP4 instead of a .MOV. Also, it’s worth remembering that we borrowed sound from (ITV?) for the Redknapp clips, something that is perfectly allowed and could be very helpful should we want to do something similar again.
The Sea City, housing, sport and giraffe packages were all very well put together and in good time. The Brine piece was, according to Mike Smartt not really a story, and although it did have a pretty good quote “Education, it’s not damn good enough” he has a point, Tory has a crack at Labour isn’t anything new, and in future we should be sure that we have something definitively newsworthy. We’ve got the contacts, so lets wring ‘em dry.
I’m not going to go into too much detail on each packeage as Tom has already been through this on his blog. I will say that most of you are becoming much more confident with editing and this can only improve. Everyone was really excellent in terms of meeting the Tuesday deadline and if we can keep this up every week, we’ll be putting the BBC to shame! Obviously some stories were still going on the Wednesday, but only really because others had fallen through or extra balance is needed. This is exactly why we ask for them to be in on Tuesday. It allows extra wiggle room without the whole bulletin collapsing. So don’t worry if that’s the case. If however you have all of you’re footage together on Tuesday, there’s no reason it can’t be done before Wednesday.
For the production team, our major issue was the script. It took far too long to get a script together, both for the autocue, and hard copies. This should be easy to take care of as long as we can come up with a system for producing them. As a last resort back-up I may start using my iPad as a script for the presenters to use, so that they can practice without having to wait on file conversions, printing etc.
I liked that most of the packages had straps by Tuesday, whilst it is a very simple thing to make it saves us that little bit extra time on Wednesday. On the same vein, we have to make absolutely sure that each strap is correct, we had a close shave on Wednesday when we had a misspelled headline strap which got past us until just before we filmed the headlines. Not acceptable, I understand it was only human error, but we’re better than that.
Our talkback also conked out halfway through the bulletin, most likely because of dead batteries, so that’s a pretty simple fix, we just have to be sure to check.
Very well done to Nicola for directing you‘re definitely getting into the swing of it, one thing I’d suggest is to make sure that you are constantly talking to everyone in the gallery and in the studio. Nothing will, or should, happen without you’re telling them.
Thanks very much to Sean for helping out two weeks running, you’re definitely becoming a real asset and hopefully we can find more interesting roles for you than babysitting a camera in a freezing studio!
Sam had a lot of patience with what was an annoying headline to film, from a sound point of view, so thanks for being a good sport. And no problems at all during the bulletin.
Ali did well in filling in several roles during the day which I know was very stressful, but honestly you need to calm down a little as you can get very flustered. Sometimes just take a step back to think things through.
All in all well done to everyone and thanks for all of you’re help, especially Graham, Dan and George for stepping in to fill in spare roles despite already having a hectic day.
Oh and cheers Henry. As with last week you were really useful in simply being there to solve various problems during the day.
I really hope I haven’t forgotten anybody…
Oh well. Power trip over.
Wednesday 8 February 2012
Long Lost WINOL Games!!
I was rooting through the corpse of a bandit when I found a strange key, this key led me to a Dwemer artifact called an "External Hard-drive" in which there resided an episode of WINOL Games thought lost foerver. Our heroes, Ewan and Graham play Skyrim... with a twist.
Monday 6 February 2012
Post Bulletin Malaise - 1/2/12
Okay it's been about three and a half hours since we were supposed to start our first real bulletin of the new order. I say "supposed to"because we missed our three o'clock deadline and due to a variety of difficulties, we didn't get going until 10 minutes or so later. but let's start with the basics, what went wrong before...
Well firstly I think it;s obvious and fair to say that, as a group, we've never produced a bulletin before (at least not from top to bottom), and despite mine (Production Editor) and Tom's (News Editor) decision to make Tuesday evening the deadline for packages (with the exception of stories that needed interviews etc on Wednesday), there were several unfinished packages that, altogether, held up the bulletin. think of it like a car on the motorway, the car at the front of a long line of other cars, stops and the car behind him brakes as does the car behind him, until the guy at the back ends up stopping for 25 minutes as a result of everyone else's accumulated stop time. I'm not going to say that every late package was a diabolical error on the author's part, it's just that every little thing builds up. Frankly if the same types of problems occur again, then the guilty packages will not be put into the bulletin. We just can't wait for them every week.
The biggest setback we had was that we didn't have the time for a full run-through of the bulletin. That is really terrible and means we have issues such as incorrect autocue script, and a general lack of practice for the presenters. If we can get the packages in on Tuesday, we can get the straplines done quickly, and then we can get the headlines done as early as possible. which means more practice, and a better end product.
-------------------
As of the Monday debrief, extra points to consider have come up.
Firstly the opening sequence will need to be replaced/ redone, as done the voice of god clip. Also everyone will need to doublecheck the grammar of their scripts and written pieces most importantly when it comes to subject-verb agreement (especially the 'case' of a phrase) and using collective nouns. There were also some black holes in the bulletin which I think were down to miss-timings of the VT and Vision Mixer machines. However they should have been clipped out in post production which was my mistake for not seeing them.
From a news package side. We apparently did not have consent for some of our clips, as consent cannot be given when the subject is drunk. Also, the was a point when someone appeared to give a rude gesture (involving certain fingers), which was very bad. In reality it was not a rude gesture, but if an audience member thinks it is, then we're going to look bad.
The best thing to do at this point is learn from our mistakes, and be better. Our bulletin on the 8th February will be our first with a guest editor judging us, and we can't afford to look bad.
Let's step up our game and crack on this week.
Power trip over.
Well firstly I think it;s obvious and fair to say that, as a group, we've never produced a bulletin before (at least not from top to bottom), and despite mine (Production Editor) and Tom's (News Editor) decision to make Tuesday evening the deadline for packages (with the exception of stories that needed interviews etc on Wednesday), there were several unfinished packages that, altogether, held up the bulletin. think of it like a car on the motorway, the car at the front of a long line of other cars, stops and the car behind him brakes as does the car behind him, until the guy at the back ends up stopping for 25 minutes as a result of everyone else's accumulated stop time. I'm not going to say that every late package was a diabolical error on the author's part, it's just that every little thing builds up. Frankly if the same types of problems occur again, then the guilty packages will not be put into the bulletin. We just can't wait for them every week.
The biggest setback we had was that we didn't have the time for a full run-through of the bulletin. That is really terrible and means we have issues such as incorrect autocue script, and a general lack of practice for the presenters. If we can get the packages in on Tuesday, we can get the straplines done quickly, and then we can get the headlines done as early as possible. which means more practice, and a better end product.
-------------------
As of the Monday debrief, extra points to consider have come up.
Firstly the opening sequence will need to be replaced/ redone, as done the voice of god clip. Also everyone will need to doublecheck the grammar of their scripts and written pieces most importantly when it comes to subject-verb agreement (especially the 'case' of a phrase) and using collective nouns. There were also some black holes in the bulletin which I think were down to miss-timings of the VT and Vision Mixer machines. However they should have been clipped out in post production which was my mistake for not seeing them.
From a news package side. We apparently did not have consent for some of our clips, as consent cannot be given when the subject is drunk. Also, the was a point when someone appeared to give a rude gesture (involving certain fingers), which was very bad. In reality it was not a rude gesture, but if an audience member thinks it is, then we're going to look bad.
The best thing to do at this point is learn from our mistakes, and be better. Our bulletin on the 8th February will be our first with a guest editor judging us, and we can't afford to look bad.
Let's step up our game and crack on this week.
Power trip over.
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