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.