WINOL Bulletin 14/3/12

Well, this week, was not exactly our best effort so far, I thinks that's a fair statement to make. For the first time since our practice runs we overshot the 3 oclock deadline, which, let's face it, is never going to be a good thing. Obviously it was technical trouble that was the main reason it went a little tits-up: sarah's radio mic stopped being picked up, it wasn't something we've seen before as the soundboard was still showing her levels, we just weren't hearing it. As the guest editor Tom Evans said, this could have been relatively easily fixed if we just had spares ready to go. Therefore we will from now on have spares of anything we can, ready in the studio. Whilst this was the main reason we delayed, in the spare ten minutes we had, there was an amazing amount of other problems to try and fix. Not having a credit sequence being a major one, but for the most part, we had no real practice time and as a result, we were a bit stuffed in terms of simple confidence.

I keep saying it but much of it doesn't seem to get through. I need people to take headlines much more seriously than they currently are. If headlines come in late (be it vt or script) then the entire bulletin gets delayed, as we can't start practicing until they're done. There was a little confusion on Wednesday for Hettie's as we were trying to put Stephen Fry in it and there was a bit of miscommunication. When we come to. Having the written headlines, bear in mind, if you're writing them that they have to match the pictures. Ergo, if you're writing the headlines then you have to see what the pictures are. Since we were using a picture of Stephen Fry, we had to reference that. I know that George came up with a great headline, but it didn't fit with what we were going to have on screen so we couldn't use it. It's a bitch when that happens, but you have to just deal with it and keep going.

To summarise this part: headlines are a lot more important than many of you seem to realise, they advertise the entire bulletin and the sooner we get them done, the better the quality of the overall show. Basically, get headlines done as soon as you know what you want to go in them, the rest of your package can wait. We won't need your package until at least an hour after we've gotten your headline clip so I don't want to hear that you have to do something else first. Headlines first. Package second.

The general rule for scripting is that whoever is presenting, should write it, since this can change every week, I want to remind whoever it may end up being, that we want a script for the auto cue, long before the paper script. The auto cue script cannot have the boxes and grids etc that the paper one does, as they do not work on the auto cue. It also has to be saved as a 95.doc (I think. If in doubt, ask Tom) as the auto cue laptop is a relic from a past age. This week after we'd filmed the headlines we were sat around in the studio for about 20 minutes waiting for a script, which isn't really good enough.

As a whole the packages are much better from the gallery's point of view, more and more often we're getting natsot at the start and end of them, helping greatly with vision mixing etc. So great job on that, keep it up.

After I called our 10 minute delay and we fixed our audio issue, we had another one when we started in using the wrong mic. This was again, a slight miscommunication between myself and Ali and was a result of the previous technical error. Essentially, whilst Ali was getting us a new mic, we swapped George's mic to Sarah and then didn't tell Ali afterward, George then receiving the new mic. Is resulted in understandable confusion on his part when he put up the new mic, thinking it would be Sarah's. A silly mistake, and one that can easily be avoided in future as we'll already have spares to hand.

After this we restarted and had a pretty much flawless run. The only real mistake being that the OOV on NUS strikes wasn't queued and so we just had the camera on Sarah talking. Not the end of the world really as it still looked fine. Other than that, the credits could have been better timed, but that was down to us not having much practice time, and having better things to practice when we did have some. So, technical issues aside, this week was a pretty strong performance for production. We can only work with the time we're given, and all things considered the bulletin looks pretty good and with only minor post production jiggery pokery (especially compared to the previous week's bulletin).

Good job guys, let's keep it up for the last few weeks!

Power trip over.