WINOL bulletin 21/3/12

It was a pretty ambitious week for everyone in this bulletin. We haven’t attempted a live OB using Skype since Tom’s last term. Which is to say that no one on production had much of an idea of how to go about doing it.

Needless to say we tried to get set up as early as possible, which wasn’t helped by neither Dave nor Corin being around too help us out. We eventually found Stu in Fred Wheeler building who showed us the ropes and I’m now fairly confident we can set up a Skype call input without any assistance. We also planed on having a test run as early as possible with Lou in the field. As early as possible meant it was at about 2pm which, when we’re thinking we’ll be needing to go live with Brine at about half past wasn’t great in terms of troubleshooting.

As time went on and the Skype calls with Lou kept cutting out, it was decided that we wouldn’t risk an attempt at a live call. Instead we set up a phone line in the radio suite and captured Brine answering a couple of questions. This was then overlaid with a screen cap of Brine from a previous bulletin. The thing to learn from our first real attempt at a Skype call was that whoever is in the field needs to prepare more. If 3G won’t provide enough of a signal to keep a connection, try and find somewhere that can. This essentially comes down to prior planning, leaving a bit earlier etc. I’m not saying Lou did anything wrong with this, we were all a bit unsure of what to do and now we have a much better idea for next time.

As it was, we got the makings of a package from Lou over Youtube and pieced it together in the Newsroom, which was fine, the sound quality could have been better, but I understand there were restrictions with camera quality. This was then followed by our phone call with Brine, and then back into the studio with Chris Pines, who was to provide our balance. I think most of this has been summed up already, but to generalise: we have to better prepare our guests for what they’ll be able to do/say etc. Pines clearly thought he was going to have more time than we gave him, we could maybe have given him more but we would have to be as close as possible to the amount of time we gave Brine; otherwise we would have been imbalanced.

From a technical standpoint, this week was pretty successful, the main onscreen issue we had was a miscommunication between director and vision mixer, so we ended up with a rather put out looking Pines as we panned over to Aarran. This is fixable in post production, and was only down to the usual lack of practice. Other than that, we were lacking a credit sequence and had to stitch it on in PP, I understand that the Mac crashed as it was being made and as such wasn’t put in in time. It shouldn’t have been left that late to begin with and that’s my fault as I usually put it together, but I was distracted with OB shenanigans. I might have to delegate the credit sequence to someone else to try and avoid this happening again.

But other that the above and a couple of hiccups that occurred (vis a vis Dan's face and a drop in sound at the end) during PP; this bulletin was pretty smooth. Headlines are looking much better - there was a bit of a mix-up with what was being put into the headlines script, so next week, whoever is writing the script should check with me or Tom as to the running order. Other than that, well done everyone in the gallery and studio, and thanks to all the non-production people that continue to lend a hand, it is very much appreciated.

Only two more bulletins to go!

Power trip over.