TV News: 25 Word Pitch

We wanted to keep our 25 word pitch relevant, engaging and creative. It took us quite some time to figure it out, but in the end it came to Alex like a switch of a light bulb. -

 " Hello and welcome to THE BUNKER, Youtube's answer to debunking weird, wonderful myths and theories you may or may not even know existed."


This sentence actually came from our opening of the script but we felt that worked really nicely in terms of placement and how it generally fitted. It tells us enough and leaves us asking more of it, intrigue and excitement come to my mind when I read it. 

Workshop: After Effects - Keying

This edit workshop with Ferg was primarily based on Keying, now this is something new to me which i'd never heard of until this point. But I was keen to experiment and soak in what was being presented to us. 

                                       

So we started with looking at Keylight to key the news anchor footage onto a newsroom environment. This involved picking the green colour on the screen from the green screen - the software then removes everything that colour from the clip. Then had a little mess around with changing levels to see what worked best, what didn't, and found that even when the background appears to be a solid colour, it is still easy for shadows and alterations in light to come through. 

Then after Keylight, we looked into Luma keying, which kind of differs from Chroma key, as it makes the video transparent based on brightness rather than colour. This is extremely useful with graphics, so we played around with editing text onto a background. 

Overall I found the workshop to be creatively satisfying, giving me knowledge on such vital tools that are going to be incorporated into my work in the future. I can now apply these new learn skills into this project and hopefully with a positive outcome. 

TV News: 2nd Discussion & critiquing with Jo

So still in major limbo about the connecting narrative situation, we went into our meeting with Jo still uncertain with our final approach to this. She said straight away that we still don't have a story in respective of the E-cigs and Mythbusting, and that there needed to be another angle to it all. 

We hadn't made any progress either on boxing off interviews/interviewee's, contacting them an so forth. We had sent initial emails with no responses so Jo told us to get on the phone and make it happen. 
So I rang up one of the E-cig/Vape lounges and managed to lock down an interview within the establishment, for Wednesday 11th October. So the ball was rolling and with that confidence grew within our group. 

We eventually broke through our mind block with a new angle to focus are E-cigs narrative on. It had became apparent to me a few weeks back that there were people creating their own juice for their E-cigs, cutting the cost of purchasing branded juice, but potentially resulting with unknown health risks? Jo instantly responded with ' You have a story here now ', to which we were relieved to hear. 

Now we just needed more research on this subject matter and to start making those phone calls and asking the right questions. 

Overall this meeting was probably the most productive out of the lot, we just needed to piece together the mythbusting side of things with the humorous tones of the rest.

TV News: 1st Critique with Jo

Meeting with Jo and all the other groups was really thought provoking, allowing us all to critique one another and give constructive criticism, positive feedback an general comforting words of wisdom.

It felt like we had kind of hit a brick wall in regards to our concept, we still wanted to have the humour theme throughout but that felt as if it was being hindered by our more serious theme of the Stopober campaign/Health awareness. We spoke to Jo about what our best options should be and where we should focus on and she gave us this feedback:

- Find an actual story, which you can come at it from both sides.
- It felt like we didn't have one, and the E-cigs and stopober did not fit well at all, one needed to be the focus, not both.
- Possibly drop one? 
- Mythbusting is great but does it fit with the other narrative?

So in conclusion, the talks were productive, but we had a lot to think about in respect to what our narrative should be focusing on. It had left us in a pondering state, as to whether think of a totally different concept ensuring that we could coincide this new one with our comedic themes on the mythbusting route, or, keep with it but potentially risking the narrative of it to be dull and lacking engagement with our target audience. 
  

TV News: 1st Critique with Helen

Having established some kind of brand, theme and general concept in our group, we went into the discussion with Helen quite positively. 

We were still in two minds on what story to use for our 'Live' package and general package, so there was much to be discussed. What we also needed guidance with was our actual story, what we were going to be covering. 

Helen liked our general concept which was debunking myths, but that we just needed to research more of the surrounding themes, and look into events which would be relevant to such narratives. 

We were given further tasks to develop this concept to a greater level and understanding, these consisted of: 
- Think of a headline.
- Research more into E-cigarettes and look at the stats.
- Think about which story we want to have as the Live package.
- Research more in detail about regarding urban myths.

Overall i'm happy with mine and the groups contribution, we just have to keep going an stay motivated on this journey.

TV News: Autocue & Green Screen Workshop

In this autocue & green screen workshop, we were tasked with shooting a short, 'live' package from a press release by the RSPCA about transporting animals across Europe for slaughter. We needed to carry out some more research to shoot the piece to create a basic list of what was needed to be included in the narrative as we had time constraints. 

- The petition has now reached 1 million signatures

- According to a survey carried out by the RSPCA, 66% of the British public are appalled by live animals being transported long distances for slaughter and almost 7 out of 10 believe that animals should only be slaughtered in the country they have been reared. 

- Transported hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles as far as the middle east 

- Animals are kept in cramped, overcrowded conditions

- The European Commission is responsible for proposing legislation and making decisions across the EU and so their input is pivotal to ensure animals are being treated humanely

- The RSPCA wants to raise public awareness that will pus the EC to change the law and put an end to the treatment of animals in this way. 

We shot a short studio segment where we had Alex being the presenter, cutting to me and Katie as our correspondent at the scene of the incident. We filmed Alex's scene first, however it wasn't managed time wise very well as we over ran on just establishing the shot, so were rushed with time when filming got finally underway. 

After the green screen sequence was shot we then focused on the correspondent piece with Katie and me. Katie was the correspondent and I was a member of the RSPCA raising awareness of the issue. What was an immediate red flag was remembering your lines as the interviewer, and how difficult it can be to say everything that you need to say. We had several takes and not one of them was what we wanted. 

In the end we eventually got something that we were satisfied with as a group. Overall it highlighted what the potential struggles may be when we come to film our own live sequences and news packages. 

TV News: Camera Workshop

Today with Ferg & Sam we had a camera workshop  to help familiarise ourselves with the new Panasonic DVX 200's. Having spent the majority of summer working and not really getting much opportunity to get my hands on some filming equipment, I felt a bit rusty an with this stuff being new equipment, even more so than usual. 

These cameras had a whole wide range of new features and gadgets on in comparison to the Sony EXs we'd been previously using. The features are:

- 4K Resolution.
- VFR - Variable frame rate (Slow motion)
- Advanced image stabilisation 

We basically just a play around with the equipment for a few hours, got some footage and experimented. You could see instantly the quality level had risen even just in the viewfinder. We decided to look at the functionality of the camera and get our heads around how to use it practically i.e format the camera and grasp the basics with it before we tried anything. 

When we accomplished the basics we then decided to get some stuff shot in slow motion an so to do that we changed the frame rate, which was a pain to do, but eventually getting there and getting some footage!

Overall it was a productive day with being introduced to the new kit! I'm delighted to have the new cameras and I cant wait to get some actual footage shot on them.