My analysis of the 30/10/13 WINOL bulletin

This is a brief analysis of the bulletin from the production side of WINOL.

Director = Me
Vision mixer = Katherine
Autocue = Alex
Sound = Bracken
VT = Zeena this week but next week Kirsty

I felt that on the output the sound was too quiet in the studio, Nadine was difficult to hear but this can easily be fixed next week.

As director, I found that there is a lack of communication in the newsroom and between the production team. I tried to make myself available and able to talk to all reporters for the majority of the morning and kept asking for information and timings, basically any updates.

In the gallery, I was checking constantly that everyone was okay and trying to make all the team feel comfortable and reassure everyone. I tried as best as I could to instil confidence into everybody, in particular I wanted to ensure Zeena was comfortable – I ran through how to use the VT machine with her earlier in the day because she was standing in for Kirsty. Zeena did extremely well and listened to my advice on the VT machine so she was always ready to play the packages. I personally checked all VTs before broadcast so could adjust timings and cues accordingly – I think this worked really well. I feel that I had the strongest and clearest instructions I could possibly give for the first time in this role.

I was glad that we managed to practice the OOV three times but we ran out of time to do the coming up and I had slight difficulty with cuing that in. I have not worked with a coming up this semester.

The communication between news editor and production was extremely good this week; we need to keep this up every week. When directing, keep in control and keep being given information all day. I managed to get sport in at around 12 o clock just by badgering a little, this we should aim to do every week. *There is no excuse for sport to be late*

Script writing was much better this week with getting it in on time on the autocue so we could have a brief run through and do checks with Nadine. There is still room for improvement with this however. Getting Alex and Nadine into the studio early to sort out the green screen and camera positions worked especially well so for broadcast we could just throw them onto screen. The in studio discussion was very smooth and the pair had a natural transition into the next packages.

Improvements:

Reporters you need to tell the news editor about any changes to your packages – they are your first port of call! They are there to help and lend a hand, keep them in the loop.

I didn’t like the Wessex story at all, pictures were very weak and there was no fresh footage that we could call ours. I think it seemed that we didn’t have enough and would have been better to spike it.

 

With subbing, there is a much better improvement on SEO checks but we must remember that people doing stuff is journalism. If there are no people in your top line, I will send it back to you.

 

 

Ian’s master class after WINOL

‘No story lives unless someone wants to listen’ – J.K. Rowling

There should be three main elements to a perfect news package.

1. Every report should have a beginning, middle and end. The beginning should provide the impact, the middle the substance and the end should conclude like one big cycle.
2. For TV news, the story is in the pictures. Assemble stories on the timeline in Final Cut and use the pictures to tell the narrative.
3. Magic ingredients: NATSOT, sequences and writing to the pictures. Your script should compliment your pictures not tell the story.

Make sure you have a sequence of shots; they should be a variety of high, low and wide images.

NATSOT in the package should symbol a mood change or a section change but the entire piece must have continuity so the report flows. It should all take on a logical sense of progression.

Try to get into the action, doing what you’re talking about creates a sense of momentum and will help with the flow of the piece.

When filming someone make sure they leave the shot so when editing you can get a nice, clean cut of them entering and leaving the screen.

Use all different angles to tell the story, make sure to forward plan so you can predict the situation to achieve the best pictures.

WINOL Debrief 30/10/13 Chris Coneybeer

 

Headlines are nice and tight on this week’s bulletin but we must be careful with a voiceover over the top of the caption because both reading and listening can mislead viewers. Nadine had clear delivery and was one of the best presenters we had (in my opinion), she was calm and presented well.

JOBS story: the term ‘months of uncertainty’ is good, it’s a powerful and hard hitting phrase. This story affected hundreds of people so is good for our audience. Council GVs are difficult to make interesting but Alex did well in getting images for his story. Chris would have challenged statements to get a good angle for these types of stories; he picked up on the ‘morale remains high’ quote in particular. This package contained strong statistics, graphics are important but they must have good, clear explanations – try using animations. *DO NOT MAKE THE VIEWER WORK*

STORM story: there are local, strong images in the weather package but because it was a breaking news story we didn’t have any images of the people directly affected. Chris suggested some vox pops or sound bites from eyewitnesses.

DIANE JAMES trail, good use of internal promotion.

IMPACT STATEMENTS story it would be best to localise and perhaps use some recent cases as examples. Show us people doing stuff.

ATTEMPTED MURDER story had a lack of pictures, which is the problem with every court package. Kate had an impressively lengthy PTC and a mugshot but these stories all need planning for images, unfortunately there were a few issues with filming on location to get them this week. Chris really liked Kate referring to the judge’s statement, it broke the package up. For court stories, it is best not to stay in vision all the time but to start with the accused and end with the accused.

We must have a dramatic top line!

The book OOV was criticised by Chris as the clips confused the viewer, the juxtaposition did not work within the clips. The business section needed to be all or nothing and in the firework piece he picked up on the phrase ‘money will now go’ suggesting questions of where the money was going before.

Chris would have scrapped the Wessex story completely, we did not have our own pictures and it was scrambled together at the last minute.

For the coming up, Chris thought the script needed to be completely rewritten as there were too many words for the images and it was a bit too wordy anyway.

There was much improvement on the sports desk this week, bulletin sport had a good standard of scripting and camera work was much improved. Images were not shot wide this week and filming was steady and calm on the goals.

Lucy’s viaduct story was a good, local story with strong images. She dropped the councillor interview for an outdoor local person (an eyewitness view) which fitted perfectly into the package.

‘Sometimes you have to be brutal’

Ian’s themes to work on include:

UPSOT in headlines

Developing the stories via planning, this will help pictures

Work on producing a coherent narrative