The Stupid World Of People And Cameras

Sunday... what a day. But this day ended in my group producing the best god damn news package the world has ever seen!!!!!!!

For part of our Reporting Skills course we had to produce a minute and a half tv package on a local news story. We chose to film ours' on the Alresford Watercress Festival, which initially I wasn't too sure on but it turned out to be a great story as the streets of Alresford were rammed with watercress enthusiasts lol.

For our piece to camera we filmed Josh walking towards the camera "miked up" and telling the camera about the background of the festival. We thought this would be a relatively simple task to overcome as how hard can it really be to film twenty seconds of footage of a man walking and talking through a crowd?.... ANSWER: very hard! The stupidity of some people was amazing! At one point we had a woman stand about a metre in front of the camera lens as we were filming, and remained there even when she had noticed... stupid bitch.

If our group were to burn all of the amusing out-takes onto a disk then we would probably have a pretty decent DVD of ridiculous antics. One of the most memorable moments of the day for me was when a woman walked across Josh's path and nearly sent him flying, and because I had the headphones on I could hear everything... the poor woman was so apologetic hahaha!

A further disastrous part of the day was that when we arrived in Alresford it was absolutely tipping it down. So to counteract that move we decided to buy an umbrella and no sooner had we parted with twenty pounds for a shitty umbrella from a coffee house had it stopped raining. The staff at the coffee house found this most amusing as we walked outside and the rain ceased, so to show them how bothered we were we just walked around with the umbrella up, however this just encouraged their laughter. boo hoo.

Another amusing point to note is that we were at a watercress festival, and wait for it, we didn't film any fillers of watercress. In fact the first time watercress is mentioned in the package we cut to images of sausages on a barbeque. How stupid could we be? It was only when we played back the footage in the editing suite that we all noticed the absence of the very reason we had gone out to film in Alresford in the first place.

Despite these funny events, we managed to produce exactly what we had been asked to. As far as quality went we were pretty spot on BEEP BEEP. Although I don't know that Brian liked it too much, which was a surprise (satire). If we had included shots of watercress I feel that the package would have been almost without fault.