"My Story"

On Monday, we finally produced a decent news package for the first time. Our story was on the BBC's "My Story" campaign, which is a national campaign in which the general public are asked to retell a personal and interesting, life-changing story. Chanin, Tom, and I went down to Winchester Discovery Center, where the touring campaign was being held by BBC Solent. 

We were very much pressed for time as all of us had gone home for the weekend, so we had only Monday to arrange, film, and edit the piece; although we saw this as bad - when WINOL is up online - we will be doing this every day. 

We filmed an interview with a presenter from BBC Solent, who set the scene for the story. He was excellent, as he gave us everything we needed so that the viewer would be entertained whilst remaining informed, plus he made it easy for us due to the fact we needed to do very little editing!

A guy called Peter then gave us an interview about his story he told BBC Solent. He used to be a commercial pilot but was made homeless six months ago after the airline discovered that he suffers from Asperges. He had been living out of his car, whilst his wife and son were in St Petersberg. This was excellent for the production as it was such a sad story, which would really create the desired emotive effect within the viewer. Again, his pronunciation and delivery was second to none.

After we got the interviews we captured numerous fillers and a piece to camera with Tom. Tom's presenter voice was exceptional, and he took very few attempts at getting the final piece. The only problems we had during the filming was the fact that we were outside a library and there were small children around, which as we know in the journalism world... is a NO GO!

In the lecture today we viewed every one's packages, and I am in no way saying that ours was the best, but we definitely received the least criticism (beep beep lol). However, the criticism we did receive was things which were very obvious when we watched the footage back. An example of this can be seen in the amount of times we filmed the BBC logo; it was almost as if we were making an advertisement for the beeb. Once it was pointed out by Brian, it was almost comical the amount of times the BBC logos appeared in our package. 

In addition to this criticism, Brian played a package which South Today had made on the event, and they had interviewed the same "pilot man". This wasn't bad in itself but we had failed to mention that he was a pilot and also a sufferer of Asperges... OH DEAR. That sneaky man Brian had managed to shoot us down as these were fairly important points which we had missed out.

All in all we were very much pleased with the production. I would like to say that we knew what we were doing that day but the truth is that we didn't and it was luck that played its part in it all working out for the best. Also Chanin and Tom were great guys to work with as they remained professional and astute at all times.