WINOL PRODUCTION: Week 1

For the second part of the semester I have started working on the production team with Winchester News Online. I am acquiring new skills, which adds to my ever-growing and impressive BJCT accredited skills. The prior skills I had before moving over to production include reporting skills, camera use, editing skills, etc and all of these are transferable skills to some extent, which have only helped me more quickly adapt to life on production.

The first week of being on production everyone's efforts were firmly focused on our live election broadcasting. Here I mixed production skills with basic beat reporting skills as we prepared for what is set to be our biggest venture on Winchester News Online to date. The first week I was assigned the task of going out and filming numerous constituency profiles so that on the night of the election we would have VTs to showcase the constituencies to provide background and political history of areas in the south. The constituencies I covered was the Meon Valley and all of the Portsmouth seats. I was particularly proud as my Meon Valley profile contained interview shots of which I had taken for my Gonzo journalism piece, and as it transpired George Hollingbery (the interviewee) won the seat for the Conservatives. In addition to this I was very pleased with all of my piece to cameras and general views, all of which were shot in interesting locations such as inside the Spinnaker tower or by the ferry port.

As well as profiling my assigned constituencies, I also helped Chanin film his areas. For this we pretty much travelled from one side of Hampshire to the other, which was rather tiring. We profiled Hampshire East in the east over to New Forest in the west. These also turned out very well as again we shot a variety of interesting shots, which included Chanin doing a PTC in front of Fawley power station.

After we filmed the footage, which was collated over nearly three days, we then moved over to production side and edited our packages. Depsite the fact that I had hours of footage, I often found myself short for decent GVs. AN example of this was my footage captured inside the Spinnaker tower, which despite being breathtaking shots, were often jumpy or the panning was too fast. These factors aside, Chanin and I were pleased with our work, which combined a good mixture of eye-pleasing general views with an equal amount of information, and history and heritage of all our assigned constituencies.