TV News - Content Research

Story ideas:

For our stories, our first brainstorm was to do with sleep disorders and climate change. To help research into why we should do this story, I looked into sites that explored 'new' sleep research about disorders and more. 

This research (in my links at the bottom of the page) helped us to form what would be our final story about sleep disorders. This research included general facts and statistics about sleep disorders, while others showed a darker side to sleep disorders, with one website showing that '24% - 31% of men and 9% - 21% of women have obstructive sleep apnea...'. These statistics shocked us, so, we decided to push that story to be a larger part of our package.

For another initial story, a story was climate change, however, we didn't really do much research into it as we couldn't really make it fit with our other story.

Jack later came to us with the idea of veganism and about how we could explore if veganism is just something for the wealthy or something that could be for everything. To do this, Jack suggested we make it our live segment.

Location and contributor scouting:

For locations and contributors, Carla took this main role. She first reached out to Medway Maritime Hospital as she knew they had a sleep clinic there, she reached out to one of the head of staff there to request an interview, which was confirmed a few days later. 

For the veganism piece, she also reached out to cafe Nucleus, a vegan-friendly cafe in Chatham high street. Cafe Nucleus was also a good choice for us as they supported a creative arts charity, so they were more than happy to let us film our news piece there.

Also, for contributors, Jack managed to get one of his roommates, Victor, to be our contributor for our vegan piece. Jack explained that Victor was a vivid carnivore and we could use him for our experiment type piece where we would give him two meat options and two 'substitute' vegan options of the exact same food and see if he could taste the difference, as well as getting his opinion to see if he would either cut down or meat or incorporate more substitutes into his diet.

Carla managed to get two contributors, one was a top lady a the hospital, who we were interviewing about sleep disorders and new research they had done on the subject. Also, as a backup Carla reached out to one of her friends, who personally suffers from a sleep disorder, this was in case the interview didn't go right or we need to change our plan later down the line.

Branding - logo and color

For our initial ideas into branding myself, Carla and Jack brainstormed several ideas, including:

Healthy Life / Healthy Line

BAN (Body Awareness News)

While we all agreed to BAN as it fitted with our chosen topics of sleep disorders and environment, we explained it to Helen who told us that it sounded like our news station had been banned. While Jack reasoned that it would draw interest towards the channel as people would want to know more about it, Helen wasn't on-board with the name, so we decided to brainstorm more about it.

We later came to like the name 'Mind, Body and Soul News', abbreviated to MBS News as it fitted it to our newly changed stories being veganism (brainstormed by Jack) and sleep disorders, our initial idea brainstormed by Carla.

For our brand, as it was about the mind and body, we focused on choosing colors that represented that. We went for blue and green, two complementary colors. Green represents new life, nature as well as growth and harmony, while blue represents trust and wisdom, which would show to our audience that our stories could be trusted and were researched heavily beforehand to make sure the truth was in our stories.

For inspiration for colours and types of logos we could look towards doing, we went through google images and found these as references/inspirations:




Following this research into possible looks for our logo designs and colors, Jack came up with the idea of creating a heart with a leaf coming out of the top to represent what our news station stood for. To us, the heart represented self-love/care which connected to our topics as both topics were aimed at making someone see a healthier way forward. The leaf also represented new growth and life, which can be applied to our topics as growth towards a healthier lifestyle and sleep cycle can be very beneficial to our audience.

However, once we got closer to designing the website, we decided on a logo change due to time constraints as more of our focus had gone onto preparing our shoot days and filming. We changed our logo to be the one on the website, a lotus flower with water beneath it.

After some research, I actually found that a lotus flower, in Buddist culture, it represents spiritual enlightenment, purity and rebirth. This tied into the message of our news station as we wanted to show stories that would help others to try new things and raise awareness, which could lead to them being in a better place. For the water lines underneath, more research told us that water indicates cleansing, freedom and life, all key messages as part of our news station.

For the colours for this new logo, we decided to go with brown for the outline and the inside be white. The colour brown represents stability and support, something represented in ur news piece by providing the audience with support through our stories. We chose white as it represents purity, something which our logo, being a lotus flower, shows.

Website:

Closer towards the ending of editing, I was given the duty of creating the website for our piece by Carla. As I had already done website creation before for my on portfolio work I felt well suited for it. To start the website creation, I went on Wix, which is a tool to help create your own website, one of the templates I found matched perfectly which the colors and ideas we had for our project.

For the front page of the website, I decided to keep the color scheme to a simple white and brown as it fits in with our scheme. Behind the logo there was already an animation of soft waves behind it, once again, fitting in perfectly.

In the picture below (top image), it shows a quote towards the bottom of the waves. As we decided to put our logo and full radio name towards the middle of the page, we thought it would be a great place to put a quote that would link well to what our news focused on. After some brief researching on quotes to do with healthy living. I found a quote from Buddha that fit well (bottom image) with the awareness we were trying to give our audience with our stories.

Below our logo and title, I included what our news station was and it's purpose. I also included our promo video there in order to give our viewers some more insight into what our piece was about.

I chose to this here instead of onto a separate page as I noticed while I was editing the website, and then later as I was reviewing the website when I first published it, was that as you scroll down the age there is the logo section and then just a blank page.

I went back into editing to see if I could make the page smaller, but that wasn't possible. So I decided to move over the original 'About MBS' page to underneath the logo and then put the promo video underneath.

Promo video:

For the promo video, this was the last thing we did and we left it until the last minute (not a wise move for us). But I was in charge of creating the video, however, Carla did give some ideas onto what she wanted to see from the promotional video.

Carla said she wanted the background to be calm and peaceful, almost symbolizing the calmness of the news piece. Then, she spoke about getting three images, one of the body, spirit, and mind. These were to represent the abbreviated name of our news piece: Mind, Body, and Soul. Carla also said about placing a small info pice underneath each picture to explain more of what we planned to help your audience with. I also placed our logo at the end.

Research sources:

Ravenscroft, D. (2019). Lotus Flower Meaning and Symbolisms in Buddhism, Hinduism & Egyptology. [online] Lotus Flower Meaning. Available at: https://www.lotusflowermeaning.net/ [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019].

Reference. (2019). What Does Water Symbolize in Literature?. [online] Available at: https://www.reference.com/world-view/water-symbolize-literature-5e957247ad9e93aa [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019].

99designs. (2019). Color meanings and the art of using color symbolism - 99designs. [online] Available at: https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips/color-meanings/ [Accessed 11 Nov. 2019].

ScienceDaily. (2019). Sleep Disorder Research News. [online] Available at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/health_medicine/sleep_disorders/ [Accessed 12 Nov. 2019].

The Sleep Advisor. (2019). 54 Shocking Sleep Statistics, Data and Trends Revealed for 2019. [online] Available at: https://www.sleepadvisor.org/sleep-statistics/ [Accessed 12 Nov. 2019].