TV News - Evaluation

Brainstorming:

Shortly after our briefing, we got into a group that consisted of myself, Carla and Jack and began brainstorming about possible ideas for our piece. The three ideas we could pick from (we could either do one story or do two) were environment, sleep or veganisim.

Our first initial ideas, environment, came from a newspaper article Carla had read which talked about petrol possibly coming to an end in just sixteen years. We ran with this initial idea as environment and it's protection are big in the media at the moment, with Greta Thunberg being a widely talked-about advocate at the time of researching for our stories.

Jack came up with a story idea for veganisim as he had already done some research into the topics, prompting him to want to create a historical focused piece of how it was perceived back in the 1980's hen it first came about compared to now, where more people are adopting a vegan lifestyle. During his 'pitch' to us, he talked about the effects of not eating enough plant-based foods such as vegetables, which gives us a source of vitamins and how it can led to health problems, including sleep deprivation.

So, after going through it all with everyone, we decided to run veganisim and sleep as our two stories as they tied directly together and represented what our brand stood for and the message we wanted to give to our audience.

Roles:

For this project, we need we hard to work hard to get the piece researched, shot and edited in just a 7 week turnaround, one of the quickest units we've had so far. In order to make this possible, we divided the roles as evenly as possible between us so we all had something to do.

All:

Story research

Producers

Risk assessments

Myself:

Website and promo video - was originally going to be all of us, but Carla asked me to take up that role while they ere out filming on days were it only needed to be a 2-person shoot

Sound

Shot list - for sleep piece only as we already had an idea for the vegan pice as we could only do that section in one take

Set design

Assistant director

Audio transcript of meeting with interviewer at Medway hospital

Carla:

Main story script

Locations and contributor contact

Call sheets and consent forms

Rough edit

Director

Reporter

Jack:

Live story script

Presenter - only for the live piece

DOP - Director of Photography

Fine cut editor

Graphics - card labels for names of interview/interviewees underneath them during the news piece

I feel we were given roles that we felt comfortable with doing and, due to our good group dynamics, we always helped each other if we needed it, making for a much better working experience.

Brand and target audience

After securing what two ideas we were taking forward into our piece, we had to pick out our branding next.  For our initial ideas we crated a mood board to pick out the colours that would be best to represent our brand and what we stood for, during this, we found that the colours that were the most widely used ono logos were blue and green, two light but contrasting colours, making it pleasing to look at, which is what we wanted.

For our audience, we decided to aim our piece at 18 - 35 year olds. Carla suggested the idea and pitched to us that during the time are within this age bracket, you are more likely to be reasoned to changing or adapting something, compared to when you are over the age of 35 and have become more resistant to change. This was important to us as we needed to spread awareness of a healthy lifestyle and it's benefits.

To keep our branding light we decided to not be so formal and stiff during presenting or reporting, to make this possible we decided to keep a light and upbeat tone to our piece in order to keep our audience engaged and to keep their attention.

Another large part of branding was the website, which I took care of, fitting it into our brand and what we wanted to represent, but the colour scheme changed from our initial idea due to a change in logo.

Deciding on a name

The next big important thing we had to decide on was what our news station was going to be called. At the beginning, we had three ideas running through. 

MBS News: Stands for Mind, Body and Soul News. This name worked well as it represents the healthy living awareness message of our brand but also links to how.

Lifestyle TV - While this name showed what our brand was about, I feel that it as too formal for what we wanted out brand to be

BAN - Stands for Body Awareness News, this name represents how both stories at aimed at promoting a healthier lifestyle and making sure that people take care of themselves. It could also have attract a larger audience as it's name could make people believe that our station has been banned, drawing their attention to it.

While we initially all agreed on picking BAN as our brand name, it was later changed due to a discussion with Helen where she mentioned that BAN cold potentially send the wrong message about our station and could actually be more of a negative rather than a positive, like we originally wanted it to be.

We then chose to go with MBS as it clearly showed what we wanted to represent in our brand yet also wouldn't carry the negative connotation of it's name, which could be a plus for us as the connotation wouldn't turn people away even before they had seen anything from us.

Story:

After Jack has researched into his idea, he worked into creating a live piece that focused on a taste-testing idea with a meat-eater tasting vegan alternatives to foods to see if they could taste any difference and if they would think about cutting down their meat intake and replacing them with any vegan foods. This live piece was presenter lead and had to be quite snappy as it had to fit into a smaller time space due to it not being the main story of our piece.

For our sleep story, myself and Carla went into deeper research about the side effects of not enough sleep, with Carla also being able to get us an interview with one on the sleep consultants at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Chatham, this helped as we learned lots of information about sleep disorders and it's dangerous effects, this was key to us as our story focused on the dangers of sleep disorders and the signs of it as many people could potentially go through life without ever being aware of it, which can be dangerous.

For scripts, I wasn't involved in creating them as I had audio transcripts to create as well as a shot list for sequencing in our pieces.

Filming:

Day 1: 'Live piece' at Cafe Nucleus

For our first day of filming,  the weather wasn't on our side. We had initially planned to do a walkie-talkie, which is a piece to camera, but while walking. However, due to the rain not letting up, we were forced to adapt our shoot to film only the taste test under a sheltered area right in front of the cafe.

We were able to film quite efficiently and with very few blunders due to both our contributor and our presenter knowing their lines and being able to adapt to any line changes the other made.

Day 2: Pre-recorded segment

For this segment we filmed an interview with our contributor to do with her personal experience with sleep disorders and how she tried to medicate it, with no success. Fr this piece, we were lucky enough to be able to film at our contributors house as Carla has been friends with her for many years. We were given the freedom to film around the house, as well as outside for our reporter lead introduction, which was another piece to camera to introduce our piece. 

For this piece in particular, it took us quite a while to film everything due to us needing to film abut her schedule in the evening as it was also Halloween, while also having to spend a lot of time to capture every shot we ended, which we also needed to be perfect.

For the other two days of filming I wasn't present due to me taking care of the website.

Overall:

I am extremely proud of our group and what we have created. We all communicated very well throughout the process, constantly updating each other on any new updates as well as helping each other whenever we needed it. We were good from the beginning as we were all on the same creative wavelength going into creating the piece.

Two things I have learn't from this to take into future units is to focus more of involving myself more into the editing process as I wasn't present throughout it, only appearing during the rough edit and fine cut viewings.  Another thing I need to do better is taking a look at the reading Helen recommends to all of us, as if we read it before going into shooting, we would have maybe done things differently and thought more critically about what we were doing on set.

Although, I am more than happy of the work we have done and can't wait to work with Carla and Jack again.