Evaluation - News Unit

News Production has been a challenging unit for me, however i have found that our finalised project does make me feel proud to be a part of the process that made it. In this Unit we had to make our own News Channel (News Grad) and not only create its first episode but also create a full channel, promotional trailer and website.


Pre-Production is a challenging but exciting process. By the time of our first meeting we had already shared thoughts between ourselves and pretty much established that our Youtube channel would be aimed at a student audience. After our first meeting we all agreed to set off and research our ideas to see if they were feasible. We also had the idea of budgeting at uni so we explored that in terms of food shopping etc (which later evolved into our top five tips, which after our fine cut viewing we cut all together). Researching these two ideas we were able to gather a lot of useful information that we could apply, however we were only able to attain a large field of data and not the specified section were were hoping to focus on, so we adapted the topic slightly.

After having a practice live news story (Johns Campaign) with Ferg and Helen in studio 1,we received some feedback from the rest of the class and it became apparent that we needed to change up our camera shots a bit more. It was a good start with the walk in, but the rest was stationary and got tedious. We learned for this in our actual live shoot with the student nurses, by varying the camera angles, including wides and medium close ups.




On the day of production we came across another issue; Emma our student nurse was available to film for only 20 minutes (as that is all she was allocated for her lunch) and her friend could not go on lunch at the same time as her because the ward was short staffed. This was fair enough as her job is her biggest priority, and we respected that. However, that did put us in an awkward position as our filming time was limited. Lucky we recce'd the location and so were able to get to where we needed to go and park the car relatively quickly. Another setback that occurred on the day of filming was the fact that Gavin was unavailable for filming and Simon because of traffic was held up until literally the second we started filming. We managed to sort of merge the script from the original two nurse script into the most important questions for just the one nurse. I was on camera however i had never picked one of those cameras up before and just did what i had done with the others before. White balance, zoom, focus, zoom back out and start rolling. Unfortunately it seems that when we looked back at the footage her white uniform did look over exposed however this is something i will remember for next time.

The day before our pre-recorded pieces were due to be filmed our key presenter Tom told us he could no longer help us with our project as he had just been accepted to a London Drama school and they requested his presence. This was unfortunate however we understood that it was a big opportunity for him. Given that i had been "playin his role" as such in Georges rehearsals i said that i would fill in for Tom.

The entire production process has been a great learning curve for me, as so much hadn't gone to plan but it was really all about the recovery. We realised when watching in post production that when using the green screen, Jack was presenting and moving his arms a lot and unfortunately at times half his arms would escape the green screen board which means in post production, half his arm would go missing. This was beyond recover and meant re-filming. Though inconvenient to us it was for the better as this didn't look professional. Also, when re-filming Jack had had some experience presenting and came across even better, our lighting was mastered so its aesthetic look was significantly better than what it was previously. This matched the rest of the quality of out News Grad episode. This just goes to show the importance of team work; we didn't let the issues we had get in the way and certainly didn't give up. We worked well together to overcome our mistakes, and stayed positive throughout.






When we reached pre-production, it was now our chance to fix any issues we had when filming, and put together all our hard work filming to see it all come together. The first big issue I wanted to work on was the live production; as mentioned earlier it wasn't our strongest point but that didn't mean I couldn't at lest try and fix it.

We showed Sam Creamer our rough cut and he gave us some feedback and said that the entire piece should be the quality it is for the second half as it gets a lot better. We agreed with Sam in this as we have a fair few decent scenes included like Georges graduation photo shoot introduction scene. We made some of the changes Sam suggested and went to see Helen the following day for a fine cut viewing. As it turned out we received a lot more constructive feedback than we initially thought! We knew our piece was missing something and at times seemed tedious with its limited camera positioning, and lengthy pieces to camera. Our option was to cut this down and have quicker cuts, as Helen suggested the high energy is lost with the lengthy PTCs with one shot. After receiving this feedback we decided to cut the 'top five tips' package and just up the quality of everything else and reshuffle the order. This was a big jump to make and meant re-filming some sequences again which was a huge setback for us, but we agreed with Helens feedback and all knew inside it was the right thing to do. Yes, we need up throwing away a lot of our footage we worked hard on planning, filming and editing but Helen was right; it was our of place and needed to be a lot faster paced in order to keep up with the energy throughout the rest of the episode. We re-filmed some sequences and re-shuffled the edit and made it flow a lot better. I'm pleased with the changes we made and feel it also acts on what Sam said about the quality being on the same high-level throughout.




This News Production unit has been a great experience and something I've taken a lot from. After analysing all the ups and downs I'm pleased to say that despite our setbacks, i feel we've all learned key factors to success when constructing a project like this, and most importantly worked together as a team and not given up at the first hurdle.