Digital News - Blog Post 4

Digital News – Blog Post 4

 

Project Evaluation

 

At the start of this project, we were put into groups by our tutors.  Our group was me, Bella, Liv and John.  We decided on our roles at the beginning in order to start on our roles to be time efficient.  I was the camera operator, so I didn’t have any immediate things to start on other than helping out with ideas and reaching out to contributors.  We worked together to find a local news story that we could work to create a news package on as we had been asked to do.  After some thought about practicalities and interest, we decided on the restoration of the Roman Painted House in Dover.  This was interesting as it was something very currant and would still be happening for a few weeks, leaving us enough time to prepare before filming.  However, our producer (Bella), struggled to get many answers from the contributors because they did not answer her emails.  This meant we had to start thinking of other things we could focus our story on.  We landed on focusing on The Maison Dieu in Dover.  We were given permissions to film inside and had found 2 people we could interview.  We had a local historian in Canterbury to interview, and The Maison Dieu Engagement Officer to interview.  Therefore, we started planning filming days and times.  On the 16^th of January we interviewed the local historian which was very successful and got good footage to use from that.  We also used the Green Screen that day to get the intro and outro of our news package filmed.  On the 17^th of January we went to Dover to film The Maison Dieu and interview.  However, upon arrival we were told for the first time by the people we had been communicating with that we could not film inside if we had the correct shoes on, which we didn’t as we hadn’t been forewarned.  However, we made the best out of the situation and were shown the things we could film on the outside that would be of interest for documenting the restoration.  Then we chose a spot and interviewed the Engagement Officer with some pre-prepared questions we had written down.  This was good as by this point, we had learnt the etiquette of how to talk to the interviewee and make them feel comfortable.  We set up quickly and well and the filming was successful.  Then we were left to get any other footage we wanted outside.  We got lots of B-roll that we could use in our voice over and to show when the interview was happening as references.  After finishing our shoot, we decided to go to the street next to the Maison Dieu and get some vox-pops.  We managed two vox pops after standing in the street for quite a while on a quiet day.  These were useful for us for relatability and representation in the news package.  One struggle I found, being on camera, was the struggle of balancing out natural lighting as we could only control it to an extent.  We got the people who did the vox pops to sign a consent form each which the producer dealt with before she asked them some questions next to the camera.

 

I found this unit exciting because of the fast-paced nature of it and the freedom of trying out new things like, Green Screens, vox pops and interviews.  I really enjoyed working in such different spaces within weeks and feel that my learning has really developed, especially on Adobe after effects. I will use my new knowledge in future units to expand my capabilities and variety in my work which I look forward to.