TV News: Workshop

TV News: Workshop

Yesterday saw one of our TVP workshops, where we had the opportunity to practice and hone our news presenting skills, as well as work with a variety of new equipment. 

The first activity involved using the script that we put together the other day. I volunteered to read out the "live" aspect of the script. I had to read from the script as if I was in the location (in this case Gatwick station) presenting to the camera. 

This was a useful experience as I had to practice my sight reading which was a little rusty. While also making sure to be actively engaging to the audience/camera. After a couple of rehearsals I got it pretty smooth. We decided to keep it moving slightly so that there was momentum in the report and the camera could pan across to reveal more of the scene. 

I had a bit of a fiddle with the camera to make sure it was on the correct settings, since we were in the studio the lighting wasn't great so I had to adjust the aperture and ND filters. 

  

In between the first and second half of the workshop, I picked up one of the new shoulder cameras and explored the settings and featured. 

I thought its design might come in handy with on location "live" sections of our unit. 

 After my brief practice with the camera i noted a few things. Firstly it had nice zoom and focus capabilities, able to bring out very fine details. It was quite heavy but this was designed to make the shots more stable. It also had several adjustment rings close to hand to help with quick changes in light. Although I didn't get on particularly well with this camera it was a useful experience. 

Part two of the lecture involved us getting hands on with a news room environment. We had a camera, auto-queue and green screen set up that we got to work with. 

Firstly we had to adapt our script to be conveyed by the auto-queue. This was a challenge at first as we had to space it out so that it didn't feel too rushed or slow. However we soon overcame this. 

I positioned myself on camera while Andrew presented and Alex typed. I made sure that the scene was appropriately framed and well lit. Shadows were a bit of an issue and we had to move the lighting to minimize this. 

This exercise was a useful practice for our upcoming project. It helped us see who fitted best with which role. Andrew seemed to struggle with presenting so this is something to bare in mind. In the end we were able to get some good takes which I put together to form a finished project.

The Joys Of After Effects

This was a very enjoyable workshop and had potential to be a great practice for our upcoming project. As such when editing it together I decided it needed spicing up with After Effects. 

So I sat down and began to work on some graphics, lower thirds and ticker bars that you would see on other news broadcasts.
I volunteered to do this since post production is my area of expertise. It required some research but I was able to put the graphics together with mostly my own skills.

Adjacent is an example of a news ticker I put together. I made sure the text displayed was relevant to the story and that it had some vague branding (not our final branding as that has yet to be decided).

I then exported this in to premier and got it to "play nice" with the green screen and other elements. I was able to successfully replace the green screen with another background (it took a little bit of fiddling) and after considering a number of options, settled for a news room background. 

The final project is bellow and I'm pretty happy with it. In future I will do more work on audio and opening graphics.