Success on Winol!

As the second week of being in the world of Winol went on, we all started preparing for the second news bulletin. We started planning and preparing straight away on Monday starting from the Production meeting where we all put together all the ideas we thought of over the weekend. To make our Wednesday much easier we decided to record the Sports Week on Tuesday, which allowed us to play with the equipment in the Gallery as well as sort out the lightings and the green screen.

On Wednesday morning I had sorted out the headlines sequence, as well as the headlines music and the sports graphics. It all looked good enough to me. I tried to push all the deadlines back so they are an hour earlier which I thought would help us go live on time, but unfortunately no one was ready to hand in their work, so for this week we left the deadlines as they were supposed to be right from the start. Thankfully, there was no need for it as we went live exactly at 3.00! By that time we managed to have plenty of run throughs and practises of handovers. This week, the Gallery was very calm and extremely organised. We all work well as a team, the communication was clear, so everyone knew exactly what to do. The presenters did an extremely good job, especially Mikey, who had presented for the very first time!

I must say, this Wednesday we had hardly any technical difficulties which was just fantastic. I think we have done a very ambitious bulletin. One of the news stories fell through; this meant that we had to come up with Plan B to fill out the 50 seconds of the gap in the bulletin. We decided on an OB from the News Room. Karen found a great story for Julie to talk about in front of the Camera of the News Room. I was really worried that it could be the only technical difficulty we could have had today. Although, it went nice and smooth, providing the information we needed.

The only technical problem that we experienced was the black hole right at the end of headlines when it was cutting to the presenter; therefore we had to re-record that bit.

As the director, my role is to make sure everyone in the Gallery as well as the presenters and camera people in the studio know exactly what they are doing and what is generally happening with the bulletin. I need to time perfectly the length of packages so I know when to shout CUE to the presenters downstairs as well as give a shout to the person on vision mixer to change the background. Compare to last week’s bulletin, I think I gave everyone enough attention and everyone knew their job well. I was very impressed with how smooth the bulletin went. I felt amazingly great directing it today. After the successful bulletin, everyone went off to the debrief while I edited the bulletin and put it on the website with Chris.

Once again, very well done everyone! We’ve all done such a great job!

Here is the full news bulletin. Enjoy!