Winol 23.03.2011

This was the last Winol news bulletin before the well deserved Easter break. Funnily enough I wasn't too happy about leaving Winol for the whole month! Out of everyone I think Domonique and I are the only people who look forward to Wednesdays :-) We definitely need a lovely break, after such a hard working, however, highly productive term.

Production wise the bulletin went perfectly! We were extremely pleased with ourselves as we felt like we had let Winol down in the last 2 weeks with little problems that could have been easily solved- such as sports graphics. This week, thankfully, everything went extremely well- EVEN the sports graphics!

Like I said in the precious post, Maria Milano came to see how we produce a live news bulletin, which put some pressure on us all. Julie and Gareth were presenting this week. The only thing that let me down at the beginning of the day was the lack of people in the news room! It was almost 10.30 and the production team as well as presenters and a couple of reporters were the only people in the news room. It made me panic a little, but thankfully we didn't miss many deadlines. I fact, the only deadline we missed was the headlines. We usually record them at 12.30; this week we had to record them at 1.00pm instead, because of the technical problems Andy- the chief reporter was having with his headline clip. Once the headlines were recorded and edited everything went just smoothly right till 3.00 pm when we went live. But that's where we had a big surprise, which instead of making us all angry- somehow made us smile :) Exactly 3 minutes after we went live we heard a very loud 'belly' noise outside The Gallery, the first thought that came into my head was 'FIRE!' and we still carried on the live bulletin. It was in fact a fire alarm and a few seconds later we were asked to leave the place.. which meant stopping all the recording equipments.
Fortunately, it was only a fire drill (even though it would have been more exciting if it was real fire :-) ) We were soon allowed to go back in. It was 3.06 p.m and I set a new deadline for 3.10 p.m. The presenters were more than fine with it and they still seemed confident about the bulletin which made the whole process a lot easier.

We didn't have any other technical difficulties. The bulletin was presented in a really possessional and clear way. Julie did really, really well for her first time.

The debrief was quite short and... brief. Angus gave me some tips for counting down the timings of packages. In a real studio there are people, who are responsible for counting down the timings. I am doing it as well as directing, so the tips that Angus gave me were quite useful and I will definitely use them in the future.

Straight after the debrief Domonique and I went to interview Maria Milano and to ask her how she enjoyed her day at Winol ---> You can see the interview in the previous post.
Maria Milano definitely enjoyed her visit at WINOL.

Here is the last news bulletin: