Digital News: Project Evaluation

My first thought when we were given the brief for this unit was that it would be a huge challenge. The project duration was six weeks which is the shortest period we have had for a project so far. The reason for this was because News is current and in the real world is put together very quickly. We were in groups of four for the project which was a reasonable sized team. We assigned roles for everyone once we had decided to go with Laura's initial idea, I was given the roles of Director for the live piece and Sound Operator. However, when it came to the shoot days we all switched to give everyone an opportunity to have their input. For example, I was on the camera for the studio shoot. I would say in reflection, this unit was the toughest yet. The pre-production stage started off very well with all of us pitching in our ideas. We came up with the branding of the channel and website as a team, deciding to go for clean, professional branding as our channel was regarding health. Therefore, we wanted to come across as serious when talking about the stories. We chose a white background with dark pink and blue text for both the graphics on the episode and on the website. We felt like using these colours against a white background didn't make it look too corporate but still retained the serious feel.
When it came to communicating with our contributors, Laura organised the interviews with Demelza, informing them on who we are and what the purpose of the channel is. They were very keen to be part of it which made filming very simple. I was in charge of the live piece and communicated with Groundwork and Ian - our interviewee. Again, Groundwork were very informative about the Kent Sheds scheme and keen to take part. In terms of the shoot days, we assigned roles again but everyone had the chance to pitch it on the day. Team work became an issue at times, especially on the Demelza shoot day which caused complications with the final footage. I would say that we should have had a few more meetings about team work on shoot days to ensure they all went smoothly as this was something we could've definitely improved on.
Time management would be another improvement for this project as well. The time constraints made it difficult to organise all of our shoot days as we had to find contributors who would be available within the next few weeks. It did feel a little pressured and we did two major shoot days in one week but  this worked out ok for editing. The editing process was relatively straight forward as we just needed to break down the interviews into transcripts, selecting the best sections. There were a few constraints in regards to the contributors talking a little too fast but we tried our best to resolve this and choose the best way to edit it. We also had a few sound problems whilst filming outside which was something we couldn't edit out of the final footage. However, we were able to learn from it and eliminate this in future. I am pleased with the final film and website and think that despite some of the issues we had, we managed to resolve them and make the most out of the footage we shot. I think that the factual programming units have been the most challenging but I have learnt the most from them.