12 Dec Critical Explication- Ameera Raidhan
The live show I have chosen to analyse is one that aired on week five (24/10/19). Our target audience was young students across London. I will be going into detail of the communication, teamwork, structure and regulation of the show. I was put in the position of director of the show, which allowed me control of the overall outlook of the show and gave me access to review the negatives and positives.
It was the show that I believe to be the breaking point for everyone and is because many things didn’t go to plan. I solely believe this is based upon the fact that many were not focused when it came to their roles.
The overall outcome was in fact very good and you couldn’t tell what had taken place behind the scenes. There were many technical faults in the VTs and the studio that if improved could help increase the confidence of our work. Also, it would encourage viewers to continue watching.
Although, the show lasted nineteen minutes which is in fact four minutes longer than preferred and this is down to miscommunication issues along with organisational issues.
This causes a negative effect on our targeted audience, as sticking to a shorter time helps to keep them engaged to watch it till the end of the show. Moreover, if the show does run over time it would be cut, as it would have gone over its allocated time slot. In order to prevent such issues in the future, as a director I should monitor how long certain VTs/segments would take, decide which parts of the show should be cut in order to ensure that the show is only recorded live for fifteen minuets.
Firstly, the running order of the show had been set and printed out, which was to be followed during the live show. One very important factor to ensure is decided and made engaging for the audience is the structure of the show. The order of how the show is run is extremely vital in keeping our young student based audience interested.
Another huge issue was communication as, in the show as a director I wasn’t informed of any changes. This made it extremely difficult when it came to controlling the cameras at the back. I didn’t know what was to come next and this is what caused the technical glitch midway during the show. It was the responsibility of the Managing Editor to inform me of any changes. In fact, during the dry run the script had been decided and given to everyone- with everyone agreeing that they were happy with it. In the future, I will take responsibility and ask the managing editor myself if any changes have been made in order to change the order on the vision mixer.
Looking at the issue of teamwork, I found is that everyone seemed way too laid back and did mostly everything last minute, which is completely unacceptable for a professional environment. It is due to this that we were unable to have a proper dry run and this is how issues then arose during the live show. I believe in the future the managing editor along with the director (me) should be a lot firmer with timing to ensure a tighter run show.
A huge issue was the fact that my floor manager was in fact extremely focused on sorting out the Halloween decorations, that she didn’t manage to really do her job and hence why it had all been thrown on me. Thus causing chaos, as I wasn’t able to focus on lighting or sound. This was a huge issue, as the bulletins presenter’s lighting was terrible and we were barely able to see her. Furthermore, this was an issue because it was the responsibility of the floor manager to have enough lighting.
Adding on to this, the social media sound was cut off for a good thirty seconds. This is because the person in charge of the sound didn’t go through it until the last minute cutting it very close till before we were live. Also, in certain parts of the show you were able to here the studio through to the VT. This is extremely unprofessional and doesn’t look good to our viewers.
In fact, this is a lesson learned to me for future experiences to not rely on anyone else, to monitor my co-workers more closely and if need be to be more forceful and persuasive, to try to recreate a normal working environment. If I would have implemented these decisions, we would have not had the issue with the sound or the technical glitches and the show would have come out a lot smoother.
Moving on to the technical issues, the stories chosen for the VTs were really good, as the stories chosen were suited to our targeted audience (students around the university) and also suited the theme of the show. It was Halloween week, therefore we had our usual news stories, social media chose tweets via twitter that went with the Halloween theme in order to grab our audiences interest. As, much as the stories are great, there is much room for improvement. One of our VTs featured Meghan Markle, a group part of the team managed to get an interview with a Royal Correspondent whom then took them to the ‘One Young World Summit’, allowing them to capture such amazing footage. However, the camera footage was slightly shaky, the angles needed to be a lot sharper and the sound had too much background noise over the voiceover. In the future the group should be given feedback on these areas, shown how they could improve it and possibly be given more training to improve future VTs- this also applies to the other VTs submitted for the live show.
Overall, the range of stories chosen was picked to suite our student based audience in order to engage them to watch the show. Therefore, by improving our VTs it helps give a professional outlook of the show in order to engage our targeted audience.
Furthermore, we did come across a legal issue in the Students Working VT, as the director for that VT captured a shot of children walking which isn’t allowed as permission was not given. This is because OFCOM could receive a complain about us filming young children without their parents knowing, as you need to ask for their permission first because they are underage. Feedback was given for this to prevent further issues in the future.
