13 Dec Saffron Cutts – Critical Explication
I have chosen the YouTube show that was broadcast on the 24th of October for my critical explication. For the show, I helped to produce a video package and was part of the social media presenting team.
For the live shows, the main target audience is students particularly London Southbank ones. So to keep their interest we include both hard news and soft news in our show.
In this particular week, there were 4 VTs all on a variety of different subjects both soft and hard such as a vt about Brexit, the duchess Megan Markle and a VT on air pollution produced by my group. Alongside the VTs The show also features a live Skype call on Brexit, The social media updates and a news bulletin.
The reason why I picked this week was that I felt that it was the week where I had a very prominent role and executed the role very well.
As the social media editor, it was my job to work closely with the social media presenter to find stories for the live show.
Another part of my role was to help promote JLDN and their Instagram and Twitter, I did this by posting regularly throughout the week about the live show and what the students on my course were doing in preparation for the life so making sure to use hashtags and also posts regular stories and link back to other accounts. As part of my role I also during the live show was on camera scrolling through Twitter and Instagram with Arun the presenter.
My group decided to make a Video package on air pollution and the impacts it is having on areas in London with the highest levels of pollution, one of them being Southwark which is also the borough our university is in. For this live show, this was a relevant news segment and my role within it was to edit the video which I promptly did as soon as I received all the footage using premiere pro.
Our video package has some technical strengths; with lots of good shots and relevant GVs however, there were issues with the audio levels and expert interviews.
The general style of the coverage for our live show was successful because it was relevant to our audience of London Southbank students because the content was localized and also relatable. For example, one group decided to do a video package on student jobs, which is relevant to both Southbank students and students worldwide.
In terms of what went well throughout the show I felt that there were a are you good variety content in the different segments and The presenters were all enthusiastic. In particular, I was happy with my segment in the show because I feel like our segment was fun and had a good variety of subjects. I was good at keeping up with the speaking of the presenter and engaging with the camera and Arun.
As this was one of our first live shows there was, of course, going to be a lot of technical difficulties as a lot of the students were still only just learning to do their role for the first time. Some of the main things that didn’t go well were VTs being played at the wrong time and the vision mixing not being done properly with the camera shot changing sometimes at the wrong time. The audio levels were also completely messed up throughout the show with at times some presenters not being heard or being heard to loud. In particular, at the start of the social media segment, I and Arun could not be heard.
In terms of my role and what I feel I could’ve done better is posting more on social media and more throughout the week in the lead up to the show. I also feel that I could’ve engaged more with the presenter in the audience. For the most part, I was quite happy with the stories that me and Aaron decided to pick for his segment however I do feel that in the future if I was to do this role again I would like to focus more on looking for a mixture of hard and soft news because in his segment we only really featured soft news.
I do believe that the coverage that was shown in the live show was impartial and accurate as we have had lots of lessons on how to be balanced and impulsive throughout the first year and also each team that worked for the live show segments and video packages had a researcher/editor whose job it was to make sure that the subjects were accurate. For my video package or editor used government sites to get statistics on pollution. For my social media editing position, I made sure that all of the news stories that I found were from social media and were from reliable sources.
When I was working with Arun to decide on all social media segment we wanted to have fun with the piece and try to engage the audience we did this by including lots of soft news and funny things that we could find. we also tried to tailor his presenting so that it would be more engaging by practicing for a good hour before we went live.
During our first year study, we learned about media laws and the different bodies that regularly work. Something to consider is using work that has copyright, such as pictures and music as you need a license to use. While I was editing I make sure that I only used footage that my group had created as well as making sure that I did not use any music that I did not have the right to. When I and Arun were trying to find new stories for our social media segment we did come across a video that we wanted to play however it had music that we did not have the right to play on it so we opted to go for a different story.
