13 Dec Kika Kubanova – Critical explication
Day of broadcast: 15th November 2019
For the subject of my critical explication I have chosen a JLDN YouTube live show broadcasted on 15th November 2019. JLDN live show is a news show produced weekly by London South Bank University second year journalism students. For this show my role was Director/Vision mixer.
I picked this show, because as the director I ran the show, was responsible for look, sound and the technical output, I made sure everyone knew what they were doing, I helped set the newsroom for the live show, ran a production meeting, went through the running order, ran a rehearsal, mixed the show live and made sure we were on time. After the live show, I made sure everyone tidied up after themselves and the newsroom was not left in a mess. Comparing this one to the previous live shows we have done, this one was a great improvement. Although, there is still a lot we can improve. In this critical explication I am going to consider three main points. Usage of the green screen and set up of the newsroom, vision mixing segment and I am going to talk about editorial decisions and the guests we chose for this particular show.
As the director, I worked close with the floor manager, who for this show, was Juliana Onetti and lighting director, who for this show was Arun Matharu. After the editorial meeting in the morning we started with the setup of the newsroom. We discussed everything before we made any decisions. I think it is really important to work in a team and be a team player, listen to what others have to say and respect that. Because I know, I couldn’t do that by myself. The show wouldn’t have been as good as it was without working in a team and sharing ideas.
We knew that in previous live shows the lighting was not good at all and we wanted to improve it. You need to set up the newsroom at the same time as you deal with the lighting. Matt and Steph – our newsroom technicians, were a great help with everything, but mostly lighting, they gave us some useful advice and showed us how to apply gel on lights so we would soften glare on the screen for the social media presenters.
For the first time ever we used green screen, which was a great idea and added a lot to our live show because it differed our live show from the other shows. We used the green screen for our bulletin presenter, who for that show was Mahira Begum. And again, Matt helped us a lot with setting up the green screen and showed me how to put a virtual set instead of it on the vision mixer desk.
In my opinion, it is great to always try new things, because that way you learn and see what works well and what does not.
The sofa presenters are always sat on the sofa and behind we can see the newsroom and people working in the newsroom. Since we decided to use the green screen, which was in the newsroom and you could see that in the shot behind the sofa presenters, we decided to turn the sofa around and the background for the sofa presenters was just a black curtain. It looked great, but was quite old fashioned and we could not see the “lively” newsroom. It was still better than having the green screen in the background. After the show we realised that we could have moved green screen somewhere else in the newsroom and it would not affect the sofa presenters. We learnt a lesson and we will do it that way next time.
The show this week ran very smoothly in comparison to the previous weeks. In earlier shows, the person operating the vision mixer had played VTs in the wrong order and had them playing over the presenters speaking. This week I make sure to familiarise myself with the vision mixer before the show and as a result, the show ran fairly smoothly. The only issue we had was that I did not know how to transition straight from to the VT back to the presenters. As a result, the VT’s would start replaying once they had finished before I had the chance to switch cameras.
So for the next time, I will need to spend more time practising before a live show, to make sure that the transitions are much more smooth. Everything we do requires time, practice, and patience and we cannot expect anything to be perfect at a first or second go of doing it.
As for my last segment I have chosen to discuss the editorial aspect of the show. I am going to mention the guests. The whole live show was about LGBTQ and our first guest was Alessia Sasso, one of our course mates who has recently came out. The interview was great and Alessia added a lot to our live show, but I feel like we should have spent more time planning it and get a live guest from outside of uni. Get out of our comfort zone and not be lazy. Later on in the live show we had a debate between Josh Mbu and Adan Wardhere, who again are our course mates. Even though, it was not bad, because it was better than if we had nothing at all. But if we want to be professional and make contacts, we need to get ourselves out there. Because this is still on a student level of producing a live show.
Overall, the main lesson I learnt is importance of planning, practising and time management.
