13 Dec Yasmine Taviot – Critical Explication
I have chosen the Youtube show broadcast on 22nd November 2019 as the subject for my critical explication. I helped to produce a television package for this programme and also presented the radio bulletins.
I picked this programme because I felt it raised a number of interesting issues and improvements for discussion. I am going to consider these 3 key areas: Communication, Teamwork and Planning
I was part of a group that produced a TV package for the live show. We went to the Elizabeth Olympic Park where Centerpoint UK was organizing one of their sleep out events to raise money for young homeless people on Tuesday, to attend to speak to some organiser from the Centrepoint charity and carry out some vox pops.
For the VT that we produced that week, I chose the role of cameraman. As a responsible journalist, you should always try to plan things as soon as possible, but it wasn’t the case that week. First of all, normally the equipment has to be booked at least 24h and I was responsible for booking the equipment but I forgot and had to it on the same day. I tried anyway and asked for an exception. Fortunately, they accepted to give us the equipment but next time I shouldn’t forget. Next time to avoid forgetting, I can put a reminder in my diary or an alert on my phone.
Furthermore, as I was actually doing the sleepout, for personal reason but also so I can film the inside, I couldn’t carry all the equipment so Marinka offered to help me carry all the equipment to the site. She took the camera since it was the heaviest item and I had to carry all the equipment to do the sleep out as well as the tripod.
We also had a lot of misunderstandings because of the lack of communication between the members of my team. I left the house earlier than Marinka and Uno did that day. I and Uno were not talking to each other because of an argument we had but we should have put our problems aside to work with more professional conduct. Because of that, we struggled to find each other since the Park is huge. I arrived at the event earlier but they stayed an hour in the cold trying to found the place because they missed the signs. In the future, we should arrange a meeting point to be sure that we don’t miss each other.
When they arrived, we managed to get really good interviews outside of the event. They couldn’t come inside as they were not participating in the sleep out. We put our timidity aside and asked if we could get any interviews outside. One of the organisers manages to get us a really good interview with one of the victims of homelessness that the charity had helped in the past.
As we were preparing to start the filming we realised that they were no SD card inside of the camera. Marinka forgot to check the camera but as a cameraman I was responsible. henceforward, we should always check the equipment to be sure we forgot nothing.
We couldn’t film with the camera so as a journalist we must find quick solutions to unforeseen because these situations are always gonna happen. I am actually proud of the way we reacted. We decided to film the interview and piece of camera on our phones and audio record it at the same time to be sure that we can listen to it afterwards with no sound problems, and do the Vox Pops another day. I also manage to get some shot inside the event.
In the end, even if we can hear a lot of background noises on our VT the production team decided to make the VT sounds louder than the other weeks we can still hear our interview correctly.
On the actual live show, I had the role of the radio bulletins presenter. It was our first real crossed platform show, it means that we mixed radio and TV in one show.
Our main issue was once again the lack of planning and communication between us.
My reading wasn’t really great one of the reason being that I always had the script at the last minute so I couldn’t read it before actually saying it live and I wasn’t comfortable with for example the way the news editor wrote the numbers.
I would also have liked to change the format of the news bulletin because I think reading it on Inception wasn’t really convenient, maybe zoomed on a Word document or printed would be better. I actually think it is up to every presenter to choose what format they feel the more comfortable with.
After I’ve heard myself a second time I can tell that I also need to improve my breathing while I read and make my voice feel more comfortable. I can, for example, try to smile while saying happier news as Vanessa had told me before on voice training and of course train because it’s not as easy as we can think.
I’m still very proud of the fact that I had the ability to improvise and resume my speech when the editor told me I had a few seconds left. English not being my native language I think it shows that I’m getting more and more comfortable with it.
For our first Crossed Platform programme I think the show was pretty good, although of course, we needed to improve, we did learn from our mistakes.
Overall, the main lesson learned was the importance of teamwork and planning. Careful planning would have saved us a lot of issues and made the overall show better and more professional. Other people’s mistakes have an impact on your work.
But this week’s work also made me realise how important to keep a professional attitude with everyone and be a real team as we are all here to work on the same show and we all want it to be the best as possible.
