TV News Workshop - Presenting a Live Piece with PTC at Location

Today's workshop was about creating a mini-news report partly using a green screen and partly a "live" report at a location.

Andrew was the Main news anchor whilst George presented live at the scene. We all took turns at using the camera and sound to all experience the kit. Luckily George and i had used the clip mics before so it was relatively easy to set them up. However creating this scene was very interesting as it really showed me how difficult it is to film in a dark studio.

For the green screen report we needed 4 powerful lights to make sure we had enough light on Andrew presenting and even one right too little created a bad shadow or not enough light. This made me think a lot more about if we wanted to include a news anchor part in our sequence. We had generally felt that we would not need one for our TV piece however we wanted to film one just incase. After this however we realise that this is not something that you can rush together in a few minutes. You need proper setup time to make the shot look right.

It was also interesting to see the teleprompter and how it is used. Helen let us use her ipad with a reflector near the lense to andrew could look at the camera and read the words at the same time. Andrew was who we wanted to host our news report if we did one with a green screen so it was a good experience for him.

We are still unsure if we want to have a news anchor but we still test one even if it does not actually get used because it would be a good experience for all of us. We also had a quick go with the JVC Camera that is available to us, Ferg said this would be good for on the shoulder work at a location and as it is heavier it gives better stabilisation whilst on the shoulder. It was a very useful workshop and we learned more about the cameras and how they operate in dark conditions. We did still struggle with the 4K Panasonic in dark conditions, it did seem to struggle, this made us think that we will want to have some time with the camera in conditions to the ones we plan to film in. We did arrange with Ferg to get some extra time with the 4k Camera outside university and this will really help us know how we will set up the camera when it comes to filming out actual news piece.

Here is the final news report that we have put together, George did all the editing to this and I added an audio track to try and make it feel even more authentic.

I really like how this looked, for a first attempt. This workshop really did help us understand much more about how and what we need to film when we get to actually shooting our final project!