Carology News - Contextual Research (Top Gear & BBC News)

For this unit I wanted to look into similar shows that are on TV Right now. Top Gear is a prominent Car show that we may have a similar style to and BBC News pioneer high quality news presenting of all styles and talking about a wide of subjects.

Top Gear

Specifically I wanted to look at a car review piece as I felt it would be most relevant to our topic. While we are probably going to do more of a challenge, Top Gear does follow similar filming techniques in a lot of areas.

Top Gear does a amazing job of relaying important information to the audience at the same time as adding some humour into it. While I think it may be hard for us to add humour in to our project without it being cringey, we feel on the day that it may be good for the project. We will probably stick to more factual storytelling though.

 Top Gear uses a shot that instantly comes to mind when I think about a car documentary or news piece. It's a camera located on the windscreen looking at the driver who is relaying information. This is something that I would like to use in our news piece. I feel that it is personal and address the viewer directly. It is also a great way of starting a conversation with facts and figures before adding in B ROLL of the car and what is being talked about.



Top Gear also normally starts with a few shots showing the car that is being talked about. This instantly relays to the viewer that we are talking about *this* car. It also gives the viewer a good opportunity to form their opinions on the car and if they like it or not.

Top Gear also uses  B ROLL of the car driving past for example when the presenter is talking. This keeps the action going on screen because without it, you would probably just have a presenter addressing a camera which is not that interesting. Adding in footage over the top makes it instantly more interesting. This is something that we definitely want to use in our project. As we most likely plan to have a lot of stuff being said whilst I am driving the car, so we plan to mix this up with either close ups of the car or shots from the pavement of me driving past.

Something Top Gear does is also give close ups of the inside of the car. From the outside you can judge a cars looks but you cannot judge a cars every day functionality. From the inside shots you can see what the car might be like to drive everyday. This is important because undoubtedly there will be people watching who are interesting in buying the car shown.

There are also parts in the car tests where he pulls to the side to state a few points. This is normally because the points that he is talking about are more important or serious issue. This is important that he stops because he breaks up the action and when the speed of the piece declines, it is a way of drawing the viewer's attention to see what he is going to say.  This is definitely something that we will include in our show because there will be some facts that are very important and will need to slow down the pace to relay this information to the viewer.

There is generally a reflection "back in the studio", we may struggle to do this because of our resources but we do plan to have a summary at the end of our piece which will reflect my opinions on the test that we are completing and also possibly if I would be interested in buying an electric car myself. We still have to plan exactly what the ending will be ourselves, but a reflective piece is what we will be going for. 





BBC News
Even though I would not be doing studio presenting I did want to contextualise BBC News because I wanted to be able to direct in the right way.

This is a new piece about the Las Vegas shootings. This particular news piece is more like the package that we will have as part of our project. The piece mostly relies on footage from people live at the scene and not professionally shot footage. This is because news crews would not have been at the location at the time of the shootings and also it is an area which not be safe to do so even if they wanted to.
It also includes a news ticker including the main story as well as the company logo and time.

As the British team could not get to the USA to film interviews they used footage that was shot from US news broadcasters. this shows that if you want to get the story out there you have to be prepared to spend a lot of time on the phone and get on the phone and see what footage you can borrow from other news broadcasters.  It also shows the importance of social media in todays world. Producers and news finders contact people over social media to ask if they can use their story and also use their footage. this is something that just fat out did not exist 10 years ago and it have evolved our way of telling the news.

This news piece also includes a little bit of out of vision commentary. It is the news presenter telling us what is going on with the latest facts that have been given to them. This also shows that the main anchor does not always need to be in vision and it is sometimes good to cut away to some more relevant footage to tell the story better.

BBC News is the pinnacle of news in the uk. They provide such a high quality news show and they make sure that they spend their time to get the footage and news that is most important to the viewers.

We will take what we have learned into the studio and package pieces of our project and we'll make sure we address the key ways of storytelling in news.