PROFESSIONAL PLACEMENT; CHOOSING AND RESEARCHING THE PLACEMENT

For this unit, we have to undertake a professional placement at a tv related company in order to gain a wider knowledge of the industry. Firstly, we were given the option of this or we could have made a short film for the unit, the reason i chose to do a placement was because i believed I was lacking real experience within the industry and wanted to build up on it. Firstly, i wanted to do a placement with Renegade Productions, i wanted to do this because i believed it most closely linked with what i hoped to do for a career; I'm really interested in pre-production, aspects including script writing, ideas generating as well as organisational tasks such as casting and organising shoots. However due to time and spaces already I wasn't able to do my placement with them. This led me to not be too sure on what i actually wanted to do for my placement, i tried to find myself another one but as i needed one where i could start fairly quickly; i struggled to find a suitable one. Offered by the course, i chose to do my placement with Sound Credit TV; originally believing they hired out equipment to productions i decided to choose them because it was the area of TV Production where i felt the least confident, using and being around technical equipment i would say is my weakest part and i have a distinct lack of knowledge in this area, therefore i believed i would get the most from the experience in terms of learning by choosing Sound Credit.

Research into Sound Credit TV; 
Researching into the company themselves i discovered they are a company that hires out both kit (cameras sound lighting etc) as well as crew to different companies. Within Sound Credit there is 2 different strands of work they take part in, firstly they do many different sporting events, this involves providing the sound commentary for events such as premier league football. The second strand of work they do is with corporate companies. They provide the filming, sound and sets for corporate companies who wish to hold events, Sound Credit film these events and then webcast it into the relevant links for the people the company want to see. Boasting a huge amount of credits the company has done a lot of work for a lot of big broadcasters, they hold a base in Crayford where all of their equipment is kept and transported to and from events.

An example of some of Sound Credit TV's Credits

From the placement i hope to learn how a production is ran and organised, I'd like to get involved with the actual kit and just learn what different pieces of equipment do and how they can benefit a production. I realise a lot must go into it but it is going to be very interesting to see how much planning and organising goes into making a production work and with the most important part of providing the crew and kit for a shoot it will be very engaging to see how this process comes along.