TV NEWS; WORKSHOP

We were given a news article entitled 'Rare butterflies booming after conservation boost'; detailing how as part of a conversation project by the National Trust, the population of  a rare butterfly species has now increased dramatically since the start of the project in 1992.

Angle; With the help of the National Trust, rare species of butterflies have now dramatically increased in population.

PRESENTER SCRIPT

Butterfly Boost

Presenter:
Hello and welcome to Nature One. Today’s story discusses the dramatic increase in the population of rare species of butterflies and this is all thanks to the National Trust and their ‘habitat specialist’.  Did you know, that the scarcer butterfly has declined in population, by 25% within the last 25 years, whereas, in comparison the Adonis Blue butterfly has increased by an equally huge 13% with thanks to the National Trust and their work.

Today we are joined with a ranger from the National One who has seen first hand, the success of the conservation projects. Hi Natasha, (she replies)

Q - So, roughly how long has this work been going on?

A - So the National Trust has been working on this issue of the decline in rare butterfly species for a good few decades, weve specifically been working at increasing this number of butterflies on farmlands since 1992, we are trying to get the numbers back to that of 1976.

Q - So, explain to us the work that you are doing?

A - So us at the National Trust have set up a lot of conservation projects in the hope to dramatically increase the population of rare butterfly species, in order to monitor this we have used results from the UK Butterfly monitoring Scheme to compare the numbers at our sites in comparison to those lands that are under other ownership. By producing some specialist habitats to house these butterflies we have successfully grown the numbers of specific rare species.  

Q - What do you think is one of the most important factors in this project?

A - Well aside from the main issue of the decline in butterfly population, i think it’s really important and extremely helpful within this conservation project that we have a wide range of local farmers and Rangers, as well as people like myself from the National Trust, all working together to achieve one common goal.

Q - From the reports, you’ve been very successful in achieving this. What’s the next step?

A - From now on, we are hoping to boost the number of farmland butterflies even further across our 200 000 acres of farmed landed, were pledging to improve butterfly habitats on land in our care with the hope of boosting the ranges of rarer butterfly species such as the mentioned Ble Adonis.  

Thank you for joining us Natasha, unfortunately that's all we have got time for today on Nature One. Next week, we look at more animal stories.  

TV NEWS; IDEAS DEVELOPMENT

After sitting down as a group and going through all of our ideas, as well as having a workshop with Jo Clark, we sifted through and decided on one idea that we would all work on and research. This idea focuses on young peo
ple and looks at their understanding of finance. The idea first came from the thought that within schools, young people are not in any way taught about taxes or credit or in fact anything to do with adult financing.

Part of the weblink emailed to me by 'Money Service Advice'

Myself and Laura found a number of different people we could call; this was mainly to try and get a better overview of this in terms of the actual issue; we want to try and find out how debt and credit is a problem for young people and as it is such a sensitive issue for some people it isn the easiest topic to find true to life facts/issues online. Firstly, we called up the 'Money Service Website', a free service by which people can call up and ask for advice surrounding issues with money. The person i spoke to took my email and gave me a link to their main page around this topic, which led me to some useful information explaining the different ways young people can get in to debt. Furthermore Laura contacted the Citizens Advice service who though couldn't give us any information themselves, they gave us an email for a charity entitled "Step Change" who specialise in this topic and are hopefully able to provide us with some statistics. We have contacted them and are currently awaiting a reply. Lastly, Jo found for us another charity that are locally based who offer debt free advice, unfortunately they do not have a phone number but a contact form, so we have sent that off and are again hoping for a reply; as this is a locally based charity we think this may be a good contact for an expert interview for the news piece itself. 

Charity that we hope to interview

Other research that i found include a guardian news article and some other news pieces that focus on a similar topic. The main example that i found from the internet was from the Citizens Advice website; it tells the story of a young boy Scooby, who accidentally went £1 into an un-arranged overdraft and ending up building up a £600 charge because of it. This to us just demonstrates firstly how easy it is for young people to fall into debt, and secondly how uneducated we as a generation are in terms of money/bills/charged and all things financing.

Katie and Aimee created this brief overview of what our idea will consist of -

Finance channel based upon young people and their understanding of money. 

Live Package
¥Who? University students
¥Where? University
¥Why? Talk to the students about credit and debt- what sort of “financial solutions” they have i.e. overdraft 

Pre-recorded package
¥Who? Joel Blundell (?) 
¥Where? In front of green screen? Sitting at desk? 
GVs- people walking into a bank? Websites- bank/ signing up to accounts/ online banking
Graphics- logos of different banks, news ticker, intro for the news channel
¥Why? Introducing the subject, facts and figures 

Website
¥Channel title
¥Tag line (pitch line) 
¥Information about what our websites about 
¥Upcoming videos

Think about- theme colours, imagery (i.e logo), intro- can include audio and visual effects

To include in script- “back to the studio”, “next time”, “let’s visit ---- at -----”, 

Note- photos and behind the scenes 

Phone calls made to Money advice- emailing stuff through, c.a.b- told to call charity Stepchange- no outcome.

TV NEWS; INITIAL IDEAS

We were arranged into group of fours for the project, because the project itself is a very short one, we begun straight away by brainstorming some different ideas that we could do. For example our first brainstorming ideas included halloween and student life. We decided to all come up with one idea each that we can all look to develop, that way we can each decide on the best one and also have a few back ups should we run into any issues with the once that we choose.


The idea that i came up with first of all is the idea of christmas and how early all of the stores and websites get ready/advertise for it. I came up with this idea because i remembered when i worked in a department store and in August i was tasked with putting out some christmas cards onto the shelf, this was my first experience of realising how early stores now sell christmas gifts and cards, and how this can put pressure on lots of people to be prepared and spend their money for christmas. I looked into this issue more and found a news article titles "Halloween in August? Christmas in October? The retail trend that is here to stay" - it was then that i realised how much of a wider issue this is, how up and down the country and most likely the world, that businesses capitalise on the event of christmas far earlier than ever before. As most would agree it definitely isn't a case of the 'twelve days of christmas' anymore.


I think this idea is good because theres many avenues by which we can explore, for example we could look at the financial stress that christmas puts on to people, the pressure to get the best presents as well be ready and prepared for when the shops start selling for the festive season. Contextually we can date this back to 1952, when the very first 'Black Friday' was announced in the USA before becoming the global event that we know today. Though normally held in the end of November so not as early in comparison to other sales and christmas events others may do, however this i think is still a very big example of the chaos and stress that christmas can create.

I thought that it would be quite important within this early research stage to look at how spending for the christmas period has increased, for example £5.6 billion was spent within the UK on advertising in the run up to the event in 2016, this however generates a huge revenue in sales profit.

Furthermore, there is a few people we would be able to talk to/interview for this topic and i have narrowed it down to two different certain types of people. The first being a shop owner or manager, who could contextualize the topic for us and give us an insight into shoppers buying habits around the festive period. An example i have found is a shop called 'The Nutcracker'; a chain of shops that are christmas based all year round, hopefully we would be able to gain access to talk to a manager or worker of one of these stores and talk to them about their store. Secondly i think it would be good to talk to a normal shopper; ask them about their shopping experiences and how the pressures of the early christmas advertising from retailers affects them.

TV NEWS: UNIT BRIEFING

Digital News Unit Briefing

- This unit will build on the experiences from the first year, key skills that we will take forward include - Sourcing stories and storytelling (narrative)
             - Sourcing Contributors
             - Sourcing Locations
             - Scripting/Writing to pictures
             - Interviewing
             - Sequencing and Actuality
             - SWEFF
             - Good Coverage (GVs)
             - Good Sound (atoms, correct mic, control background and noise etc)
             - Factual Accuracy/Fair Dealing/Impartiality & balance
             - Team Work and Communication
             - Time management and Organisation Skills
             - Interpret information and find good news angles - disseminating info thereafter

- New Skills that we will take from this unit include;
             - Reporting - on screen/directing talent
             - Fast turn-around (6 weeks to submission inc this week) - get story & access quickly
             - Online platform development/branding/concept
             - Studio presentation/News anchoring (green screen possibilities)
             - Sourcing talent - IE reporters/presenters

We are challenged to develop your own original online news channel and produce content for that channel, find a brand which will fit a particular audience and provide content for the audience - niche content rather than mixed. We will all be assessed individually on both submitted work and blog work. Design your own branded digital online news channel via website such as YouTube, Vimeo etc.

Submission Date - 26th October 



           

DOCUMENTARY; PROJECT EVALUATION

After a month of pre production and another of filming and post production, our documentary, Digital Detox, is finally fully edited and finished, and it is now time to reflect on the things that went well, the things that didn't go as well, and finally the things that I have learnt from the project. Firstly, the one thing that was really different to this project, in comparison to the other 2 projects we have completed in our first year, is that it was fully cooperative group project, meaning that all of the decision making had to be made as a collective, everything had to be considered through 4 different opinions and this was something we hadn't yet experienced. Overall with this i think that we handled it quite well, between the four of us we managed to in a way divide up the roles in order to suit where our strengths lied. Myself and Laura had a lot of involvement within the pre production and other organisational work such as contacting potential characters and locations, whereas Katie and Aimee more worked on the actual production side of things such as actually filming and special effects. In terms of the actual editing we had a good experimental process by which we connected a mac to a TV  and would all edit together suggesting our own ideas and testing what worked and what didn't. Group work worked well for us because we were coherently organised and all knew what we were doing within the documentary, and that is why i think this is one of the biggest strengths within our project. 

Stylistically, i am really happy with how the project turned out. Obviously due to the nature of the topic we were looking at (social media) we wanted to convey this throughout. Firstly the use of the vlogs is something thats quite different tot normal documentaries and is a lot more personal; part of the reason we wanted to use vlogs is because it makes Jake, as the main character, a lot more closer to the audience, as they are watching they will feel a lot closer to Jake and almost like they are part of his journey, therefore i think stylistically the vlogs were a huge strength of our project. Also, the graphics we used all links in to this in terms of being quite modern, different and interesting to watch. 

Furthermore, a huge strength from our project i believe lies within the special effects that we used within the post production. Our documentary itself revolves around the use of social media, which is an extremely modern and new way of thinking; relevant only to the 21st century, therefore we wanted to include some of these iconographies within our project, such as the texts appearing on screen and screen recordings of Facebook and other sites. I think that using these within our project really made the overall videos flow better and gave a certain tone and direction to the piece itself. Something else that i think was really effective within our documentary, was the idea of getting more GVs on a larger scale. When we were editing, we had so many facts and other bits of voice overs that we needed some more, relevant GVs to show whilst these facts were playing. As a solution, i came up with the idea that we should go to London, a city of bright lights and advanced technology, to film some large scale city shots that were firstly relevant to our topic and secondly would give our documentary a more professional feel/look. We went on the emirates cable car to film and it proved to be really effective, Katie then used these shots to do some post production stuff, by which we wrote facts across the London skyline, paired with the voice over from Jake. 

Moreover, whilst their were many strengths and things that i am completely happy with, their are also some weaknesses that i can learn from in the future that could have perhaps made our documentary better. Firstly, as i said in previous blog posts, we really wanted to get an expert to take part in our documentary, just a short interview where our main character Jake would ask some questions about the usage of social media within teens. The reason we wanted this was to provide some background and context to the situation we were presenting on screen. We were making Jake give up social media for 4 days and we really wanted someone to answer why he was giving it up for 4 days and why it is such a big issue in our world today. Unfortunately, after we contacted many and many people, including experts within the field, psychologists and lecturers, we couldn't get someone to take part. We had some that were interested but due to time restrictions or travel restrictions they were unable to take part, and others such as lecturers couldn't help us due to it being a busy time of year. Overall i do not think this damaged our project, but i do think that had we have managed to obtain an expert who wanted to take part, the overall subject we were portraying would have maybe gained a bit more credibility. Whilst this was something that disappointed us, we overcame this issue by putting our own facts on screen, with our main character Jake, someone who as a character on screen our audience feel very comfortable with, reading them out with a voice over. This leads me on to something else i would have liked to have been better within our project. The sound of the voice overs was something i personally didn't think sounded right. I could hear a light buzzing behind Jake's voice and i just felt the overall quality wasn't really that great. We did two things to overcome this, firstly we put music on the first 3 minutes of the documentary, because that was the part by which the clips change a lot and the audio changes a lot, therefore the music helped up to overcome this issue by covering the audio gaps. This then lead us to using Jakes own recording of his music which again is something we were quite happy with because of the music originality. 

One thing i have definitely taken from this project, in terms of mainly documentary filmmaking, is the absolute importance of transcripts. At first we didn't do this straight away as we thought it would have been easier to just edit whilst watching, however after our workshop with Helen we soon found out that this was not the case. Myself and Laura wrote out the transcripts for Jakes main interview, whilst we all then transcribed the vlogs, i would say that there is 2 main reasons as to why the transcripts for us, turned out to be so important. Firstly, the way in which Jake speaks, sometimes didn't make sense, so having it all written down on paper meant we could go through each line and highlight what we wanted to keep - i.e. make it make sense. Secondly, it saved us a lot of time, it was far quicker to label the clips, look at the transcript and being able to find certain bits of dialogue that way, rather than the much more time consuming way of endlessly sitting there watching all the clips all over again to find what we want. For these reasons, that is why i would say the important of transcribing is one of the biggest things i have learnt from this project. 

In terms of what I would like to develop from this project, is probably my own personal involvement in the design of special effects and post production. I would say i am quite an organised person and so I've already enjoyed being involved in a lot of pre-production stuff such as organising potential characters/actors as well as scheduling and locations. However something i am not as great as, is the creation of special effects within the post production, Katie and Aimee are more into the post production side of things and so seeing what they have been able to do during this stage of our project does interest me and is defiantly something I would like to develop on in the future in my own projects. 

DOCUMENTARY; EDITING

Now that filming is mainly completed, we began the editing stages. Aimee began piecing the clips together and Katie started to do some of the post production edits; such as iMessage notifications appearing on screen when we see Jake etc. Editing in a group is a lot different to editing alone, arranging places and times to meet, and then agreeing on what to use is a lot different. However it is nice to have other peoples views when editing also.

Myself and Laura began writing up the transcript from Jakes interview, its quite a long process but defineltly helped us in editing when we wanted to take certain bits out and put others together. Also when editing the VLOGs this helped us a lot because there were so many clips that it was hard to organise, so we used the transcripts in editing to put the clips from each day together. We used a highlighter to select the bits we wanted to keep and put into our documentary, using the time codes to select each different voice.

DOCUMENTARY; FILMING

We filmed our documentary, following the schedule posted earlier, with each person in my group having a specific role. We filmed in our multiple locations, interviewing 4 teens as well as Jake, we also filmed the GVS and sequences with Jake. Katie was main camera person, setting and positioning the camera in the correct way and filming the interviews, whilst Laura was doing the sound. An idea that Katie had, was to film with another camera at a more abstract angle, to pair with the main camera footage and audio, though this was a bit more experimental and we are not entirely sure whether we will actually use this in the final documentary, this was my role throughout filming. I was using another mobile camera to film each interview from a lower angle, looking up at the interviewees, and finally Aimee's role within filming was being in interviewer, she asked everyone the correct questions and made sure we got the answers she needed.
Below is a list of the Sequences that myself and Katie created before filming, to use as a guideline so that we were prepared to film on the day, and finally we also came up with 10 main questions to ask Jake on the day.

On reflection from filming, i think it went really well. We spent roughly 2 whole days filming and i believe we were very efficient in getting what we needed with timing restrictions. For example, we only had about 3-4 hours with Jake to film both his interview and sequences, hence why we created a plan of what we wanted to film so that we efficiently got through with everything in the time we had. The only thing we need to film now is some more general GVs, i.e. videos of phones, social media sites etc.

One thing we were struggling with was what our introduction would look like, an idea i had was the idea of the 21st century; obviously social media stems from the immense advancements in technology we have, which is a result of the 21st century, so we thought about how best we could represent that. The idea that we came up with was London, big flash buildings with flashing lights all representing the amazing stuff we can do with the technology we have today. So we went up to London and went on the Emirates Cable Car to film some landscape shots to use as our introduction.