During my professional placement, i did a range of different roles whilst attending a range of different events in order to learn as much as i could. Firstly, i went to a corporate event Natixis in London, i helped out the transportation of the kit into the room where the event was taking place. Also i helped with the staging by building the chairs and tables for the presenters to sit on stage.
Moreover, i helped within their warehouse with the organisation of the kit, i helped and learnt how to properly wrap 20 meter cables properly, the reason they are quite particulate about this is because it makes it a lot easier for the crew to unravel when getting rigging an event. The way they work in the warehouse is they have 'standardised' the kit, so each camera or sound kit comes with the same amount of cables; normally more than what they would use but it means they have spares and extras if needed. I helped put these kits together particularly focussing on cables which allowed me to learn about the different types and what they do, for example, XLR and speakon cables.
Another event i went to was a premier league football match, for this their wasn't a lot i could physically do, purely because Sound credit got there to set up the commentary machines, they have to have them all set up by a kick off so that the commentators are ready to start on time, with this one its quite important to be good on working with timing deadlines. During the match i sat with some of the foreign commentary for Denmark and MUTV, i was there in case they had any issues with their commentary machines or if they needed anything else. This event in particular was really useful in seeing how the process works.
Whilst still completing my placement, i have been introduced to a number of different pieces of equipment that i had not used/heard of before and therefore wanted to look into more.
1) Audio and Vision Mixers - this was something i had heard of before, but haven't ever used. Originally and simply i thought that these just edited the audio and vision together, but i found out on my placement that this was not the case. An audio mixer can amplify incoming signals which allows the volume to be switched up or down and most importantly, it allows for multiple audio signals to be layered together correctly enabling for a smooth sound. For example when a piece of music is layered with the audio of someone speaking. A vision mixer is a piece of equipment that is used to select between a range of different video sources; for example this is most important with any form of live event that a multi-camera set up is being used. Within the event i was at with Sound Credit; they were webcasting a presentation event for a french banking company, therefore they were using about 3 cameras in order to cover the entire stage that the presentation was set on. Within this the mixer would be useful as it would allow the director to move between cameras as the people on stage move around, allowing for the best coverage.
2) Speakon Cables - this was a term that i hadn't ever heard of before, I first heard it when i was at my first event with Sound Credit and then when i was back helping in their warehouse for a few days i asked a few questions about what is was. A speakon cable is used to connect a power amplifier to a loudspeaker, because of this they are most commonly paired with XLR cables, for example XLR cables may be plugged into the piece of equipment that will be recording the sound and going into the mixer, and the speakon cable will be used to amplify the sound to be heard through a loudspeaker. Most commonly used for live events with many speakers being used, a speakon cable comes with 2 main advantages of use over any other type of audio cable. Firstly, a speakon cable can take a very high current and therefore be used for a lot more high voltage events with lots of big speakers etc, secondly most of the cable comes with what is called a 'twist and lock' connection by which you secure the cable into the amplifier/speaker by locking it in, therefore the chance of disconnection is very low.
3) PPU; Portable Production Unit - In essence this is the main component of a live studio production, its portable and designed to easily fit into the back of a van to allow for quick movement from production to production. Standards PPU's can run up to 12 cameras; using a digital video switcher. Connecting with the audio and vision mixers allowing both to run out for a smooth transition.
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.
Finally, we have come to the end of another project and it is time to reflect on what went well and what could have been improved on. With this project i was a little bit aphrenrsive because it was a group project again, working with the same people as i did on the last one i wanted to make sure that anything that went wrong last time we didn't do again.
What Went Well
-I think the first thing that went was was working in a group. In comparison to last time working in a group, i think we were all clear on what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. We knew first off that we needed to communicate more and understand what roles people wanted to take on. This time, Katie wanted to get more involved in actual editing rather than just graphics, so we kept all the files and edited from her laptop, this i think worked better, we all contributed to editing in some way from her laptop rather than it being left to one person. Also, Laura wanted to get more involved with the camera work, so on the live shoot with Rosie and Joel, Laura was on 2nd camera; the more complex one that involved sticking on a close up shot of Rosie. I wanted to get more involved with editing, the post production side and i think i achieved that in some way. One of my strengths i think is taking an idea someone gives me and putting it into practice; therefore after getting feedback from our rough and fine cut tutorials i felt like i had more of an idea of what i wanted to edit, i sat with Katie and together we rearranged the timeline and put more GVs in on both occasions after our tutorials.
-A strength of our actual project i think was the live aspect of the package. We filmed using two cameras, something i had suggested because i believed though it was a live, we could still use a variety of shots and make it look very professional with good coverage. I thought we needed one camera to stay on a close up of Rosie because she was our main subject, and then the other camera Katie decided to use a wide shot to illustrate both of them talking. I also came up with the idea for Joel to switch looking cameras on his last link to close the programme; something id seen and researched in programmes before and i thought would work well. Part of this as well that was really good was the fact Rosie was such a good contact; she was an expert and gave us great answers and content, this was down to Laura for finding her.
-The whole branding of our project was really good; we had a good colour arrangement and everything linked, right from the social media pages created by Laura and the website which was created by Aimee. This was down to the knowledge of adobe after effects that Aimee and Katie had, Aimee created our logo as well as an animation of it which i think really set our project aside and gave it a definite professional look. I didn't get too involved in the graphics side of it; i enjoy more the pre production organisational stuff and was trying to get more involved with actual editing - this is something i think i would like to get more involved in in the future.
-Lastly, i think our last strength was taking feedback from Helen and putting it into practice. From both our rough cut and fine cut tutorial sessions we recorded what Helen said and made sure to put in place what she had told us. For example, we completed changed our introduction, i wrote out a huge page of voiceovers and Aimee arranged for Joel to meet with us to record them, this enabled us to still put out the information we needed to say to the audience, but in a more simplified way. We really used the valuable feedback from Helen in a way to completely improve our project and highly believe we were successful for that.
What we could improve on
-Something we needed to watch out on was framing, we needed to make sure that in the midst of all of our filming we make sure there was nothing in frame. For example on the live, Rosie's sound pack was in shot in the background and we didn't notice.
-Also, i think we needed to come up with an idea quicker than what we did, it took us so long to decide on an actual idea that our research was delayed. At first we all came up with our own individual idea; mine revolving around the advertising of Christmas becoming earlier and earlier every year. We needed to come up with an idea that was different; originally wanting to go down the halloween route but realising that many other groups also wanted to do this. Finally Katie Aimee and Laura expanded on my christmas idea, pairing it with their idea of debt and credit. I think because we came up with this idea so late we didn't have as long to do all of the research and we also wanted to film ASAP because we were aware we didn't have long to edit, and with the graphic ideas we had in mind, we wanted to make sure we had as much time to edit as possible.
-We needed to plan more sequencing and GVS. Especially with the package involving Kerri, i think we should have planned more sequencing to cover the cuts, because when we were editing we found we quick ran out of GVs to cover the cuts and needed to film last minute other ones, which although that worked fine, it just wasn't ideal.
-Lastly i think we needed to be more prepared with our audio. We planned our voice overs last minute so we had to film using a DSLR; which wasn't good in comparison to the clip mic we used for the other ones.
Overall
Overall i really enjoyed this project, i liked the topic and had quite an interest in it. I think i had a really good amount of contribution to the project which included calling up organisations such as Citizens advice trying to find out some more information, as well as writing the voiceovers and helping out with editing somewhat. Something new in this project was bringing in external people and interviewing them, i enjoyed this part as well as i think i was quite confident around them, i introduced myself and the rest of the group and i took the lead on making the guests feel welcome and up to speed with what they would be doing with us. I thought that would be best as the more comfortable they felt, the better content they would give us. The video itself i think was really successful, as a group we all collaborated well and in the end i think we all put in equal effort, equal contribution and created a good news piece.
After making the changes to our video that we needed to make after out rough cut feedback from Helen, we had our fine cut feedback session with Helen. From this, there were three main points that came, one positive and two to improve on.
1) Firstly, Helen liked our intro, after changing it completely to include more voiceovers rather than the big long filmed studio links from Joel. We edited studio links way down and made them voiceovers, using a lot more GVS relevant to the words being used
2) Secondly, Helen thought that for our package, our main interviewee Kerri, spoke a bit too much, she would make some very good points that were absolutely perfect for our package, but some of what she said wasn't that relevant. What We Did -In order to change this, myself and Katie sat and edited Kerris bits down. We did two things to do this, first of all we took the 30 second introduction part (which included the graph on money spent on retail advertising) split it up completely and used to weave in and out of the points that Kerri was making. We felt this worked out a lot better because it in a way backed up what Kerri was saying, giving the audience some context. Secondly, we placed some more GVS in when Kerri was talking, this was because we had to split the clips up to edit her down, therefore there were a few jump cuts, so we had to put more GVS in to cover the jumps. For example we put in a clip of the Debenhams Christmas advert.
3) Lastly, Helen still didn't like our last link with Joel, Rosie was sat in the background and so Helen said we should use some graphics to cover it up and make it look more professional.
What We Did - Aimee tried to create some form of graphic on a trial and error basis, however we felt as a group that it didn't look that great therefore we decided to leave it how it was. With more time perhaps we could have done it but because we only had one proper day of editing until hand in we didn't want to damage our project, so we decided to stick with what we had.
Now that filming on both sections was completed, we began fully editing everything together. Katie took the lead on this, we had the clips on her laptop but we all sat around a big TV (with Katie's laptop plugged into) so we could all cast our opinions and still edit together. Aimee and Katie both began creating the logos and other graphics needed using after effects. Furthermore Laura took the role of creating all of our social media sites - we now have a youtube account, a twitter account and a Facebook.
Feedback - We had a rough cut viewing with Helen where we received some feedback based on our rough cut version on 'Guidance to Finance'
-Joels beginning links is too long, at the moment amounting to about 1 minute and a half it is a bit to informative and too 'wordy'
-The graph that we used to indicate how much companies spend on advertising needs to reference where we got the information from in order to back ourselves up -Case study; our case study Kerri needs to be built up more, we need to create more of an image as to who Kerri is, who she represents
-Talking about christmas, bring it in earlier, get to the point and express the underlying issue earlier
-Cut down ending
What we did to improve After receiving our feedback from Helen, we all sat down to organise because we still had a lot to do. Though everything was filmed, we needed to switch everything around in terms of the order within our timeline, as well as organise some extra content. Katie sat there and went through the timeline, we had to be fairly brutal and remove anything that wasn't significant without worrying about timing issues. I sat there and organised our voice overs, Aimee organised for our presenter Joel to come back in and record the voice overs so i sat there creating them. It wasn't too hard as i already had a rough idea of what we needed Joel to say. I just found the main weakness in creating voiceovers was making sure they fit into a certain time frame and obviously i couldn't predict how Joel would say what i had written. We changed around the order and shortened down Joel's beginning links, replacing them with more GVS filmed by all of us, and the voice overs written by myself.
For our next unit we can choose between one - Fiction Adaptation, or another - Professional Placement. Today we had a workshop with Mike Rhymer and were had an introduction to the fiction adaptation course so that we can make an informed decision to what one we take. We were given a haiku as well as some web links to some stock footage sites and had to create a 30 second video based around and adapted from the Haiku. Myself and Laura worked together and we choose the following Haiku
No one travels
Along this way but I,
This autumn evening.
From this we wanted to show many clips of a city; we wanted to highlight the fact that within big city there are lots and lots of people and to show this we used many different wide and bird eye shots of big city buildings with bright lights and fast cars. However we had one clip of an old man walking alone down a road, we kept cutting back to that to demonstrate how within a big city; people can still be alone and feel lonely.
During my professional placement, i did a range of different roles whilst attending a range of different events in order to learn as much as i could. Firstly, i went to a corporate event Natixis in London, i helped out the transportation of the kit into the room where the event was taking place. Also i helped with the staging by building the chairs and tables for the presenters to sit on stage.
Moreover, i helped within their warehouse with the organisation of the kit, i helped and learnt how to properly wrap 20 meter cables properly, the reason they are quite particulate about this is because it makes it a lot easier for the crew to unravel when getting rigging an event. The way they work in the warehouse is they have 'standardised' the kit, so each camera or sound kit comes with the same amount of cables; normally more than what they would use but it means they have spares and extras if needed. I helped put these kits together particularly focussing on cables which allowed me to learn about the different types and what they do, for example, XLR and speakon cables.
