Golden Oldies

Golden Oldies 

With the pitches being done and the chosen charity being ‘Golden Oldies’ the next step was to get assigned roles from the producer. With everyone in the class having specific job interests I was quite enthusiastic to want to either be the vision mixer which I had done before and also watched a pro in action doing it or to try being a floor manager as when working on cameras and generally on the studio floor I had always wondered what it would be like to be someone in that position. When on the group chat, I put myself forward for both these jobs, and of course with a few people wanting to be the vision mixer with me offering another role I got the position of the floor manager.

What is a floor manager?

‘The floor manager is responsible both for the safe running of the floor and for ensuring that the studio is ready to rehearse and record on time. Once the studio is in rehearsal, the floor manager becomes responsible for the overall state of the studio.’- Cue and Cut

With being given this job I am really excited to see what I will have to do as this and to also have a big part to play within the production. Meeting in our lecture just before we broke up for Easter, it was clear to me that I didn’t have a big role in being within a pre production as I am more active on the day of the production, keeping everything to time and making sure everything is running smoothly. However, in this session I sat with the crew that would be on the floor for example the camera operators and sound on the floor and we went through where the cameras would be placed and what the layout of the studio would be. With this I also talked to the researchers to find out from them who exactly would be in the studio so that I can research a bit into them as they will be the people that I will be interacting with. Which lead me to talk to the director, who talked to me about the possible time frames of the show, so I would know what to do with having to stick to what needed to be done in a certain time frame.

One thing I am weary of is the fact that I haven’t experienced this job role before and with that I am nervous about wanting to act professional, so in order to prepare me for this job I am going to research and read into what makes an effective floor manager, so that when it come to the day of rehearsing and recording the show, I know what my job entails and what I have to do to ensure everybody’s safety and also learn how to stick to the timings correctly. However, I feel like our class is very committed and all of us want to make a good show and therefore will all work together in order to make a great show.

Samaritans Pitch

Pitch- Samaritans

For our final project, we are producing a charity live show and for that we have to come up with the charity to set this show on. In doing so we were set into groups of 3 to come up with a charity to pitch to the rest of the class. in my group we discussed many different charities to of those caring for animals to helping people in need. One of our team member Ross, was adamant that we focus on the charity ‘Samaritans’ as it was a well known local charity in Bath that helps people who need someone to talk to about their issues or worries. As a group we all agreed that this was a really good and a solid idea to go with.

Following our decision, we had a week to put together a 5-minute pitch. During that week we had made a google doc with each of us in the group adding our ideas to the pitch. On the Wednesday we all met up to go through and time the pitch and also put together the order in which we would all be speaking. Also in this meet up we went along and added a bit more information as this was the first time we met as a group and doing this made a big difference as there were all individual bits of information we all thought would be effective in the pitch. One of these being a storyboard, so one of the guys in the group drew out a storyboard for the insert we would want to create for the charity, this would be passed around for the audience to see when the pitch would be going on so they get a clear idea of what the insert would look like. With our pitch we figured that having a PowerPoint was a bit cliché so instead we found a promotional video that Samaritans had already made just to show what they do from the charity themselves.

When it came to the day of the pitch, our group where the second group to show our charity pitch. Once the first pitch had finished, the third member of our group was no where to be seen as we were setting up he luckily turned up just in time, with his delay I became more nervous about pitching. As the pitch started everything we had planned ran smoothly, nothing went wrong, and we managed to just fit in the time limit. However, when it came to the questions there was a few which our group couldn’t answer as we hadn’t looked fully in depth about the charity. That area was where our pitching went a little downhill, not knowing some of the answers the audience wanted.

This was the script from our pitch

Although our pitch didn’t win for our class project, I feel like the pitch we came up with was loaded with information about the charity and also what we could include in the insert to make something that shows off what the charity Is trying to promote.

Jasmine Kylie Show

Jasmine Kylie Show

Coming back from our reading week, our class were set the challenge to work with the third year actors (who we had previously worked with before) to put on a meet and greet show. Obviously the actors themselves came up with the whole concept of the show, however for our class it was our task to make the show happen. 

I had immediately put myself forward to work on the camera's as I had previously worked with one but I wasn't that familiar with how they worked and often became confused with the movements of them. I also put myself forward because previously I had either been working on sound or in the gallery, when doing these jobs, I always wanted to try and operate a camera and to my luck I was assigned camera 1!

What is a camera operator?

Camera operators operate the cameras. This job includes rigging the cameras, ensuring each camera is on its mount. At the end of the day this would also include de-rigging the cameras also. Camera Operators are to follow camera cards which show them where and what position the camera should be at a certain aspect of the show. ‘Camera Operators need to listen to the script supervisor’s shot calling and the director’s instructions and sometimes to the vision mixer’s instructions” Cue and Cut

When I took on the job role of camera operator I knew what it would entail, but when on the camera one aspect I found especially hard was to actually move the camera in the right direction whilst trying to record. Once given advice by my lecturer I soon found out that I was making the job a lot harder than it actually was and soon after was moving the camera smoothly.

Here is an insert of the final cut of ‘The Jasmine Kylie Show’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEwMcjdnl9s 

I think with working on camera 1 I had the hardest job of all of the camera operators as this was the camera that has the most movement and also had a lot of different and difficult camera angles to achieve. One that you can see in the show is when the second guest (Karl) came into my shot, I had to change from and single mid shot to a two shot and one thing that I wasn’t expecting with them was the height difference this made it a bit harder to try and position the shot.

One more movement which was a bit of a struggle was getting camera 1 to where the band was playing and back to the presenter again as it was the only dependable camera to go back and forth from each insert. For this I needed a bit of help from the floor manager and the movement had to be swift.

 I thoroughly enjoyed being in the making of the ‘Jasmine Kylie Show’ and although I suffered from a few issues, I felt like I overcame them within a professional way. On this show I learnt a lot about cameras and have a much better knowledge of how they work, meaning any pre conceptions I had have now been cleared up now for future work.

Reading Week

Reading Week

During my reading week I was set the task to research studio based TV feature Programmes, at first I was unsure about what these types of shows were. Although researching into them it soon became clear what they were and what they consisted of. Over reading week apart from seeing all my friends I looked into a few and soon became quite interested into them, with watching a lot of the ones I researched and writing notes with them all showing a common similarity to them. This was that many of the shows where designed to suit a certain audience.

This is what I wrote down within my research, as you can see one of my favourite TV shows anyway was ‘The Great British Bake Off’ so when I found out this was a studio based TV program I was very happy, as this also gave me a reason to watch a whole season of the show. What we also were set the task to do was if we were to make a show like this what would you create. For me this was very easy, I am very into my crime and psychological programs and for me there are not enough of these around which are local to a specific area. So for an example ‘Crimewatch’ that’s the kind of show I would like to recreate, but make it specific to an area for example, where I am from in Berkshire, it would be nice to have a show where the people watching are from the same area and also in terms of catching people that are doing the crimes would probably be a lot easier with the majority of the people watching would all be from the same area.  

In my reading week I was slightly unsure on why we were asked to do this, however coming back after the week in our first lecture it soon became clear to me that this was because we were planning a meet and great show, which would be aimed at a specific types of audience. In that lecture we went over what we had all found out about studio based TV feature programmes and then talked about how we would interpret all our findings into a show that us as a class where going to produce. From my point of view who became at the least a bit obsessed with these types of shows I thought that producing a show like this would be really exciting and it filled me with a lot of excitement.