BJTC Awards + WINOL 1

The BJTC awards now seem like a distant memory, but my blogging has not been up to date this term, so I'll go through a recap of the day, and the role that I played. I took on the role of managing editor, slightly different from the web based role that would become familiar to me.  My role basically consisted of making sure that everybody was in the right place at the right time and knew exactly what they were doing, this included the rest of the production team, and all guests. I assigned members of my team to certain guests, Ben and Alex waited at reception for students and nominees, whilst Jason took care of Alastair Stewart. I arranged details with vice chancellor Joy Carter for her arrival. This all went as planned and general organisation was very good, the only problem being latecomers having to be refused entry once the event started. They were understandably upset, but unfortunately this was unavoidable. The event was a great success and a great way to advertise Winchester Journalism to other journalism students from around the country.

The following week was the first edition of WINOL, and I had the responsibility of taking the BJTC award footage and editing it into a package. Henry had helped me with the ordering of our shots, so I wrote a voice track for the piece. I decided that I needed to make Alastair Stewart the key focus on the news package, although we wanted to make something of the fact that we won awards, the real news story was having a celebrity presenting the awards for us. I wanted pictures of Alastair Stewart in his more familiar setting, presenting the news, so took some from Youtube, I was allowed to do this as it was only around 4 seconds, so counted as fair dealing, we showed the clip to a copyright expert and he said that it was safe, although we were slightly pushing our luck, because it was't being used for purpose of review, but it was, in a way being used to tell the news. I wanted a catchy opening so went with "from bongs to gongs" incorporating the big ben bong sound that is so well associated with ITV's ten o' clock news.

I was fairly happy with this package, it was the leading story in the bulletin and the intro seemed to work really well. I also felt like I'd written to the pictures quite well throughout. the main problem I faced was the sound quality. I had recorded my soundtrack using a gun-mic in an empty classroom, and  it didn't sound as good as it could have.

www.winol.co.uk