News Package - Filming

Today in our groups, we began filming for Dave's assignment. We took a Sony V1 out along with a manfrotto tripod and a couple of boom mics, travelled to Jack's student accommodation and began filming with our interviewee Matt, who was acting as a student unhappy with the way in which the Manchester College provides little or no support for students who are planning on living away from home, at student accommodation of some sort within Manchester.

With Josh as our presenter, we had a few hours to film an interview with Matt in and around the accommodation, asking some fairly basic questions and trying to gain some opinion on the matter, which a number of people in our group have been affected by. The filming proved to be harder than we had expected, with a limited timeframe and a number of techinical difficulties getting in the way of progress, we had to compromise on a few of our original plans, but ended the day with more or less exactly what we needed.

Multicam Session: Band Performance 2

News Package Research - Content

For the news package, we have said from the beginning as a group that we will adhere to make the VT look as professional as possible, with the means we have at our disposal. We have decided that the style of the package will be minimalistic, with a continous and matching colour scheme that is the same from beginning to end, from the design of the lower thirds in the interview, to the colour of the sofa in the program itself.

Our logo will be simple, yet effective, the name of the show is 'Good Morning Manchester', so a simple but bold and striking 'GMM' lettering done in a thick black font inside a shape with the same colour as the scheme we will be using, similar to that of the New York Times' logo:

Finally, we hope to be able to either use a green screen as our backdrop, projecting a time lapse of Media City looking over the water there. Alternatively, if a green screen isn't possible we will hope to use a large flatscreen television on-set, where one of the presenters can stand and read the days top stories a long with pictures, and also that can have our time lapse on, behind our logo.

Green Screen

Today we were working with green screen, Ricardo introduced us to the background of them in the industry, why, how and when they are used generally, then we had a chance to take turns filming each other with the aid of them. We found out that a special lens attachment is used to create the effect, as opposed to having literally a 'green screen' behind the subject, this attachment emits a green light from LED bulbs that attaches itself to the subject, pending on how high or low you have the settings, and depending on whether or not the subject has bright green clothing on, which makes it harder to determine where the effect can be placed.

Once we had done the filming in small groups, we were able to then take it to the computers and manipulate it with any background image or video we saw fit to use, which had varying degrees of success and hilarity. I shot three different takes of my subject, each with a varying degree of intensity, ranging from -4 to +4, each meaning different things had to be done in the edit in order to make the image visually pleasing, when it is over exposed it is harder to feather out the intense green colour that surrounds the subject, whereas when it is under exposed it is difficult to achieve the effect without the subject looking like a ghost, therefore a middle ground had to be found whilst filming and then eventually editing.

News Package - Plan

14th November - We will be in our groups filling out release forms, getting consent done for the interviewee and permission to take out the camera from a member of staff.

21st November - Hopefully by now we will be starting our filming of the interviewees, starting with Matty,  getting shots of him talking in his recently acquired student accommodation. We will also hopefully be able to get an interview with a member of the hospitality staff at one of the private halls, such as Unite or Mansion House.

28th November - This day will be used for gaining the GV shots that we will need for the package, for example shots of students around Manchester, and around the Student Halls. Some examples of shots we have talked about in the group include the fountains in Piccadilly Gardens and general shots of the main student areas, such as Fallowfield and Oxford Road.

5th December - We will hopefully by this point be able to start our editing process, and will use the remaining weeks on editing, with the option of more filming if the need arises.

Research Outlook

We have now formed our individual groups in the class and have been working on coming up with an idea for our assignment. The group - consisting of Jack Ware, Josh Lloyd, Joe Kerrigan and me - has decided that the research project will revolve around student accommodation, specifically how Manchester College doesn't provide private halls to its students, or give them much in the way of help with this issue. We have come up with the following rough draft of a running order and script that we hope the show will eventually turn out like:


 Beginning of VT


Establishing shot showing our presenter walking towards a camera, equipped with a wireless mic, saying the following:


"Higher education comes with many challenges. One of these is finding accommodation if you are living away from home. Aproximately 300 students study undergraduate courses at the Manchester college."


We then cut to the first interview with a student at the college.

Questions
1. Do you think there should be more support for students?
2. Are prices reasonable?
3. Have you found accommodation that fits your needs and price range?
4. Where are you living currently? Is it practical?
5. What more can be done to improve the process?
 
"Although connected to universities, the college fails to connect an exclusive halls of residence for students."

Target Audience: 17 - 25 year old students around the country, but especially in Manchester that are looking to move away from home into accommodation, but may face issues with restrictions, lack of help from college/Uni.

GV: Student on computer, looking at private hall website.
Pro's:
24 hour security
Bills Included
Free content insurance
Common room (games)
Possibility of ensuite
Chance to meet new people

Presenter ending the VT with an appropriately chosen backdrop (Halls or Manchester College)
End of VT


 Roles
Director
Vision Mixer
Producer
Floor ManagerNegative:
Halls can be far away from college
Halls cost more money.
If you cant find a place to live, it would be difficult to travel to college.
People may be put off studying because there is no exclusive halls of residence.
Nearest halls: Oxny house and gardens (unite-students) in Rusholme.

Floor plan For Band Setup

This is the presumed floor plan that the band will be likely to use, when they come in to be filmed in the studio, for our project with Peter.