Filming in India
In June I travelled to Nepal and India in order to film a documentary for my final project for my MA in International Journalism. You will already have seen the montage of shots from Nepal and the trailer for the final documentary. Now you can see a montage of other shots from my time in India.
It was a fascinating trip to the north of India – Dharamsala, which really appears to be a ‘mini Tibet’ – a unique area where a group of people have set up their own base in another country in order to retain it’s language and culture.
Enjoy!
Work experience with film team at Water Aid
As part of my MA International Journalism I am required to gain at least 3 weeks of work experience as it is a BJTC (Broadcast Journalism Training Council) accredited course. I have so far completed one week with Heart radio and am one week into a two week placement with an International NGO called Water Aid. Having worked in charities and NGOs I have long been interested in working for a film team within such an organisation so I made contact with Water Aid to see if they’d be willing to have me for a placement and to my delight they said yes!
The placement has been really enjoyable so far and has been a great insight into how an NGO film team operates and the type of work they take on. This gives an overview of what I’ve been up to so far!
Day one
- Introduction to the film team and an overview of current projects
- Attended cross department meeting
- Introduction/overview of the media team and how they work
- Editing video interviews for the website of country representatives
- Burnt project dvds from a supporter trip
- Editing more video interviews for the website and feedback on first round
- Edits to a short film for an upcoming event at Anglian Water
- Learnt some new short cuts in final cut pro
- Meeting with photography officer. Learnt about the ethical policy and how they go about photography and film work.
Day three
- Editing more video interviews for the website
- Putting together B roll for media team to send to BBC to support the Water Aid country themed garden at this year’s Chelsea flower show
- Learnt to use compressor
Day four
- Finalised B roll for BBC
- Edited more interviews for the website
- Overview of the Communication Services team (branding and editorial)
Interesting facts learnt this week:
Through editing lots of country representative interviews I’ve learnt quite a bit about water and sanitation in countries around the globe as well as general background of the countries. Here are some of the interesting things I discovered:
Burkino Faso
- 45% of the population lives on less than $1 a day
- Less than 10% of the urban population and less than 1% of the rural community have access to sanitation
Post conflict countries have added challenges such as security and moving from an emergency response to a development approach.
In Liberia and Sierra Leone many of the challenges in relation to water and sanitation relate to infrastructure and capacity.
Papua New Guinea
- Indicators show that its moving backwards
- There are 800+ languages spoken by a population of 6 million
- 80% of its population is rural
- There is no shortage of water, but the quality is a major challenge
Timor Leste became an independent country in 1999 (it was previously occupied by Indonesia). After independence its water supply and roads were destroyed.
Ethiopia is Africa’s 4th largest and second most populous country. It is one of Water Aid’s oldest country programmes (since 1986).
There are 300 million people living across 16 countries in West Africa. Of this 162-166 million have no access to sanitation and 88 million have no access to water.
One of the main points that struck me when listening to all the interviews from Asia and Africa was that girls are hugely impacted by lack of adequate water and sanitation. They often have the role of collecting water and walk for miles to fulfil this. They often miss out on education for this reason as well as the fact that many schools do not have toilet facilities.
New term…new module: Professional Practice
This includes 2 ‘rolling news’ days each week. We are split into teams of 6 and integrated with students on the MA Multimedia Broadcast Journalism (who focus on national and local news) and each week we cover a different platform: online, TV, radio, reporting.
Week one: Online
We wrote articles and produced audio and video for the UCF Journo news website. You can read my articles here: Harlequin ladybird invasion, Argentina to complain to UN re Falklands ‘militarisation’, Cornwall council solicitor begins Falklands job swap
I did not find this too stressful or difficult as I have used content management systems quite a lot in my various jobs and also am used to blogging and loading up a variety of content online.
The difficult part was learning the style and writing news stories for web which has a formula to it. This now makes much more sense to me having started the print module. I don’t think I ever really appreciated before that journalism writing is very different to academic and just creative writing in general. It is a new style to learn with its own rules and formula, and most importantly it relies on being able to write clearly and under pressure AS WELL as in an engaging, balanced way! – piece of cake?!
Week two: TV
This involved producing stories (pictures and scripts) for 5 minute bulletins at 11am, 12pm, 2pm, 3pm and 4pm both days. It was quite pressured on day one as it was new to us all! However, by day two we were in the flow.
The editor had a fairly stressful job pulling everything together and ensuring the timings were right for the whole bulletin.
It’s the first time that we’ve used the small green screen studio and operated our own auto-cue but it was really fun. I presented two of the updates and felt much more comfortable with this type of presenting than just sitting behind the news desk ‘anchor’ style! I also really felt that the voice coaching I had at Heart FM was really useful and has definitely improved my style so far. I think it still needs work though!
I can’t load the full bulletin’s up online as we use Reuters news agency footage for many of the stories, however, clips of me presenting will be coming soon…!
Week three: Reporting
As part of the ‘roving reporter’s’ team, we were expected to go out and gather content for all platforms to use. This sounds quite exciting, however in reality with only 2 car drivers in a team of 6 it was slightly challenging to get out and gather content quickly!
On day one I used an existing contact to get an interview about the LGBT adoption and fostering week which is the first one to run. I edited the interview and gave it to the online team, who produced a short piece for web, and gave shorter clips to the radio team for use in their bulletins.
As one of the team who was in the newsroom I also took phone calls from our reporters who were out and about and recorded live voicers for them in the studio to give to the other teams.
Aside from this I helped edit a short piece on pancake day and produced a short package with Emma Fry on the Cornwall train takeover.
Overall I enjoyed being on the reporting team but would have enjoyed getting out a bit more!
Week four: Radio
Being part of the radio team was less daunting as it’s not the first time we’ve done rolling news for radio. What I enjoyed the most was having half of the day to focus on producing bulletins and the other half to focus on presenting. I feel much more confident on both now as well as my ability to read the news to a precise duration. We produced 3,4 and 5 minute bulletins.
Most of our bulletins are comprised of straight-reads, voicers and clips from IRN. However, we try to get our own audio when possible and this week I was able to get an interview with the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions in relation to the news about the Eden Project financial losses and job cut announcements.
Week five: Online
Having now rotated across all four platforms we were back on online this week. We only had one day this week instead of the usual two, as we had a documentary workshop from One World Media on the other day.
I was quite proud of my achievements this week as I managed to write two articles for UCF Journo in half a day, which for the first time were barely sub-edited by our tutor! (the second half of the day I was filming for an external project for PCDT).
In addition I managed to film and edit some video interviews to accompany another article on the site with Emma Fry. We were really pleased with the interviews from the World Pasty Competition which was held at the Eden Project.
To read my two articles click on the following links:
London air ambulance to carry blood
Week six: Reporting
This week I also had just one day as the second day I was again filming for my PCDT film project. I hope I made up for my absence though by preparing four OOVs for TV.
For reporting I was editor which was quite manic but overall enjoyable. Mainly I think because it plays to my strengths as I am very organised and used to project managing from my jobs prior to joining the course. I find it quite satisfying to coordinate people and ideas! : ) It paid off too as the other teams were happy with the content and support we offered to the other teams.
Professional Techniques marks
We have received our marks for the last assessments now and moved on to start new modules. I was really pleased with my marks and for those of you who read about my experiences you will feel my happiness too! I worked hard on them, especially radio as it took a while sourcing interviews for me this time!
My marks reflect my interests which is nice. I gained my highest mark for my TV piece which got a 78! I am SO pleased with this and was a little shocked to be honest! Great to have positive feedback on all elements of my filming, scripting, story choice and editing. : )
Then my blog got 73 which again I was very happy with. I don’t really find blogging that difficult…I just say what I’m thinking most of the time…which is usually a lot! That approach seems to work though…my tutor liked the detail and ‘chunking’ of my content. It also paid off to evaluate my piece by using the marking criteria.
Finally my radio piece, I was a little disappointed to see that my production marks were fairly low for this (in the 50s) but understand why. Evidently it was not the best decision to cut out all pauses and breathes and made it sound very odd??!! Incidentally no-one who listened to my work said this to me! Oh well, luckily I gained high on ‘journalism skills’ for the piece as they liked my story and were impressed with the interviews I did get which was good.
Overall I came out with a mark of 71 for the module – a distinction!! : )
Find, Verify, Tell! BBC’s David Hayward at UCF
Find, verify, tell….these are the three most valuable skills that all journalists must have according to David Hayward of the BBC College of Journalism.
David visited University College Falmouth to speak to the MA journalism students today. David was really engaging with his talk and he covered a huge range of topics. His background as a journalist working with the BBC gave us an insight into how the changes in the industry have impacted upon the BBC.
Multi media environment
His talk focused very much on operating in a multi-media environment and how the BBC as well as other media organisations and journalists have had to adapt to constant technology changes.
For example, the use of twitter in particular is a constant challenge for news organisations. It is not only used in sharing news stories and coverage, but increasingly to break news and to source news as well as engage with different stories. There is now a site you can visit called twitter stories which nicely ‘packages’ stories which have come out on the social networking site. Twitter has been linked to the news for a few years now, but still it causes debate within new rooms it seems. David spoke about the constantly changing editorial guidelines for broadcasters on the use of twitter and the split within news rooms on how it should be used and controlled.
In fact, this week Sky News have featured in the news for their new guidelines to their staff who have been told not to tweet breaking news without going through an editor. Is this ironic for an organisation whose tag line is ‘first for breaking news’?!
Competition
Another interesting element touched on in the talk was how newspapers are now competitors for broadcasters due to the increasing importance of online, social media and tablets like the iPad for making this all very accessible to the consumer.
It was interesting to hear a little about the BBC W1 project. For the first time ever regional, national, persian and arabic will all be housed in the same building. There will also be TV, radio, and online housed in the same building. This signals that the BBC realises it needs to be more linked up in it’s approach to maintain with or ahead of the competition in this multi media age.
History
He gave us some of the key moments in the BBC’s history in relation to multi media such as Peter Horrocks being a key character in moving the BBC to working together. And when Robert Peston broke news on his blog with the Northern Rock collapse. The importance of blogs for the BBC is shown by journalists like Nick Robinson who uses his to develop stories through the comments he gets. He explained how Laura Kuenssberg was one of the first to use twitter in her role with the US elections. In fact so well known is she on twitter that when she made her move from BBC to ITV last year there was great debate about it in the public sphere.
So important is twitter and social media in general to the BBC now that Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC Global News, said “This isn’t just a kind of fad from someone who’s an enthusiast of technology. I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary.”
David Hayward also gave us some insight:
- 84% of BBC news users also use Facebook in a typical month
- Average BBC news user spends around 32 minutes on Facebook per month
Innovative ways to get work and reputation as a journalist
David cited examples of people using blogs to promote themselves. Graham Holiday, for example set up the site Kigali Wire when he moved to Rwanda. Initially it served as a central point bringing in all sources to one place. It served him well as Reuters offered him a job off the back of it. Now Holiday also has a personal site which promotes his services as a media consultant and trainer.
Another clever blogger mentioned was Paul Bradshaw, creator of ‘help me investigate’ which is a series of blogs investigating different areas such as health and the olympics.
An inspirational young journalist is Josh Halliday who now works for the Guardian. It was amazing to hear the story of how he gained this job just two years after graduating from his course.
Finally he cited Alex Wood who set up ‘Not on the wires’ with a couple of friends after graduating from City University. This method of going out there and producing work to get noticed certainly appeals to me.
catherinefeltham 