Shoot and Meeting - News Anchor

After filming our news anchor parts, we sat down as a group and went through what went wrong and how we can learn from our mistakes from this shoot.

Here were our mistakes:

-       The shoot went 30 minutes over than expected.

-       We had problems with sound and wasn't sure what to do, so we got Fergus to help us out. By getting Fergus we was able to save a lot more time for the shoot.

-       We focused more on the set, rather than other things we needed to have with us, i.e. spare batteries.

We all also felt that we kept getting into each others way, when we should off just stuck to our own roles. We have now officially given our roles to each other, however jobs roles such as sound and lighting might change depending on what we are filming.

Here are our official roles:

Me – Producer and sound

Illy – Assistant producer and auto cue

Sei-Kai – Director and lighting

Tim – Camera operator

Even though we went into each other's roles, we have still all agree to put in input as it may be useful towards the shoot.
Another major thing we noticed was that out organisation and communication for this shoot was very poor. We have taken this as a learning curve and hope not to have this problem again in the future.

One problem we had on the day of shoot, but ended up correcting was the lighting. We started of with two daylight photography lights that Sei-Kai had on either side of the news anchor; this helped lighten up the the news anchor however this created two shadows in the background, so it looked like Ben had three heads. We first moved the lights back and higher, to try and move the shadows down, however there still happened to be a little bit of shadow in the background. Finally we moved the couch forward the camera, so that it wasn't up against the wall and also put the main light on. By doing this all the shadows disappeared and then we could start shooting.

In the future as producer I will make sure that I create a call sheet, schedule for the day, risk assessment and make sure that the reporter used for that shoot has the script a couple of days before the shoot to prepare him/herself.

The call sheet will include: map, location, roles, times of shoot, equipment being used, contact information and extra information. It will be sent to the crew, reporter and whoever we are interviewing that day.

After having this meeting, we decided to go through our set up and camera shots for the knitting for charity live shoot, so that we were more prepared for the shoot.

Here’s a storyboard of what we are hoping to do for Wednesday:

R - Reporter
C - Carole
A - Angela
1x - knitting group member to answer question 1
2x - knitting group member to answer question 2

Even though we had a bad shoot with filming our news anchor pieces, I feel that this was definitely a learning curve. We are nor going to go through every shoot a couple of days before to organise the shots, framing and paperwork for that day.