Live@Five

Today, it was finally my turn to be on Live@Five duty, the last group to complete a day of being part of the broadcasting students news program. We were effectively the graphics department whose role was to liaise with the producer of the program and various journalists, and create the needed computer visuals to enhance their reports.

To be honest, I was absolutely dreading this day. Live@Five had been built up to be a veritable disaster by stories from the second years of rudeness from the broadcasting students, dis-organisation, and stressful deadlines. I personally approached this day with trepidation because the software that we would be exclusively using was Abobe After Effects, a program that i had no previous experience in, apart from a couple of brief and VERY basic tutorials, done what seemed like an age ago. I knew that nearly all other members of my group where significantly more skilled than i was, and due to the deadline for our work being 2pm that day,i knew that this was not the time for a complete novice to try and get to grips with the program. I was highly skeptically whether i would be able to contribute to the days work at all, not wanting to slow down production or annoy the team. Yet i knew that it was important for me to be involved. I didn't want to let the team down or seem like i was slacking through idle laziness. 

Thank God! This day was a testament to the phrase, "it won't be as bad as you think". In fact it was really relaxed, and relatively stress free on our part. It was a matter of inputting the right information given to us by the broadcasting students into pre- made graphic templates. Myself and Matt were the two students less confident in the software, so Pete Felstead (who is a legend), took us under his wing in the morning and guided us through the basics again with such patience that he really restored our confidence. After this crash course, Pete the German our producer gave us the task of doing the sports table for the news report. Working together we managed to navigate through our assignment with relative easy finding we had plenty of time to tinker and explore multiple ways of displaying and revealing the football, rugby, and cricket scores, using various masks and presets. I laugh to say we were even ambitious enough to add team logos and crests, ha ha so pathetic. Anyway we asked the sports reporter if this was what she wanted, and the feedback was to keep it plain- nothing fancy just the white text on a black background. This really surprised me, and by the end of the day i found there to be a generally lack of vision for the graphic content of the news program, by the broadcasting students. They weren't demanding at all, they didn't ask us to do any one off graphics for individual reports, yet when i viewed the final program i thought there was a huge opportunity for them to enhance the quality of their show with computer visuals. Many of the reports needed graphics to make the content more interesting and the information more palatable for the viewer,  an example being the report on STI's which needed to display statistics. Maybe the broadcasting students themselves need to be educated on what is actually possible so in future they can ask for more challenging work from us.

Anyhow, we came across no major problems, just a minor one, where the sports reporter had asked for each table to hold for 30 seconds before changing to the next. The graphic template on which we were working only lasted for under a minute,and we had three different tables. As it was a movie layer it could not be stretched, however after more tinkering and help from both Petes' we fixed it by taking a snapshot of the final frame and used it to create another layer that lasted the required amount of time. I must add here that Pete the German was a fantastic producer, very calm and understanding considering my relative ineptitude. He trusted us as a team and allowed us to work at our own pace when he could have achieved the same results in less than half the time. As a group we completed our work efficiently and before the deadline.

It was really interesting to be able to watch the run through and actual filming of Live@Five, standing in the back of the control room while pandemonium unfolded in front of us. The stress and dis-organisation of the broadcasting students seemed to contrast sharply with us, the animation students relaxed attitudes. It occurred to me during this time that we were effectively the "IT guys". You know the boring nerds in every company that stare in front of the computer all day, who the rest of the staff look down upon. Yep that's us- AND IM PROUD! It was really rewarding seeing our work up on screen next to that of the broadcasting students, yet like i said before i would like to have seen more. Unfortunately one of our teams weather maps didn't work, but Pete F reckons that the Broadcasting student simply didn't import it correctly. When i saw the sports table appear frankly it looked pretty rubbish, the black on white was too stark and needed to be broken up to be more legible. Matt and i consoled ourselves with the thought that we did exactly what they wanted, but next time we would conclude that they didn't really know what they wanted, and we would add more creative flourishes to our graphics. Overall it was a great insight into what it would be like to work for a production company, and a good taster in working for other people, to their own specifications. I just want to thank Kat, Harriet, Matt, and Pete for being great team members and i learnt alot from working with them.

GO US!