A2 Media Studies: Construction

Storyline Ideas - 12th January 2016

As part of the construction process of my media product, I had to come up with some ideas for my lead story as well as which stories would be soft or hard news. My partner and I decided that we wanted to film in Birmingham city centre and at St Andrews football ground, in order for our report to look as realistic as possible and to be produced to a high standard. We also chose these specific locations because we have friends, whom we are using for interviews, that work there allowing us to make the interviews easily but most importantly they will come across as authentic to the audience. We have also chosen to film on sight, at school, as it sits in line with our lead story and makes our filming relative to the time we have, manageable. Time management has proved to be essential throughout the construction process of my news broadcast. For our lead story we talk about the rise in apprenticeships in Birmingham for young adults/school leavers. This topic is currently in the local news therefore we felt we had a great example of how this news would be presented as well as this were able to provide people with a greater amount of information on the subject . This would also be beneficial for a local news programme as it would keep parents, students and teachers around the West Midlands updated on job opportunities. First of all we drafted a potential hard news story for our broadcast.

After some discussion with both my partner and teachers about the audience expectations of a local news report, the codes and conventions observable within them and the results from our questionnaires, we opted against a hard news story in favour of 2 soft news reports.

Soft News Stories Brief Plans - 17th January
For our soft news stories we first drafted a brief plan for the lead story. To begin with our draft was brief as I had already produced a possible bulletin to use for a filming day in my research and planning stage, which we chose to also use as a base plan for our final news programme. For the second report we decided upon a local sport report as this genre was heavily covered by BBC Midlands Today and I also has carried out research on a sports report in my research and planning. The report covers the signing of a footballer by Birmingham City Football Club. As I have mentioned previously throughout my blog, We have chosen to round off the broadcast with a weather report by a female in compliance without our audience feedback/questionnaires. Below you can see that we drafted the story headlines, the filming locations, the number of interviews and the names of the people with whom they were concerned along with our own roles in the broadcast.

Broadcast Running Order/Treatment - 20th January
I then decided to create a running order so that when it came to independent filming, me and my partner would have a clear guide to follow allowing us to manage our time efficiently. The draft includes 10 scenes with details about transitions, graphics, roles of individuals and interviews.

Continuity

In light of our realisation that a key code and convention of any news broadcast is continuity, we decided to change the roles of people within the running order above. It came to our attention that the report would seem wholly unrealistic if both anchors were to reappear as different people in the latter stages of the broadcast. For this reason we decided against myself playing the role of the football player and decided to replace this scene with footage of an actual footballer. We also made the decision to make the lead story a personal interest report from the perspective of the 2nd anchor, we felt this made the report seem more realistic and conventional as this was something we had identified when researching existing news programmes. Lastly my partner and I scrapped the scene where the reporter is on location at a construction sight, in order to make sure that the broadcast lasted the requisite 5 minute length.

Finalised Story Ideas + Treatment/Running Order - 23rd January

Below are the 2 soft news stories that we have decided on filming for our broadcast. The actual dialogue of these will change to some degree as we want to use these plans as parameters for what should be filmed but do not want to become restricted by them because of the potential of us having some better ideas on location. Thus far, I am pleased with the transitions and stage directions that my partner and I have selected along with the order of the report therefore it is most likely these will stay the same. This will make filming the report along with editing it a much more efficient process.

Applying News Values And Narrative Theory To My Story Scripts - 28th January

Here I have showed how I have applied news values and narrative theory to my scripted stories to show that they are in accordance with the selection process of any editor and thus are conventional and realistic news stories. My intention by doing this is to create a feeling of professionalism amongst the audience and to make my broadcast meet the audiences needs.

Values

Roland Barthes - Enigma Code

Final Script - 4th February
Here is my final script which I will use throughout the filming process of my broadcast. Changes to the stories include voxpop questions and some of the filming locations. Sticking to this script will be vital in displaying elements of professionalism and good preparation throughout the programme. The script will also assist my partner and I with our time management.

Props for filming day - 8th February
I decided to make a list of props which I would use to record with on our studio filming day. This was essential in making our report meet all of the codes and conventions of a news report that I had deduced from my research. As a result of this I went back to my research and planning stage to look at the specific props to include in my programme. Below is a list of the props that I have chosen.

9th February

Today my partner and I decided upon the clothing that we would wear for our broadcast as anchors. Originally we decided upon formal clothing that was identical to one another's and which used the colours of the broadcaster logo in order to reinforce synergy. Our decision was influenced particularly by this image, a search result for two BBC male anchors using Google. There were few results but all had shown the anchors wearing different formal wear which made us change our mind on our consideration of wearing the same clothing.

Props in use on studio filming day

Studio Filming - 15th February

Our group carried out the filming for the anchor's scenes using both the scripts and props which we had previously planned and produced to use. In order to make our news studio look professional on camera, we had to consider many factors regarding the layout and design of the room (mise en scene included).

Studio day from connerbmedia

Title Sequence - Construction Process - 26th February

Changing My Final Title Sequence

Royalty Free News Jingle
After discussing the mark scheme with my teachers, we had identified that the title sequence news jingle had to be royalty free. In light of this I went online to https://www.freesound.org/ to download royalty free news jingles that I could use instead of the copyrighted news jingle in my current title sequence. I also adjusted the timings of some of the clips used in it to speed up the title sequence and therefore make it more appealing/interesting to the audience. I will use the same news jingle from my title sequence in my final news broadcast to develop the synergy used across my product. This will also make my news programme instantly recognisable to the audience.
Here is proof of my registration...

This was my first attempt at creating a title sequence. I realised that there were some changes that needed to be made in order for my product to appear fully complete and to adhere to the typical features found within existing title sequences that I had researched. I decided to add a time lapse of a canal boat at the beginning of the sequence to show a greater use of technology and editing. This extension of the length of my sequence also meant that I could extend the news jingle so that it ended with the visuals, which made the entire sequence appear much more professional.

Final Title Sequence - 3rd March

I used the same overlay effect (multicoloured boxes) across all of the clips to reinforce synergy and to once again make my broadcast instantly recognisable to the audience.

Creating Final Radio Advert - Production - 6th March

First of all we drafted the dialogue for our radio advert. We aimed for the radio advert to be 25 - 30 seconds long. We recorded our voice over in our media sound recording room. My partner and I decided to split the work load so we could both play a part in the construction of our final products, this was one of their tasks. My partner edited together the audio using Audacity, a piece of sound editing software.

http://www.audacityteam.org/

Script

Producing radio advert in studio

One problem was that we had added a copyrighted news jingle that we had used in a previous title sequence development. Therefore we chose to replace it with the royalty free jingle from the freesound website used in our final title sequence. In addition to this my partner added the "come on blues!" dialogue from the sports report as we both felt that implementing this would capture the listeners attention. This is also an example of our use of convergence with the ancillary tasks.

Completed Radio Advert - March 13th

Producing The Chroma Key For The Lead Story - 18th March

Here is my partners first attempt at a Chroma Key for our local TV news story. My partner and I decided that it would be beneficial to have an informative but interesting and aesthetically pleasing way of presenting our key information and statistics regarding the topic. We decided that an animated Chroma Key would be the best way to do this. In order to create this Chroma Key my partner used Microsoft Power Point, a programme which he is very familiar editing with. His first attempt can be seen below. We felt this was a good attempt but it still had some flaws and after a critique, he looked to address these issues with another version of the Chroma Key.

Below is his amended Chroma Key. we decided to make a number of changes to the original version as detailed below: The main change was to reproduce it as a widescreen video so that we didn't have to stretch it in Corel, which would have made our report look unprofessional.

Changes to the font of the title to a much more appropriate and professional font
addition of a shadow effect to make it stand out more
a removal of the boxes from the outside of the text replaced with an added shadow effect which looked more professional and aesthetically pleasing for the audience
colour added to the background as the lack of colour on the original Chroma Key made it look dull. With colour added to it, the backdrop of the Birmingham City Centre looked much more interesting and appealing. Overall, the second version of the Chroma Key is far better than the first due to it being much more clear, professional and aesthetically pleasing.
Finally we decided to add a blur effect to the background of the image to make the main point of the scenery, the town hall, stand out amongst the rest of the background.

Producing Sports Story Chroma Key - 23rd March
This is the Chroma key that we had produced for our sports story using power point. My partner had to go back and convert both of our Chroma keys to widescreen display so that they were the same size as the rest of our individual recordings for our final broadcast on Corel. This was imperative to show continuity within our report.

Production Process Of Final Broadcast - 6th April

Creating background for weather report using power point

Convergent Links - Twitter handle
In order to engage certain members of the audience less likely to be concerned with the weather, particularly teenagers, I decided to introduce convergent links. I intend on encouraging members of the audience to send in their images of their pictures of the weather via our social media platforms, the address to which will be visible on screen. This will hopefully enable the audience to fulfill their roles as 'prosumers' as they will be greatly involved with this segment specifically.

First attempt at creating a name super using Photoshop