NEWS UNIT: STUDIO SHOOT

What I think will give us that extra bit of punch is the use of a professional who knows what they are doing. We managed to get Jennie Delaney on a last minute call on Monday, she was very willing and patient with us and has helped our channel 10 fold. Her sophisticated yet friendly voice was exactly what we were missing on Monday, but with the studio shoot on Wednesday we put that right.

We had a script produced and ready for her which stayed the same and wasn't altered too much during the shoot as in the package:

We spent about 40 minutes prior to our shoot making sure the light was just right on the green screen as well as on our presenter. This was most certainly a learning process as this was not enough time and so put a lot of pressure on us to get it right even as our presenter arrived in the lobby. In the end we got it pretty right in the eyes of us and Fergus so we are satisfied with the end result.

Lighting came of quite well, balancing green screen lights and presenter lights

With a bit of manoeuvring and with the help of a background we have a great platform to present our channel. 

What I would say about the shoot was that it would have been better to shoot longer takes as the cuts are not great for taking it into the edit. The reason we did this however was that we tried originally using a prompter, but this noticeably lowered her eye-line so we got her to memorise short parts and read them out from memory. This is what is above and here is an example of the earlier attempts:

Low eye-line from earlier shots

Cameras rolling (makeshift prompter) causing low eye-line

Plus the added bonus during the shoot was the employment of the jib, which I think gives us another little edge towards the success of our news channel. We have used that on the intro and the outro tying the whole piece together really nicely. 

Testing the jib prior to shoot