News Production Unit - Introduction

Today I had a lecture on a new unit I'm starting all surrounding news. Its objectives break down into finding stories and constructing a narrative, involving contributors, finding locations, scripting, interviewing, sequencing and GV's to pull together a finalised project. Team work, organisation and time management skills will be vital to the project and with being very involved in the documentary we did last year, I believe a lot of these skills will be brought forward.

Some new skills that I will need to learn over the course of this unit are reporting, branding, news anchoring and sourcing talent. With the project being submitted in 6 weeks I will need to put everything to practice and learn fast to ensure a good project is received at the end of it. I want to achieve an in depth critical understanding of news and to create a body of work that shows the true meaning of how news for an online channel is created.

To start off we looked at some previous work from the course. In the art news project, although it was structured together well, the scripting was very repetitive and seemed very stiff. This showed me that our group will need to make sure the script is well written. It was fairly boring and with the repetitiveness from the writing the whole thing needed a bit more energy with something that viewers will enjoy watching.

We looked at some others and Helen pointed out some key elements that we could concentrate on in terms of structure, lighting, sound and editing. From the documentary our group learnt a very important lesson, show the audience don't just tell them. This is important to anything factual as it allows the audience to come on the journey with the presenter rather than just telling them about it.