As Live Production Unit - Del's Workshop 1

Today we had our first lecture with Del Brown who is going to be helping us with this studio production unit. His main role is a Director/ Vision Mixer for the television industry and is leading our live studio unit. Our main focus for this session was to come up with and finalise a structure that myself, Gavin, Victoria, Jemma and the producers have tried to establish. We all participated as a group coming up with a set design and nailed down sectioned content. Below is a picture of what we have come up with. It shows 3 different areas, a soft area on the left where presenters can sit and chat to guests as well as show things on a TV screen, a hard area in the middle where the two presenters can stand to present to camera as well as show things on the studio floor in a more practical way, and a catwalk area on the right which is where models will come out and feature clothes that they are wearing.

From this image we were able to develop this into a basic floor plan which was drawn up as shown below.

This will help me for working out where the cameras are and to help with my blocking of the presenters and contributors.

In terms of structure, this is what we have come up with as a group. I wrote it down in a simple and easy way so that when I look at it I can see clearly what we are doing and in what order. You can view this below.

We also learnt about our own job roles in more detail. I understood that as a director I am going to be in the gallery making sure everything is framed and that we go to each shot when we should. I will also be leasing with all crew using talk back on the studio floor. Del said it would be very important to me to learn the terminology that is used in the industry world wide as it will be used for our studio production so I have been looking these up:

TX - Transmission
SOT - Sound On Tape
Sting - Musical Punctuation That Separates Two Sections
Gram - Musical Sound Effect
Aston/ Lower Third - A Graphic At The Bottom Of The Screen, Usually Someones Name
ENG - Electronic News Gathering
PSC - Portable Single Camera

This was a really helpful session that I learnt a lot from and I look forward to the next one which is going to be more practical looking at camera work and the gallery.