Unit 43: production and post production for T.V

Production Process

Throughout the process of creating the RSPCA Gaming Night segment, the project involved following the 3 most important stages of a general T.V programme. First, the pre-production stage, which involved the organization of filming sessions and the scripting for the segment. The main production, which involved recording the actual footage itself. And finally the post production stage, where editing, possibly re-filming and collecting additional materials takes place. As we planned to film the event, which took place on the 19th of December, it involved us preparing equipment call sheets to borrow a verity of filming equipment, which is available to us by UTC Sheffield College. Questions to ask the event attendants, arranged mostly by myself, with help from Jake Dungworth, and organizing a shot plan and storyboarding for everything we planned on filming to make sure we had correct footage to successfully finish the 5 minute segment. These tasks were met by an overall Production Schedule for the entire production stage.

The equipment taken to the gaming event which was held at the RSPCA centre in Sheffield, Attercliffe, included 2 DSLR Canon 650D Cameras, with Portrait and Regular Lenses. A RODE shotgun microphone, with a tripod and general SD cards and extra spare batteries for the cameras. We were expecting a successful day of filming as well as being very mobile during the duration of the event, especially with this range of equipment allowed for quick and simple set-up as well as stationary shots for vox pops and interviews. A recce sheet of the RSPCA venue showed us that an perfect place to shoot the interviews was in front of an art wall, in the centre itself. This became very convenient section for the segment, as it made our overall project look a lot more professional and news like, which turned out to be better than what we expected, and what we was originally looking for.

Following the success of the event, we as a team, made the decision to head back and film the RSPCA centre yet again, to obtain more footage, by setting another shooting day, later on in the following weeks. This meant we had the opportunity to film not only more footage that may not have met our original standards, but also to film some of the animals there and have the chance to tour the centre which successfully provided some great quality filler clips and coverage shots of the venue. This choice was made by myself and Jake Dungworth as the event alone did not provide enough content and footage for the show, as due to the weather conditions, many of the attendants could not make it to the gaming night.

On the 7th of January 2015, Jake Dungworth, Alex Raynes and Mitchell Morton went down to the centre so they could record some of the footage again and gain more filler shots and variety clips, to solely focus on the animals of the RSPCA centre. While this was ongoing, I was at the UTC Sheffield college, editing the previous footage and completing any related work that needed to be finished like documentation.

We began the post production stage in our project which I and Jake Dungworth were responsible for. We also had a big help from Alex Raynes, who was mainly in charge of finishing off the documentation and creating the production schedules. We primarily used Adobe Premier as our editing software. The entire editing process took around a month to complete as a first draft. The music we used was sourced from the site www.audionetwork.lgfl.org.uk, where all sounds are available royalty free and with no copyright, meaning no copyright breaches or charges. We then showed our segment to our client (Vicky Kilby and Jordan Turner, hosts of The Games Corner as well as our classmates and Teacher, and Sheffield Live as a whole) as we intended on obtaining feedback, which was mostly positive. We were expecting changes to be made as we knew that this was only our first draft edit. There were several changes that had to be made which will be gone over under the improvements section.

Key Decisions

The choice to create a segment based this particular event was decided by the hosts of The Games Corner, Vicky Kilby and Jordan Turner, as they were planning on going to the event anyway to raise awareness of the gaming night, for people in the Sheffield area. Our group (Myself, Jake Dungworth, Will Hewitt and Alex Raynes) had already created a piece of work, for the show covering the Euro-gamer Expo event, that is held every year in London. This particular segment was featured on episode 1 of the show. As the Euro-gamer segment was sadly too short in running length, were asked to record a second piece as because of the issues with this particular segment, also including a lack of sound quality also. The team was assigned different tasks after the euro-gamer project was compete, which led to myself, Jake and Alex teaming up again to do this particular segment, while Will worked on his own section of the show.

On both of the filming occasions, the production team travelled by public transport (tram), being the quickest way to get to the venue from the centre of Sheffield (where the UTC is based). We followed the interview conventions by having a close up of the person we were interviewing as well as tried to get most of their upper body and head in the shot also, sometimes resulting in a medium shot, which we believe went successfully. Our main decision affected our outcome and genre of this particular section, as the group came to the decision to convert the 5 minute segment event into a news and promotional piece, resulting in us making the segment a lot more professional and formal.

We ended up choosing an upbeat, happy and calming music to accompany and fit in with our footage as we all felt it would suit the calm and friendly atmosphere perfectly, at the centre, so this led to our choices reflected this mood. We decided that we would overlap the interviews with a variety of establishing and outing footage of the RSPCA centre. We believed that this would be a lot more entertaining for our audience than just watching two full interviews, over the course of our 5 minute long video.

Alterations from Script and Storyboards

Before the event took place, we weren't aware of much about the gaming night; but what we was provided with, included competitions, as we based our shooting plan and script on this, was a recce of the location. The recce was carried out just before the event took place, and so our storyboards and shot plans were drawn and created based on the areas of the location we decided to film in and the shots we wanted to take; such as the RSPCA art inspired background wall that we used to film our interviews against. In the script we mentioned that mentioned that the event included a poker tournament; which was eventually cancelled due to lack of attendants because of the weather conditions. This drastically affected our planning as it restricted most of the content we could record on the night as well as any footage in general because of the lack of people there, to make the event look substantial. As mentioned before, we overcome this issue by deciding as a group to go back to the venue and re-film; meaning additional storyboards and shooting plans had to be created. Because of this, many of the re-shoots, were improvised, for example the shots of the animals.

Film Quality

From the feedback that we gained from our audience, the piece ended up being very successful, visually excellent and said to be professionally produced, from the content of footage that we produced to the effective camera work and overall contribution to the meaning and appeal of our target audience. The shooting locations and scenes of our product were totally appropriate for the RSPCA segment. Our best and strongest quality of the segment was said to be the skill of camera usage, shot by all three of us. From things like framing the subject during our interviews shot on several cameras, with close-ups to the tracking, which was said to be smooth during moving clips and videos, as well as the lighting, as it was set correctly for which ever scene we shot. The interviewee Titles, the cutaway clips and all of the filler footage between the interviews, was said to fit well and correctly fulfilled the conventions of a T.V News Segment. All of our Recorded audio clips came through very clear and smooth, which was captured via several RODE Shotgun Microphones, while the background audio from all the footage ended up fitting great with the theme of promoting the animal centre and the gaming night.

There were some instances where the quality of the sound ended up being unintended, like the outside footage, mainly being of establishing shots, that could have been prevented by using a wind baffle, and possibly improved by better use of the equipment and camera work. For example, some scenes we filmed were shaky and/or didn't frame the subject or scene as well as other clips, like the establishing shots from the outside, as the tripod used inside the centre that ended up helping us film the interviews perfectly, to professional quality, wasn't used. This knocked the overall quality of our product as filming was not always consistently good quality even though we filmed twice. This was considered a minor fault for us as a team, as our footage far exceeded good to bad quality.

Comparison to original Concept,

Our shots, footage and overall end product, matched the storyboards, script and shot plans we created at the start of our project, extremely well and we all feel we have succeeded in creating a piece of work that is fit for television, to entertain our T.V audience, and to get awareness of the gaming event. We believe that we got all the shots that we wanted as well as enough to last our 5 minute segment deadline. We did plan to get a good insight into the centre, which, from most of our footage and interviews, we did exceptionally well, as well as planning to display the night, the centre and the facilities they have for them, to possibly get them more attention, which again we think we did very successfully. As mentioned, there wasn't a great deal of information about the event, heading into it, available to us, so we purely planned the entire night from our recce hours before to the event took place, this also included some information from Vicky and Jordan as well as the information on the RSPCA website, about this event. So, the final piece didn't fully reflect our original plan entirely, but it actually developed into a more realistic television segment for the The Games Corner, which we were even happier with.

Relation to target audience

We believe that our product was suited to our target audience especially well, as it not only shows games content and games being played, but also shows the audience an event that they may want to attend, and can play games in a competitive and social environment. We used clips of game footage, shots of people playing games and interacting, interviews about the night and the RSPCA centre, as well as overall footage from around the centre itself. We believe that Sheffield gamers should find the social aspect highly appealing to them as it is definitely becoming much more frequent to play games socially, in groups, as there are many gaming bars open, in and around Sheffield and local towns and cities. They may also be interested in visiting the centre itself which helps to give it some more publicity, and was one of the initial ideas about doing the segment for the venue. Our segment will be good for pre-watershed issues due to there being no offensive or harmful content whatsoever. It is educational as well as entertaining so it is also good for daytime television.

Identifying Areas for improvement

When relating to areas of improvement, some of the framing in some particular shots could have been improved, although the ones that we did frame professionally, look very accomplished and fine. Although we are happy with this, we will focus on making sure all of our shots are framed well next time. We should also use tripods more frequently and effectively as some establishing and panning shots were a little shaky, due to there being no tripod, so next time, the use of a tripod will remove this. The establishing shot could have much better as we only did 2 takes overall, between the two days for it. Both shots were shaky so we could only use a small section, which meant it wasn't as long as we wanted. Just to clarify, the first time we went filming and the venue, it was getting dark, and the weather conditions were very poor. Overall this would have stopped us from getting the best shots we possibly could on that night, although the second time we filmed, this was no excuse. The interviews were very strong and clear, the sound was quality was excellent and the shots we took look extremely professional. The only way for us to better the sound quality is to use a hand-held microphone to give to the person we are interviewing to minimize the unwanted noise pollution. Although this was provided to us, if we chose to use it. We believe that in the end, the final result was good enough standard for us, and we are extremely happy with the finished product.