CCi Live Preparation Continues

We have finally managed to get clearance to film the Great South Run from the event organiser, on the condition that we make it absolutely clear who we are, don’t get in the way of Channel 5 film crews and do not use any wireless frequencies whilst filming.

On the Tuesday we had a group meeting to discuss and organise both the CCi and the commissioned shows. I delegated tasks to the members of the group and ensured everyone knows where we are with each piece of the show. We are also gradually getting a treatment together for our commissioned show, although the tighter deadline for CCi Live means the main point of focus is on that.

Charlie watts set up an open audition session whereby producers could evaluate prospective presenters. This session was very useful as we could see how the candidates dealt with presenting, and also enabled us to discover some new talent we hadn’t yet seen. There were several candidates that I decided I would like to use in future shows, however I couldn’t ask any to present our next CCi Live as we already had presenters lined up. We were also told in this session that Portsmouth City Council have changed the process to get permission to film around the city, they now want at least 5 days notice. During this session, one of the presenters, Tom Cross, gave the producers feedback in terms of the script. He said that he would prefer it if he could see the script earlier so he could read over it and feedback to us if he thought adjustments were needed. He also said that sometimes the show can be too scripted and this comes across as fake and cheesy.

In preparation for our live show, I bought several poppies for our presenters to wear. This is because our show is broadcasted on the Friday before Remembrance Sunday and presenters always wear poppies around this time of the year on television, so I wanted our show to be no different. I also made several ‘microphone flags’ to use during the filming of the Great South Run to distinguish ourselves as CCi Live, and also give the interviews a nice professional touch. These were made out of a cereal box, and had the CCi Live logo on each side, with slits cut at the top and bottom to slide the microphone up whilst also being adjustable for multiple microphones. We also borrowed University TV crew polo shirts from the CCi office to wear over our coats on the day, to further identify ourselves as being from the University.

Homemade microphone flag

We discovered that our next CCi Live show will hopefully be broadcasted on the BBC big screen in Guildhall Square. This means that we have to be even more careful with our content because we have to abide by the BBC’s rules as well and bear in mind that it will be shown at 12:00 in front of a wide audience of all ages and backgrounds.