Simon Babbage Television Production: Show Time

On Friday 11th January the group met at 9:00 in Eldon building. My job for the 2 shows was production assistant again as I enjoy doing this role and I think I am quite good at it. Some members of the group including myself were wearing our new CCi t-shirts, which I believe look good when delivering a show.

We ran through our CCi Live between 9:00 and 10:00. When doing this we realised that the timings were also slightly off and so we had to unfortunately cut out our commissioned show advert because otherwise we would run over time. We than ran through The Manual between 10:00 and 11:30.

Several minutes before we went live for CCi Live we were told that we would have to show some straps before the show to say that we are aware of technical issues when watching online and are trying to fix them. This meant we had to quickly make the straps on the Tricaster and display them before the opening credits so that they would not be embedded within the show. This also meant we went live a couple of minutes later than normal. This slightly threw us off but we managed to keep it together and stay calm. CCi Live went fine but we were 6 seconds over which was quite frustrating for myself.

We then had around 15 minutes or so to get everything ready for The Manual. The show went live at 12:30 and everyone seemed excited yet nervous. The show seemed to all be going fine until we were told of a technical issue with the sound, as 2 of the presenters were not being picked up very well. During an insert this was attempted to be fixed, however when the presenters were live again the sound was awful and came up very loud and distorted. This was not our fault though and it was very frustrating because we were live and the problem was obvious for all to see. We later discovered that the sound was in fact fine initially and so didn’t need to be corrected.

We managed to get the sound back but kind of lost where we were in the show because of the disturbance and the fact that we didn’t know what the presenters had covered. However I reiterated to the team that the show must go on and that we must stay calm and keep going. The show ended around 36 seconds short of time, which was very frustrating again for myself however the sound issue didn’t help to keep the show length under control.

We decided that we would re-film certain parts of the show that had been messed up by the sound issue as well as one or two other mistakes that were made. These would then be edited together with parts of the original live show and then uploaded to Vimeo. In doing this we managed to catch up on some of the show time that we had been short on. When I watched the show back I was very pleased with the outcome. I believed all of the elements came together well and the finished show had a consistent look and feel.

I believe that I carried out my role as producer to a reasonably good standard as the organisation of the film shoots, such as making sure everyone was available for the days filming, was quite a challenging task. These organisational tasks were made much more manageable by various other members of the group, such as Michael Parsons, taking it upon themselves to organise various other elements of the show. For the next show I will try harder to ensure that I undertake more organisational tasks and prepare for film shoots further by creating more documentation. I will also become more closely involved in each section of production and post-production to create further synergy amongst the group.

Here are some photos from the day