Production day! The actual day of filming is always my favourite, especially when I feel like we are some what prepared. Unlike the last assessment where I had the small job of being the vision switcher, I had a bigger role being our producer. Obviously, I was in no position like the director, but I still felt a bigger weight on my shoulders to make sure everything went according to plan.

My first main job was to go around and find three people to be the talent. Firstly I got Patrick to be our host. I did actually have some strategy in picking Patrick. I know him from my other classes, and I know that he’s super comfortable speaking in front of an audience, and being able to speak without a direct script, and make it sound natural. Perfect! I also asked Matt and Joey to be our quiz show contestants. I picked them, one, because they were talent for the first group, and they seemed pretty comfortable, and two, they’re friends! It was important for me to consider that the two people would be interacting with each other, meaning if they had never spoken to each other, it might have seemed a little uncomfortable, and possibly even heavily scripted.

I can’t speak completely on behalf of my entire group, especially the ones in the control room, as I didn’t see them much during the production, but from my view point, everything went smoothly. We stuck to the time schedule well, our cameras and audio were set up and working correctly, and overall, everyone seemed to have a good idea about what their role was on the day.

I want to say that our graphics were our downfall. For me, it could just be a personal thing, but I find that graphics on live shows should be used sparingly, and only if they are adding something to the shot, that could only be achieved through the particular graphic. The concept of having the gifs/pictures pop up for any relevant questions seemed good as a concept, however, I think they ended up making the shots look a bit messy and cluttered.

From a stylistic standpoint, I think this is something that we could improve on next time. Subtle graphics, text, maybe the odd image to support a statement or question would be good, but not just using them for the sake of.

For the next time I work on a production, I would like to focus on the stylistic elements of whatever we film. In particular, lighting. Without going into too much detail, I think setting the right mood through lighting is important, something I don’t think we really did. We had a very generic lighting set up. Obviously in such a small studio/setup, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to play with it a lot, but hopefully I can play around with it when we get to the bigger studios.

Overall I think our show as a whole was successful, but as always, there is things we could do better. Unlike the last time we worked together, our communication improved hugely, and we were able to achieve much better results.