Assignment Three: Post-Production

Going into today’s class, I was super nervous and anticipating my writing coming to life on screen. I was also apprehensive about the questions, I was worried about them being too hard and that the attendants would not understand or they would be too easy – I think we had the right balance in the end. I was also put on as live stream operator, which was making sure everything was recorded properly and that the sound was on + working. Although this job was a minor role, being in the control room again was exciting, I enjoyed being in the atmosphere (and less stressful than being a director!). I think our production was done really well overall, seeing we only had one section of rehearsal time (unlike our last production, where we had a few tries), which I thought was interesting and liberating when we nailed it.

Although my role was more behind the scenes than being in the forefront of the production, it was very exciting and satisfying to see my questions and work come to life on-screen. I have a background in more of the writing side of media (journalism, freelance writing), so it never really occurred to me that writing in TV Series was something that was at the forefront of my interests, but by having a go at this assignment in writing, I’m going to consider it to be more of an option in the future.

Our content was very suitable for a live tv show and I also think it was suitable for our audience, as many of them would have grown up in the 90s themselves. It was exciting to see some of the harder questions being answered correctly (we were excited in the control room when they got it right). We used all options available to us including graphics, video, sound(playing songs rather than sound effects) and multi-camera angles. The fast-paced environment and the unpredictability of doing a live show really put me in the situation of what it would be like in real life, which often means people saying different answers of correct answers etc, which means we had to be on top of the ‘correct’ and ‘wrong’ graphics coming up on the screen. Because we only had one take, it was quite daunting because I am the type of person that I want to have multiple goes or ‘double checking’ that everything was fine, so only having one take is quite nerve-wracking.

All of our roles had to work together in the control room and on the floor, communicating with each other and making sure everyone has copies of the script and are familiar with the script itself.