Confusion

This week was kinda of easy because I didn't have to anchor and we didn't have much content for the show. Garrett anchored for his first time and did a pretty good job, even though it never aired on TV. This weeks show was live in New Castle for Light Up Night. Our producer wasn't sure if they would be able to fit the sports segment in because it was a live parade. Garrett was kind of upset and I would be to if it was my first time anchoring but he has to realize that in a real life News segment sports is the usually the first thing to get cut. A news director would rather take time away from sports than from weather or the news.

But even though it didn't air Garrett did good and we had a lot of readers because the hounds were away and we didn't have a game of the week. We did have titan highlights with a few readers about soccer wrapping up their playoff games and a few previews of what was coming up this weekend. One thing we previewed was the Buzz Ridl Classic which is a Basketball tournament that the Titans host every year. There was a local soccer tournament that also happened today that we previewed. That was about all we had and sports ended up being two minutes and thirty seconds which would have been perfect for a commercial break or for the open of light up night.

I sent a crew today to cover the local soccer tournment that was held at Wilmington High School. I will make it into a package and the main point of the pack is "what does this mean for the kids." I had them interview the players and find out what this tournment ment for them and also some of the parents. They also got some highlights of the game. I feel this package is perfect for not only our sports segement but also for this allstar game because it is the first one ever.

Breaking out of the shell

I finally came out of my shell, what I mean by that is I finally did some on air work. Thursday I pre-recorded Titan Town sports which I anchored for the first time. It was a little nervracking to get all the highlights and full screen graphics for it but it turned out pretty darn good. The one thing that I struggled with the most was voicing my highlights, for some reason I just couldn't get them to sound good. In the end they sounded pretty good in my ears but I let you be the judge of that. I stumbled through the volleyball and soccer readers but it was only a few words that just didn't want to come out of my mouth right. I feel this was a great eye opening experience for my self. I learned that I can do on air stuff with out being so nervous and that I can show some of my personality on air. Also on Thursday night I was a on the floor reporter for the Mock Convention. This was another reason why I anchored Titan Town sports. I wanted some type of practice in front of a camera before I went on live television. My responsibilities for the Mock Convention was to find people on the floor and ask them funny questions and obvious questions such as what are you dressed up like who are you voting for and so on. I was under the assumption that I would only have to do one interview, well it turned out I was doing four interviews. I got very nervous when I saw on the rundown that I had four interviews to do. My first interview went alright except you would think I was doing a 100 yard dash because I was flying through my questions, mainly because I was nervous. After that everyone told me to relax and just be myself. So it was time for my second interview and I had it all ready to go and I am in the middle of asking my interviewee a question and the microphone gets knocked out of my hand by a big beach ball! I almost lost my composure and flipped out on the kid who hit it but I realized the show was live and I went back to asking the question. Lucky the microphone wasn't working so I had to do the interview over again and it went awesome. I have never been so relaxed on air before. I was listening to what my interviewee was saying and I had follow up questions. I had a lot of comments on how well I did and that made my next interview go great because I knew all I had to do was relax and listen to what my interviewee had to say and respond. Now I feel I could do anything on air because of how well the whole day went with Titan Town sports and being a floor reporter. I really came out of my shell and I am ready to do it again and again.

Help me please!

This week was jammed packed full of local sports for the show. I was very impressed with the rundown and with all of the quality footage I had. I did a lot of running around each day of this week to put together what I felt should be our best show yet. Tuesday was a big day for me because I went to the basketball PAC media day and got some very useful sound bites for the show and shows down the road. Then when I got back the Women’s soccer team was hosting the first round of the PAC tournament, so I got some highlights from that. Wednesday I worked on a story coming up next week and shot highlights of the Men’s soccer team also hosting the first round of the PAC tournament. Then that night I put together my Hounds and Titan football highlights. I put a few readers in the show also with our SAAC athlete and I was ready to go. I felt my content and the work I put into the show was spectacular. All I had to do know was sit back and watch them hit play on my tapes while my anchor David Greg did his thing. Well this is why I put help me please for my title because the show was a total disaster and there was not one thing I could do to help or fix it. There was no audio for my first video of PAC media day, when they got to the hounds highlights David Greg introduced the interview at the end of the highlights and our switcher cut the interview and made David look like a fool. Once again I feel responsible for these technical difficulties because I am the sports director but I will not lower my head in shame because of errors I can not control. Next week I guess will go back to pre-recording the show because that’s the only way I can make sure things go the way they should.

One day to prepare

This week was a hectic week because our school was on fall break until Wednesday. It didn’t really matter for the news crew because they were able to re-rack their best non-dated packages. Unfortunately for sports you can not re-rack anything but we did the best we could with our time constraint. As always we had titan and hounds highlights which looked great and were easy to edit. We also had Garrett’s How to and a couple full screen graphics to preview what’s coming up next. I and David Greg had all of our material done by four o’clock yesterday. Then the show starts and everything is going well until we get to the titan highlights. I notice that I can’t hear the music bed I put under the highlights and I shrug it off thinking I might not be able to hear it from where I was watching from. Then we get to the hounds highlights and there the wrong ones there from two weeks ago, so David apologized for the technical difficulty and moved on to Garrett’s How to, which didn’t have sound either. The rest of the show was full screen graphics and they went better but after the show I figured out our rookie crew who has been doing this for two or three weeks forgot to turn on the audio for the highlights and accidentally rewound the hounds tape to a random football game. My show has had two major hiccups since we started and I feel responsible for them but I can’t control these mistakes. Next week I guess I’ll have to do my own audio and push play for my tapes because I will not accept another flaw in show that I can not control.

Pre-recording

Last week we decided to pre-record this show for a few reasons. One was so I could put it on my blog for all of you to view and understand what I do each week. The other reason was so it would be our polished show with hopefully no mistakes. I was a leery about doing the pre-record because I knew that meant I have to get my highlights and graphics done for Wednesday afternoon instead of Thursday night. I also had to call in for an in studio crew to help run a camera, audio, tapes, floor director, teleprompter and the switcher. So I need about six people and I thank everyone that showed up, there were five of us including myself. We started to record the first time and I knew something would go wrong but I wasn’t sure what and of course I screwed up the second tape I forgot to bring it up on the switcher. Round two went better but we didn’t have someone running camera though and David had half his body on the screen so we went to round three and there was no audio for the hound’s highlights. I didn’t realize this till the next day so we had to do it once again. This time it went better and we had audio so I was happy and not so stressed out anymore. All we had to do was sit back and watch the tape during the newscast. There was no worrying about if we would have audio or anything. Here is the show please give some feedback on what the shows strengths and weakness are.
http://www.westminster.edu/student/orgs/radio/county_line.cfm

Getting better

The best show with the least content. Our show this week only had one game for highlights and because of technical difficulties the highlights started in the third quarter. We also had Garrett’s How to which looked even better than the week before. We shot it with a wireless lave lire microphone and it looked and sounded ten times better. We had a lot of full screen graphics that turned out great. In those full screen graphics we represented four PAC athletes of the week from Westminster. All and all we didn’t have much video but we make a good show. For the next show were going to try and pre-record so we can get rid of minor errors such as a highlight tape starting right on cue.

New addition

Our new addition to this week show was Garrett Horvath’s How to Soccer second. I was worried about how this would turn out because when we shot it, we were not sure what to expect and it was kind of confusing. We really needed a wireless lav mic so Garrett could explain what he was demonstrating instead of doing a voice over. Garrett and I edited the day of show and it surprisingly turned out pretty good. Their were a few flaws but we made do with what we had. We also had lots of highlights this week Westminster College homecoming, hounds homecoming and the game of the week. I thought the show went well but I’m also comparing it to last weeks show.