Aurelija's TV production blog

For the most part, I'm happy about our finished project as it went so much better than I expected it to. To start with I had my doubts about the winning show idea as it was a children's game show and  we were warned not to work with children or animals as they come with a lot of legal responsibilities (like the fact that we can't upload our show on YouTube, or any online platform, yet for example). However, I think that all of us did their best and deserved a clap on the back. This unit definitely helped to bring us all together as we never actually worked on anything as a  big team, so far we only had little teams that wouldn't change a lot over a year and a half.  As for my own work on it I feel like I could have done a better job at keeping sharper focus, but I'm sure that with more practice I could have done it better. During game two I did a crucial mistake (that was later on edited out) of reframing on air. My job was to have CUs on th...

Jungle Run I chose this show because it has a lot of similarities to our studio show Mission Control. There are a few games along the way that help to 'power up' the last one and depending on how you did in the games before you get a certain time limit to do the last task. Obviously Jungle Run had a way bigger budget and a way bigger set that let them have more challenging quests, but at the same time, the show is meant for older kids than ours was.  From the camera perspective, there's always a following shot when they are running from one game to another, there's also an establishing shot, usually from the jib, which we tried to do on our show, but at the end, it was too risky to use.  Something different from our show was that they didn't have an audience on set, but the host interacts with the viewers at home. As well as there's a pre-titles sequence of the host introducing the show, he and the kids run off and then they play their titles which wo...

I was the DOP for our promo team. Overall, the experience of working with my team was quite pleasant. However, I wish things wouldn't have been done so last minute and that the communication between us was a bit better, as I had to miss a shoot day due to being told too late about the filming date when the promo was being filmed and I couldn't move around my shift at work anymore. But I am fairly proud of my work in our trailer and titles.  If I would have filmed the promo I would have suggested to put the letters on the word S.P.A.C.E down on the left side of the frame and left enough room for Jess to put them in the edit. "Ideally, every shot in a television program should be composed as carefully as a still photograph."(Inman and Smith, 2006) and in a still shot like in our promo that is very easily achievable. Looking back at the footage I feel like we should have turned the lights up a little bit because even though it supposed to be nighttime it...

Grams aka sound effects, the name Grams come from 'gramophone' as back in the day they were playing it through gramophones  (Singleton-Turner, 2011) . For our pre-production, I was given a job to find grams, which wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, however finding decent sounding, royalty free effects that fit into our 80s synth/vaporwave theme is possible. It took a while but with some help from Tom, we managed to get it done in time for the day. Sound effects are extremely important to any TV show or film. Without any sound design, people may not understand what's happening. Not only does it help to explain the setting of the action it also helps the viewer to get immersed in the show/film. Sometimes we as viewers don't even notice how we react to background music or sound effects (like infamous dun dun duuun ). Grams are especially important in kids TV shows and films as it helps them to keep up with what's going on on the screen, draw in their...

Our first workshop with Del was a camera workshop where he explained what is expected from camera operators in the studio. He explained how working in the studio is different from working on our one camera shoots where we'd have time to focus and get the perfect shot and much more movement there is in the studio shows so there's almost no point in wasting time to lock and unlock the cameras or having lots of friction as it works against us when we try to follow people around especially when we had to reframe and keep focus on the subject. Even though we had time to practice our camera skills before the TX day, I still feel like I'd need way more practice to be a good camera OP on the 'live' studio production as I did lose focus a few times and "a good Camera Operator does not 'lose focus' " (2011, Manchester) . We also learned about camera lineup and how important it is to do it so that the images from different cameras would look the exact sa...

During our studio production rehearsals, I was behind the JVC camera. Everyone in our camera crew agreed that it was the best to stick by one camera and master working with it instead of bouncing from one to another. I've never worked with a JVC camera so it was tricky to figure out. The first day I picked it up felt like my first day in uni when I knew very little about cameras, it took me ages to find the on/off switch. To help me better to understand where I can find all of the settings and buttons I took the camera out. I wanted to go through the settings so I would be confident in knowing where I can find certain settings if needed. Before that, I couldn't find peaking on it which helps with keeping everything in focus especially when people move more. Found out that if you turn the peaking on you can only see things in black and white and the peaking colour, of which I wasn't a fan, but at the same time I found out that you can increase peaking on the...