WINOL - Week 2 Report

The first WINOL week was very daunting. We had our first features meeting on Monday at 2:15 with our editor, who asked us all for our ideas and said she’d like navigation around campus feature made for first year students who had just joined the university. This year the features team wanted to begin including staff profiles on the website of important people around the university, and they wanted two profiles for the website every week, which we also started looking into.

Claire, Jake and I took on the navigation feature and began by booking out a camera and tripod and planned where we would film – where was most important to help first years find their way around. We chose, Reception, Student Union, library, Main Building, Food Hall etc.

To initiate the feature Jake presented a piece to camera outside reception, with ‘The University of Winchester’ sign behind him. We had been told not to include signs in packages if we can help it, however, not including one in this instance may have caused confusion to people outside of the university.

As we are students of the university we assumed we did not need permission to film buildings on campus, but thought we’d better check just in case and it turned out we did, so we approached the managers of each building and asked permission to film.

This was also only our second time using Final Cut Pro to edit anything and we had two days to edit this feature, so were feeling under pressure to finish this and two staff profiles.

While we were editing, we started to research people around the university who would be interesting to include on the features page of

www.winol.co.uk

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We decided to e-mail the Student Union president, Seb Miell, and managed to arrange an interview for the following morning. As well as carrying out a standard Q&A written piece, we thought of filming quick-fire questions. We asked Seb his age, where he was born, to describe his job as president, future ambitions etc, while the quick-fire questions were more like, Pepsi or Coke? Football or rugby? Night in or night out? We did the same thing for the second person we chose, which was James Knight, who is captain for the university’s football team. The quick-fire questions were edited so that the questions would scroll on the screen in the style of a typewriter then the interviewee would appear stating their answer.

The main complication with editing was the computers, as we had to use a firewire to connect the camera with the Apple Mac, in order to log and capture our footage. But many of the connections would not work so it took us a while to get started on editing all three packages.

Once we’d finished editing the navigation feature, our editor checked it before we exported it and suggested we include interviews from people around the university to add more information and to also put a voice over in to describe all the places around campus rather than having just visual. Our deadline was the end of that day, so in order to put in these additional aspects that had to be moved to the following day. The manager of Waterstones, next to the Learning Café was more than happy to be interviewed, and we got a few words from Martin Filler who works in the Food Hall.

Editing these interviews took a while, as we wanted GV’s over the interviewees however, we did not get any of Waterstones so had to go back at the last minute to get shots of books from different angles etc.

Our Navigation around Campus feature was much improved by the interviews and voice over as it was move captivating and informative for our audience – first year students at the university.