WINOL: Week 3 Review

News broke on Monday morning that the president of the NUS (Aaron Porter) would not be standing for re-election at the end of his first term. As a controversial national figure on the student scene it was vital that we covered this story. It was a story that was covered at a national level by the BBC so I decided to put a local spin on it by evaluating the effect it may have on Winchester students.

I tried to get a hold of Aaron Porter through his PA. Unfortunately he was too busy to do a phone interview. (However, I continued down this route and managed to get an interview for Colin with Porter a few weeks later that he did over Skype.)

My interview with Seb, the Student President at Winchester, was good. However, he was very polished and unfortunately did not say anything controversial. Again, I have to work on the backgrounds for my interviews. This one was too white, we were in an all white room and perhaps should have asked to do it somewhere else. When I got back to the news room the colours were off as well, so I really must remember to white balance etc. This was sorted out in post-production using coulour corrector on FinalCut with help from Andy Giddings.

The voxpops I got were OK. I had to go through a ridiculous amount of students before anyone actually recognised the name Aaron Porter, which was pretty frustrating. As I was shooting on my own I framed them with quite a bit of headroom. I squeezed the shot closer to their faces, again in post-production with help from Andy.

I tried to get some new and innovative shots of uni. I did this my using zooms and pans. A shot I like a lot was the one of the canteen zoomed in through a window before zooming out to reveal the main university building. I also liked the shots of students that I took without idntifying anyone (Human Rights Act) showing people and movement, which is always more interesting than a shot of a building.

Thanks to Julie for helping me with the archive footage of Aaron Porter and the strikes. This really helped colour the story, as well as give it some context within other news stories.