Evaluation of Emma Massey's sessions and work

Evaluation for Emma Massey’s Piece

Whilst visiting our seminars, Emma Massey set a piece of work, which was a treatment for a news story, of which we had two to choose from. I chose to do a piece on non-smoking day, which was underlining issues with underage smokers.

My original set up for this piece was just the treatment without a script or storyboard telling to accompany it. I started to think about how the story would be treated on a programme such as Look North and the approaches that the Journalist would have towards it. Such as would it be covered in a comical way or a more serious manner, would the journalist have Vox pops, or interviews, or would it be something with a piece to camera, or all of the mentioned? I also thought about the running times and the schedule or where it could be placed in a programme.

After submitting the piece in a seminar at the BBC building, I talked through these ideas and gained feedback and further suggestions through other members of the group, and Emma’s professional advice. From this I re-wrote the piece taking on board the feedback, and also adding a script and Storyboard to gain a more insightful projection of my ideas to the group when presenting. I hand sketched these storyboards, and gave copies to all attending people in the group, and in my presentation, discussed the sequence that I would have, and also read out the script with each scene numbered to the storyboard.

Aspects that were changed from the original piece or the orders of some sections to the videos made the piece more interlinked and flowing as a story. Changings aspects such as orders of sections, the affects in the videos, where the piece to camera was, and also adding a script gave the piece more realistic qualities. This gave me more ideas of aspects to change with the sequences, as the words spoken would also have to flow, and irregularities became more apparent when trying to fit writing together along with pictures.

The presentation of the piece I feel went well, the storyboards where a little comical with my artistic impressions of objects, and also the script gave the storyboard meaning, and vice versa. The sequence of the story flowed when reading the script and my ideas, which again I feel was helped by having both words and pictures, as I gained a clearer perspective of what linked within the piece.

Overall the sessions with Emma Massey were extremely beneficial to me, as they helped my understanding of how much operation goes into running a scheduled programme, and helped me to gain a better understanding of basic do’s and don’ts within broadcast Journalism. The task of scripting a news treatment with all the added aspects was the most beneficial part of the sessions, as this is as close to designing something that could be used in Journalism with the feedback of a professional Video Journalist.