American Elections

The US Elections are over, but what a hell of an experience it has been for the WINOL team and indeed the organiser Ali Al-Jamri. It is the first live transatlantic broadcast, entirely run by students. Everyone had a part to play, but it was certainly heavily reliant on the presenters, experts and guests to keep the reaction show alive! And, they did a fantastic job of this too,considering the panic of the news room at 7am when news had come to light over night that Obama had won, which certainly was not anticipated! But, that's the beauty of live TV, and the show had to go on - the scripts were changed, the VTs were cut down, and 'America Decides' changed to 'American Decided'.

My active role on the morning was Floor Manager, this was a invaluable experience, as I hadn't seen the production side of things until then. It gave me a chance to get to grips with the buzz of being in the gallery, and of course the exciting nature of 'talk back' with the calm, professional and reassuring guidance from the director Graham Marshall, who was superb throughout the entire 2 hours!

In the run up to the elections, I produced 4 short packages of the candidates campaign promises, broken down in to issues such as Economy, Education, Healthcare and Energy. These topical VT's were used in the show to spark off discussions between the guests and the experts, in addition to the presenter and the live Skype conversation over to our sister college in Esatern Illinois. For the first time I learnt how to extract clips from YouTube in order to use a few seconds of footage from the debates under Fair Dealing. Moreover, it was the first time I experimented with a graphic, scaling in on certain aspects and adding effects and text which supported the voice over, to make it more visually interesting for the viewer. Here are the original packages, but they were cut down to just Obama's promises for the show.

Highlights of the show will be posted soon, watch this space