DIGITAL NEWS • Evaluation

What worked?

Group work:

• As a group, I think that we have worked really well together.I have really enjoyed working with Josh, Ida and Becca and I would happily work with them again. 
• There was always good communication and everyone was always able to give their opinions. We started of early with having lots of group meetings and keeping everyone involved. We gave each other tasks so that we all had something to do towards the project and we stuck to our roles. 
• I think there was a good atmosphere between everyone in the group and I felt comfortable sharing my opinions. When watching the footage and sharing ideas, I felt like I could say if i didn't like something or if I wasn't too sure if it worked and this was good because it meant that as a group, we looked at how we could maybe to it differently.
• If someone had an idea, we would always do a test and see if it was possible and how well it worked. Especially in terms of editing, Josh would always try to achieve the ideas we had and put them into the video. Sometimes they worked really well and other times they didn't but it was nice to be able to see everything we though of. 

Shoot Days:

• On shoot days, I generally image these to be quite stressful and be a bit manic. However due to our extensive planning we knew the times we wanted to film everything and stuck to them. We got our equipment early and had already planned where everything was going to go. We were all organised and everyone was helping each other. 
• We all worked together on shoot days and made sure that we kept up our communication, this was especially important when we had contributors in as we needed to keep up a professional appearance. On the day of our live, we kept ourselves organised and calm even though that was the most stressful section as there were a few things that could have gone wrong. We had lots of audience members and contestants and a presenter and they were all looking to us for what to do and where they should go. 

Roles:

• We each had a different role and we all stuck to them well.
• After group meeting we would all have a task to do that matched our role. For example, I had the task of writing the shot list as I was the Director of Photography. 
• I also helped Becca write the script and add in some extra parts to the one she had already written. 
• I feel that I took on my role with a good attitude and I was excited to do it. I think that I did well in doing my job and I stuck with it throughout. I'm happy with how all the shots came out in the end and am pleased with the final result. 
• I am happy with the input I had throughout the production and I felt that all my ideas were taken on board and listened to. 
• I enjoyed being the Director of Photography on this project and found that I have developed my skills as we tried lots of different filming techniques such as with the green screen that i hadn't done before. 

Organisation:

• We had a strong idea from the beginning of our production which I think helped to organise as we didn't spend weeks trying to finalise an idea. 
• We decided early on shoot days and booked out equipment ready for those days so we were able to get all the equipment we wanted. 
• I kept on top of my tasks, like writing the shot list and the articles for the website and so did everyone else. We set our own deadlines of when to have things done by and were able to all stick to these which made the pre-production stage easy for us. 
• I feel that I have kept up with my blog work as in our group meetings we made sure that we had time to write blog posts and weren't giving out too much work to everyone so this wasn't possible. 

Challenges:

• On the shot day of our live, we had to change our location last minute because it started to rain. We had already chosen a room indoors to do it in as we knew we couldn't predict the weather and it was lucky that we had planned this in advance. It turned out to work better for us in that because the space was smaller, we had less things to consider. 
• We had some editing ideas that we wanted to include in our production. When we added them in they didn't really work, and some interrupted the flow our the show. As a group we had to find a way around this and either find a different idea or try to make it work. We tried different versions of these ideas, such as the Pen Pineapple Apple Pen joke, and eventually we were able to make all our jokes work. This was down to good team work and communication. 
•  We had some problems at the beginning with our script where it didn't really flow well and was as conversational as we wanted. To fix this we sat together and went through the script and got Josh to read out the lines and then change certain words that we wouldn't say to ones he would to make it more natural.

Overall, I have throughly enjoyed this production. I have learnt that working in a good team is essential to a good production and that communication is really important.