What you Sayin' - Intro

So, Helen has pitched and her production had been given the green light to produce.

Been given the job title Cameraman for VT’s then Floor Manager Assistant during live production.

So what does a cameraman’s job involve? A cameraman films all shots needed for the VT given by the director. It is the cameraman’s job to make sure the shots filmed are in focus, the correct style, exposed correctly, white balanced, framed as asked by the director. For this project, the whole team are allowed to have some input with the creativity for the VT’s.

So far, our team were given 4 VT’s to create.

1 – Graffiti

2 – Violent Games

3 – Self Esteem

4 – Domestic Violence

All VT’s contain different subjects and will be filmed differently to each other which is part of the production.

So far from the meetings, to the best of my knowledge, the production is called ‘What you sayin?’. The target audience is from 16-35. The format is a talk show such as ‘Loose Women’ and ‘The Wright Stuff’, but aimed at the younger audience. The idea of the show is due to the increase in people using social media. The shows intention is to bring people back to watching TV to discuss what is ‘Trending’ on social media.

My criticism

Already I can see that most of these subjects have been talked about already and nothing new.

The discussion of graffiti whether it is art or vandalism is such an old debate. Typing up ‘is graffiti art or vandalism’ in the search engine, there are already plenty of blogs, sites, assignments, debates people have written about. As I am in the VT team we needed to find a way to introduce this topic. Already Helen – our producer had managed to get hold of a graffiti artist from a group called Graffiti Kings who graffiti’s for a living and legally. A group meeting was held for suggestions about what we could do for the VT.

Violent Games – I was told that the producer wanted to film reaction shots of people playing a violent game that hadn’t been released yet. Apparently this game has been spoken about as the most violent game to come out so far. I found that this was also nothing new as there are many videos online showing people playing games and watching their reactions. The discussion was based on how people react to violent games and how far do people take it. This question has also been discussed before, so nothing new here. In the meeting I heard the producer say ‘I love going online to watch peoples reactions’ does not convince my understanding of who will watch this. No statistics were given to us that prove the main target audience watch this type of video. From this statement I feel that the producer has not done her research properly, and have based the idea from her personal lifestyle. I am in the target audience category and I don’t like to sit and watch people play games. I am unhappy with this topic, but the producer can see a discussion about it. As a cameraman, the only thing I can do is to accept and try to vision with what the producer wants and try to film it to the best of my ability. The team will need to come up with a new way of showing reactions to make the show unique and show something new.

Self – esteem topic

So… the topic on Justin Beiber posing in Calvin Klein adverts has been a trending topic that people are talking about. Self-esteem is not a new topic, but it is a topic people are discussing. I have heard that the producer wants this shot as a video of a ordinary person being photoshopped and speeding up the time.

Domestic violence against men compared to women.

Once again, this has already been done before. The producer wants a stunt showing 2 actors and one bullying the other, then vice versa and filming how much the members of the public react when comparing the man beating up the woman then the woman beating up the man. Already this has been done before.

Problems arising (I can see)

This will be tricky to film as it could be dangerous for the actors if a member of the public decided to beat up the guy for beating up the woman, as seen in video experiments that has been done before. Also, getting permission from the public to broadcast. Some members of the public may feel offended and unhappy about the stunt.

Considering this is a talk show about things trending on social media I have noticed that only 1 topic is trending and the rest of the topics are all old. The target audience needs to change as the game they want to film is a 18 rating, therefore not suitable for under 18’s to watch. I do however, like the fact that each VT shown will be different.

Graffiti

Our group had a meeting and we agreed that we couldn’t do much  but watch magazine shows for research and look at shots and styles.