Week 1 – 29/01/18

For this week as a group, we narrowed down all the potential ideas for our pop up station to our favourite four. These ideas were a Gaming Station, An Alternative Sports Station, A Disco Station and a Women’s Station. Everyone in the class on that day split into 4 groups depending on which idea you were most passionate about. As I had suggested the idea for the Women’s Show in the beginning as this year is the 100th anniversary since the Suffragettes won the right to vote for some women  I decided to go with that group. In our group, we had to come up with an outline of the station and what it would contain and then pitch it later on to the full class. These ideas included stuff surrounding the music the station would play, OB ideas, presenters and news. After all the individual groups had fleshed out our ideas the four groups pitched the station ideas before the entire class had several rounds of voting for their favourite. In the end, we all agreed on a Gaming Station as the idea was the best fleshed out as well as the most unique.

Once we had decided on the station we started working out roles. I wanted to be and AP Producer on one of the three shows, however when it came to dishing out the roles there was no one to be the Producer on the speech show. I agreed to step up and take on the role so  I am the Producer for the talk show called State of Play. Once we all left for the day I created a group chat with myself, Fay and Tony who are the presenters, Ellen who is the AP, Eliza the editor, Lucy the programme controller and Adam the Executive Producer. I plan on speaking to my older brother who is a big gamer this week to find out what is big in the community at the moment.

Week 2 – 05/02/18

This week we started with a class group meeting to iron out a few decisions regarding the station including the name which the majority ended up voting for the name Unlocked. After this, we split up into our teams within the Station. Simon and Beth who are the OB team joined us as i spoke with them and we decided that the OB would work best in the Talk Show as it takes pressure off Fay and Tony. We decided in our team that we wanted the vibe of the Talk show to be a discussion and debate regarding major topics within the gaming community. So we started to come up with ideas for the four different shows. These are the ideas we will be working towards for the show, but we will also be looking for other ideas in case something better comes up.  During this discussion, I flitted between the presenters for the show and the OB team to make sure the ideas suited both groups and especially in the OBs case there were exciting things for them to do.

For the Pilot and Week 1 Fay suggested an Idea surrounding the language used by the gaming community and whether they mean it, for example, the controversy of Pewdiepie and his language while playing games. I thought this was a good idea and said we should expand it to the gaming culture in general so the language used, the violence, the impact it has on young children and some slight conversations regarding the behaviour towards women.

For Week 2 we decided that we wanted to do an entire show on Women in Gaming so the underrepresentation of female heroes, the sexualisation of female characters, the discrimination towards Women gamers and the abuse they get. I thought that placing this idea after our first week 1 would be a good idea as Fay and Tony can connect the two shows and prelude to the discussion in this week. This could provide some good social media content throughout the week in between as a way to get people’s opinions on the matter.

For Week 3 I decided that we should do a show on Gaming Addiction. Just at the beginning of the year Gaming Addiction was classified as an actual disorder. I also had spoken to my brother and he said in-app purchases are also a big problem as it counts as gambling and many people get addicted to this. This topic would also provide lots of guests and OB opportunities as we could get in game developers, people who are addicted to in-app purchases or games ourselves and go to a treatment centre for gaming addictions.

For Week 4 the final week we decided on a VR heavy episode. The discussions will be on about the future of VR, are they taking away from normal games, the health problems with them as well as the help they can provide for disabled people. This idea to do VR originally stemmed from Beth saying that she and Simon would like to do an OB somewhere regarding OB.  I did some research during the meeting and found a place called Omescape which is a place in London that claims to have the first team based VR escape room. I thought this would be a great OB and suggested it to Beth and Simon who loved the idea. This would also be great content for the digital team too. During the next week, we will contact them to try and arrange an OB there. Fay also has a contact who has VR equipment and does youtube equipment so we would bring them in too. I decided to have the topic VR during the last week as it is our most ambitious and fun idea and I think it would be a great conclusion.

After coming up with these ideas I also spoke to the News Team about what we wanted them to do in our show as well as speaking to Branding about what we wanted. In regards to News, we decided that it would be cool to aim to have a Newsbeat style investigation relating to each topic every week as well as news on the hour. This would once again take pressure off Fay and TGony as well as giving more opportunity to the news team.

Finally, after the meeting, I started to look at potential guests for the shows and found a few female gaming streamers/YouTubers that we will try and get in contact for an interview in Week 2. After this, Ellen and I started to work on the Remit for the show and I shall continue working on it for the rest of the week.

Week 3 – 12/02/18

Monday was really productive. I started off the day by sitting down with Simon as Beth wasn’t in to help finalise some of the OB ideas as well as starting to contact some. We made a document on the google drive with all the ideas for each week as well as starting to put on contacts and locations for each one. Lucy started to contact the list of Women Gamers I compiled last week. I found the contact information for the Omescape VR escape room and Simon rang them up to start the conversation. They seemed interested and said to email them with the details. So Simon and I sat down and wrote the email which I then sent off and we are just waiting for a reply from them.

After doing this I sat down with Ellen and we started working on mind maps of all the ideas we wanted Fay and Tony to cover in each show.  This helps segment the show into different sections and will make it flow better.

Once we had finished making mind maps of each show I went and found Bernice and spoke to her about the investigational pieces of news that she will be doing for week 1 (gaming culture) and week 4 (VR). I wanted to make sure that the topics linked with the main show but did not overlap too heavy with both the show and the OB. We decided that a good angle to take for week one in gaming culture would be whether violence in video games could impact violence in real life. I had already done some research on this topic and sent it over to Bernice to help her with a starting point. For the VR week I suggested that investigating the impact VR has on disabilities could be interesting Bernice agreed and has started working on that. Next week I will sit down with Clare who is doing Week 2 (Women in Gaming) and Week 3 (Gaming Addiction) to sort out her angle for those weeks. For the rest of this week, I am going to be working on researching some more into information surrounding the topics we are talking about as well as guests we could use.

Week 4 – 19/02/18

Leading up to class on Monday I researched some more information related to the topics of the week. This helped a lot as during the day I mostly sat with Ellen and we made the running order of all the key points to be spoken about of each 4 shows.

We have so much content to fit in each show as well as both organising the OB and the News Package Update to fit in within the hour show so we decided to work out rough timings for all four shows. We bullet-pointed the key topics and ideas to be covered in each section as well as including some information I had researched/knew about because I game a little. We, however, did not script or provide all the information as we wanted to allow Fay and Tony to do this.

The running orders of the four shows took up most of the day, but throughout the day I would also check on how Simon and Beth were doing with there contacts for the OBs as well as talking to Bernice and Clare about there update section. The idea for the shows is that all three sections: the main show with Fay & Tony, the Update News section and the OB all interlink and are related to the same topic, but that they all cover different angles. So during the day, I kept communicating with the three teams to make sure that this was the case.

As well as this Ellen and I also started to contact some guests for some of the main shows. This included organising a Pre-Recorded interview for Week 3 Gaming Addictions, A possible phone call for Week 2 Women in Gaming as well as another interview for that week. We also contacted the incel forum for an interview, but we doubt we will hear back from them.

We were meant to do a brief run through on Monday for the pilot the following week, but we ran out of time as Fay & Tony were doing digital content. So Ellen, Fay, Tony and I agreed to meet up on Tuesday and have a run through of the entire Pilot show. We met up in the morning and Ellen and I made notes and timed Fay & Tony as they ran through the show. Overall the show run through went, okay, but it helped Fay & Tony understand what they needed to improve on as well as what worked and didn’t work in the run through. After the run through finished Ellen and I gave our feedback on it as well as advice and we also tweaked a portion of the running order/topic as Fay & Tony said they preferred to talk more about the Violence aspect as they had opinions on this. Ellen and I spent about half an hour after the run through tweaking things based on the run through as well as adding more information. We also decided on what songs we wanted throughout each of the four shows.

Today I started researching some more and adding some more information to the running orders as well as planning out the songs for each week and  I’ve emailed the information over to Iona. I am now collecting information and images regarding female characters that will be talked about during week 2 as we plan to have the digital team to tweet those out as references.

Week 6 – 26/02/18

The pilot didn’t go well. We had a lot of problems and lots of things to change. So Ellen, Fay, Tony and I agreed to meet every day for the next week in order to make sure the first show would be better. We met every day and wrote better scripts, changed the running order, did more research and lots of run-throughs. One of the main complaints for the pilot was the lack of contributors so Ellen and I started to try and find some. Ellen contacted David Zendle who is a lecturer at York St Johns and has done some research into the connection between violence in video games and violence in real life. He agreed to a pre-recorded interview. We also managed to get in contact with James who is an avid gamer and who agreed to a pre-recorded interview regarding his opinions as a gamer regarding violent video games. Finally, I managed to find Corry who agreed to be a live phone interview on the day in regards to the topic of pewdiepie and his use of the N-Word.

On Friday morning Ellen, Tony and I recorded the David Zendle interview and in the afternoon Fay and I recorded James’ interview. I then spent the weekend editing the James interview as well as editing together the PlayStation detox package that Fay recorded and sent to me on Sunday. I also planned the social media tweets and timings of them before putting them in the calls to action sheet on the drive so James and Dan could schedule them.

Finally, throughout the week I was in contact with the OB team to get information regarding their broadcast as well as to get a cue. I was also in contact with Bernice throughout the week helping her with her Update package.

Week 7 – 05/02/18

We all came in at 8am and did run-throughs all morning in preparation for the show. I also worked with Iona to load all of our audio (songs, recorded interviews and packages)  into the Myriad cart. The run-throughs definitely worked as the show was much better than the pilot. It wasn’t amazing, but much better than the previous Monday. I wrote notes of all the critiques Tom and Luke had for the show and I’ve put them on the drive. After the critiques, Fay and I went to the studio as we had a pre-record phone interview for our week two show. I had written the questions and sent them over to the interviewee a few days earlier. I recorded the interview and will edit it down in the next few days.

On Tuesday we came in and started working on the next week. Using the critiques in the notes we are working on bettering the show’s format. We are happy that we had improved from the pilot, but know we still have a long way to go. We are planning on spending all day today and most of this week working on the show as we are determined to get this show right.

Wednesday morning I came in and edited two of the best bits of the showdown by request of Digital and sent them over to them as well a paragraph of writing explaining them and an image so they could put them on the website. Once Fay and Tony came back from doing the voxpops and I had finished editing the clips down and had sent them over to James I went to the studio with Tony to record another phone interview. Once we were done with that I started work one editing the two interviews down as Eliza wanted all audio in myriad before Friday. I also sent a message over to Eliza and Lucy letting them know the changes we were making in the show and just an update of the show plan. I had no replies from them so assume that it was all good.

Over the next few days, I worked on editing the interviews, working on the running order and clock with Ellen and communicating with OB. One of the critiques of the show was that OB needed to link more with the show and have more interaction. I messaged back and forth with Beth the OB producer a lot throughout the week to arrange the structure and how to obtain this connection. Another critique from the show was to have more live callers as we only had one in the show. The whole team put out feelers on social media to try and get some people and we managed to get three people willing to be live callers on the day and listen to the show.

Towards the end of the week, I began to realise that we potentially had too much content for this week’s show. So after analysing everything, we had planned I decided it best to drop one of the pre-recorded interviews I had edited. I felt that although the interview was good that we didn’t want too much-pre-recorded content and could use the time better with a live interactive caller. However, as it was already edited down we put it on myriad as a backup for something to play if we have a problem with a live caller. The other interview was also edited and scheduled into Myriad before Friday. I also wrote out some draft social media posts and sent them over to James and Dan so they could schedule them on the buffer account and add some videos.

We were all in different places over the weekend so didn’t manage to meet up. However, we all did individual work like Fay and Tony continued to research for the show and I started work on researching for Week 3s show so we could be a few steps ahead once Week 2s show was done. We did decide that although we were all in different places over the weekend and although we couldn’t meet up physically to do a run through that we would do one over a group call. This happened at 8pm on Sunday night after Ellen had got home from work and While I was on a train travelling back to London. This was a fun experience being on a train and counting down timings for the run through and talking with my team while in a packed carriage, but it was definitely needed. The run through went quite well there we a few tweaks needed to be made to timings, but overall it went well which gave us a little more confidence in ourselves as this was something we had been lacking since the start.

Week 8 – 12/03/18

I arrived in just before 8am and the rest of State of Play quickly arrived too. We spent the first part of the morning tweaking the running order and putting more facts in based on what we found weak during the run through on Sunday. Clare found an interesting article about a game called Super Seducer so we promptly put that in the running order. There were a few points in Fay and Tony’s scripts that they wrote I felt jumped around a little too much so I suggested some changes which they did. We finished tweaking the running order around 9am and as we didn’t have Studio 6 for a run through until 10am we went into Studio 5 and just had a run through of the script. This worked well after the tweaks were made and had improved even since Sunday. I had been timing the run through and there were still a few timing concerns, but this was easily fixed by swapping some timings around from different segments.

After we had done this run through we had access to the studio where we did a run through with the audio as well. We had a few technical problems with Myriad like our songs not being there, but Music team promptly fixed this and normalised the songs as well.

Then it was time for the live show. Throughout the show, I had to tweet out our social media posts from Buffer as to try and make timings as accurate as possible as scheduling didn’t work well last week. I was also in contact with Beth and Simon to make sure that they were ready and knew the times. Overall in the studio, the show felt much better, smoother and Tony and Fay were definitely more confident. The three live callers were good and we didn’t need to use the backup interview. There were a few technical issues at the start with the news bulletin and then someone walking in during a live link, but Fay and Tony did great at not letting this faze them. The OB worked great and during it, Fay/Tony wrote down some questions statements in regards to what was said as we had planned a minute chat with Simon and his guest Ashley afterwards.

Towards the end of the show, we started to realise that we were running behind and had to start cutting stuff in order to finish on time. Fay and Tony did great and were professional in cutting off one of our live callers early. Then I evaluated the rest of the shows running order and informed them of which bits they should cut out and skip over. Amazingly we managed to get back on time and it went to the news on time.

The feedback was good this week and we definitely felt better in spirit when hearing it. Its good to hear that people can tell we are putting work into it. We obviously still have ways to go, but we seem to be on the right track. Once again I wrote down the notes of what Tom and Fiona said in order to tackle them and keep improving.

On Tuesday we met up at 9am and quickly went over the notes I made from the feedback and went over how to improve on them. For example, for the press line of the show, Ellen and I will write down key moments and times of the show and will highlight them to Fay and Tony to use to summarise at the end of the show as well as giving them to News so they could potentially use them. Tom had suggested telling people how to be a caller, but we were unsure how to do this as we did not have a number to give out. Ellen spoke to Matthew about this and we now know to tell the audience during the show if they want to be a caller or state their opinion and we will get in touch with them. More callers was another feedback point and for week 3 we are actually working with Digital to have a live panel debate about Gaming Addiction. So we may not be able to fit in as many live callers but will have several live guests instead to bounce off.

After working on how to tweak the show we started putting out feelers and contacting people to be these live guests. As of the moment we have three people. One through Bernice who is relaying all the information about the panel to them and two who I am emailing back and forth with.

On Wednesday we did not meet up as we all had individual things to work on. I spent the day emailing back and forth with the live guests to make sure the details with them were okay and sending them overdraft questions for the panel. I also spent the day finding more research for Fay and Tony as they were working on there scripts. We messaged Eliza and Lucy

Thursday and Friday morning we met up again to work more on the running order as Fay and Tony had worked on their scripts and I had confirmed the guests for the live panel. We also worked on getting more callers on throughout the show but found this hard as anyone who had any opinions on the matter was busy during the show., in the end, we managed to get two live callers.

Sunday Morning we came back in to do some run-throughs of the show. The run-throughs seemed to go well just needed to tweak a few timings of the show and some content. Sunday night at around 9pm Bernice messaged to say that her friend could no longer be part of the live debate. This caused quite a panic in the team as he was the main person discussing from a gamer point of view.  I started to tweet out journo requests to see if we could get another live guest in to take his place. Fay and Tony also started messaging other people and posting in groups. Ellen didn’t have any wifi so she was unable to do this, but we kept in touch via text. I also started to work on a backup plan of changing the layout/angle of the panel if we could not find anyone else. Luckily we did manage to find other people over the next few hours. I had messaged Adam as he had lots of gaming friends and he found two who agreed to be live phone-ins I also messaged my best friend’s brother as he was a gamer and he agreed to be a call in too. Andrea messaged me with a suggestion of a live panel guest so I quickly contacted him too. I let the rest of the speech team know that I had found guests, but by this time they were all asleep so I left them a message with an update so they could read first thing in the morning, I then spent until about 1am answering people’s questions and working on questions and the layout of the panel as it had obviously changed.

Week 9 – 19/03/18

Monday morning we all came in at 8am again and I briefed the guys on the new guests we had. Then we spent the rest of the morning up until 11am going through the running order and run-throughs. I did have to leave the run-throughs at one point as there were problems with the tie-line so I was on the phone to Simon and Beth while talking to Tim. We tried several ways of fixing the tie-line, but it didn’t work so in the end, we decided to do the OB via Skype. At 11:30 I went to collect the guests as they started to arrive. I introduced them to Fay, Tony and Ellen and then we briefed them on the layout of the panel. I also introduced them to James and Dan as they were the ones in charge of the look of the panel. The show started on time at 12am, but about 6 minutes in we realised that the pod downstairs still had control so I had to quickly run downstairs and release control. Once I got back up I had to wait outside for 10minutes or so for a safe time to get back into the studio without interrupting the show. While I was waiting outside Lucy came an spoke to me to say that the phone for the live debate wasn’t working, so people wanted to push the whole debate back. I went over the running order and quickly decided that this was not the best choice as we had several key times we needed to hit like going to OB and Ads. I quickly made the decision to scrap the live callers and carry on with the panel as intended and have people tweet in the questions instead of asking over the phone. After this, the rest of the show seemed to run smoothly.

Overal this show had lots of technical problems that weren’t our fault, but I’m proud of how we all handled it and found ways to work around them. The feedback for this week was shorter than previous and we were told that we had improved again which is good. There were still a lot of things we needed to improve on which I have jotted down and will change eg. more callers and cutting the music.

Tuesday morning we came in at 9am and we started planning the VR show. Over the past few days, I had started researching and had already amounted lots of facts/resources. We all continued to find more research though throughout the day as well as emailing and contacting lots of potential callers. Callers seem to be going well so far as we have a potential 6. We also started to discuss how the layout of the show should be as we are going back and forward with Simon a lot as he is doing a VR escape room.

Wednesday we all worked independently on talking to callers and gathering more research. Thursday Tony and I met up at University (Fay and Ellen were busy). I started working on the running order and timings while Tony started to work on scripting some bits. I was also emailing back and forth with some of our potential callers.

Friday – Saturday we were all in separate locations so we all worked independently, but spent a lot of time messaging back and forth. Ellen and I worked on the running order and timing the live callers and making sure we had the correct information. I also updated the contact sheet in admin and contacted James about the calls to action for this week. Ellen was editing down an interview over the weekend and was struggling to cut it down more so I listened as the second pair of ears and helped her cut it down even more. I also spent this week tidying up our section of the drive and communicating with OB to make sure everything was okay for this week’s show.

On Sunday night about 20:15 we did another facebook call run through as we were all travelling back from work/home and couldn’t meet up in person. There were a few changes to be made and more research needed for certain topics, but overall the run through went okay.

Monday morning we all came in at 8am and I started chasing up live callers as some people had been flakey during the week. They finally got back to us and are up for doing it, however, I have pulled in two backup live callers in case they fall through. I also spent the morning going over Fay’s and Tony’s script and providing them with more research in areas they were lacking in.

About half an hour before the show we couldn’t get hold of our first and main caller. So we got one of our back up callers lined up. We then had the issues of what to do with the callers as we couldn’t do them in Studio 6 because we would have to ring people during the show which we decided wasn’t the best. About 5 minutes before the show started Myriad crashed so we couldn’t start the show as we had no back up for Ads. We had backups for our recorded content, but not the ads. We started the show about 8 minutes late as this was when Myriad finally fixed itself. I had to run downstairs again and release control from smoke and we started. As we started late the running order went a bit out of sync as we had to make split decisions about what to trim out to end on time. This was decided via Ellen, Callum and I messaging over the group document which Fay and Tony could see. We also had a problem with the logs not having a stop break in so we went straight from a caller to the Update package without an intro. To rectify this we just made sure that Fay and Tony would back anno both pieces. During all of this as well as communicating with the rest of the team with what to cut and timings I was messaging Beth and sending out the socials for this week!

Overall the show wasn’t how we planned which was disappointing as we had high hopes for this show, but we managed to end on time and overcome the problems as a team.