Producing our First Magazine Style Show

It's been a while, and I always apologize for not blogging enough, but this time I'm not. With the flury of daily activity for RTV News, time is tight. I'm going to call this "just in time blogging". (Buzz!)

We are in the final 10 days before the students will produce a magazine style show for our school division. I must thank our Communications Director Nicole Garner from Northern Lights School Division. She has been instrumental in organizing the majority of the interviews, generating ideas, planing out the show, formatting, and so much more.

The NLSD-TV program wil serve two purposes. I'm interested in both, but am biased towards #2. First, the show will highlight the great things happening in our division using Youtube, the premiere media consumption site in the world. Secondly, my students will have a true client to work with. It's elevating the stakes to a real world (buzz!) experience for my students.

Currently we have 4 major stories that are going into the program. Due to geographic considerations of our district my students have only been able to get to one local school in Cold Lake to interview a staff member about their breakfast program. Another interview I did when I was in a neighbouring community for PD, and the last interview was done over the phone. I used Skype to record the call and it turned out great! I highly recommend spending the 2.3 cents/minute and a call recorder program for over the phone interviews.

From here students are going to write the scripts, leads and tags for each segment, edit them to length (around 2.5-3 minutes each), add graphics and export for production. Seems easy, right?

The finished segments will be evaluated by Nicole and our Board Chair, Walter Hrcyauk who are coming in next week for a production meeting. All aspects of editing, lower third graphics, audio levels and shot composition will be scrutinized. Nicole's experience in broadcasting will be invaluable in our class.

At the production meeting the show's script will need to be outlined, so we'll definitely be meeting with our script writers on that day as well. All of this will be done by the students. I hope to sit back and see the interaction with the Nicole and our Walter to see how they listen, make recommendations, and take feedback.

I'm really excited to see this first show going. We will plan a post production meeting to dissect the show and make changes for the next one. Stay tuned...