BBC Visit

On the 11th September the students taking the Ceative Media Diploma visited the BBC 21cc studios in White City as part of the course.When we first arrived we were introduced to a man called Sav who explained some of the things we wre going to do throughout the day. We started off with a short activity about the different camera angles for example close ups, medium shots and extra close ups.We then watched a short clip of Eastenders and had to say "cut" every time we thought there was a cut in the scene. This was good because it got us aware of the different ways a film or advert could be cut to make it more interesting. Soon after we were introduced to the equipment and got familiar to what did what. The microphone played a very important part in our film because without it there would be no sound.There were two very key elements of the microphone, the first was the button that showed you the distance that the microphone would pick up. 90 would pick up in front of you and 120 would not only pick up your voice but also the surroundings. The second element was that someone in your group had to bend down and point the microphone up in the direction of the speech, without being seen on camera. Then we placed the remaining equipment in position and were asigned into groups of 4 to 5 and recorded a short interview of any topisc of our choice, just to get the hang of it.When that was complete we watched over our interviews ans discussed what needed to be improved on and what different camera angles we could use.
Shortly after we were given a piece of paper with 5 or 6 titles. We had to chose one as a gide line for our short films. The one we chose was "The women who spoke too much." We had to write ideas of where each scene would take place and the story line. Then we all departed and went are seperate ways to begin filming. We decided to record our first scene in the womens toilet showing a conversation going on between two friends, using the over shoulder camera angle which reflected off the mirror. Our next scence was at an outside seating area and this time we used the medium shot. After completing our recording we were assigned to computers and began editing with the help of Sav .We began by importing the footage. This is when we started to learn the different techniques of editing for example fading clips in and out, adding text and also seperating the sound from the footage. The day at the BBC was great fun and a very enjoyable experience which will come in very handy in the creative Media Diploma and later on in life.