Yoga Show

Our first ever feature filmed in London! What an adventure!
One of the things that I am consistently learning each week working on Features, is how essential planning really is and this week was no different. I don't think I've ever sat looking at my email accounts so much in my life! I had arranged 'Press Passes' for Zoe and I this week and at this point, I definitely felt like a true member of the press (although carrying the camera to London was very heavy.)

Yoga is not really my forte, so I knew that walking into the National Hall at Kensington Olympia was going to be a whole new world for me. And yes, yes it was. We walked in with blue wristbands and were surrounded by women in tracksuits carrying  1-2 litre bottles of water. There were hundreds of stalls selling different health products including coconut water and barley grass juice, which Zoe and I happily tried. Yoga classes were being held throughout the day, with a variety of different teachers and teaching styles. Unfortunately, Zoe and I didn't get involved in these, which upon reflection is something we should have definitely done. Involvement in our feature would have improved the quality drastically, and would probably have helped the viewers feel more engaged. That's a lesson for next time!

Due to the fact, that I had never been to any sort of convention like this before, I was slightly unsure as to how to go about filming and what sort of content to include. In the end, we tried to approach it as if we were trying to lose some weight before Christmas. We spent most of our time there filming the many different health products that were available. We also spoke to a variety of different people all trying to tell us that their product was the very best and the one that we should invest in.

I am happy with our finished piece, although we could have improved it by participating in the yoga classes. This is something we will definitely do if we ever attend an event like this in the future.
When editing the footage, I wanted to use music that created a calming, tranquil effect however, I think this backfired slightly and makes the feature appear too slow, perhaps even too calming!

Our feature was used in WINOL Life, Winol's fortnightly chat show. There we met Elizabeth Barnett, Editor of Hampshire Life. This was really helpful and incredibly interesting as she offered valuable feedback. I also taught George a few moves. Take a look:

Restaurant Review at Giraffe.

I was really excited to create a Restaurant Review, (mainly because it was an excuse to go out for a lovely lunch!)

In reality, we were told that it might be a lot harder than we anticipated it to be. 

I would say that one of the more challenging area's of creating this feature had to be the organisation. As Giraffe, is a large restaurant chain, it was difficult to know who to contact but once we had found this information, everything fell into place. 

We arrived and were immediately greeted with a warm welcome and to our delight promised lots of free food and drinks. I felt like an absolute princess! Once we had set up our equipment and sat down, it dawned on us how stupid we looked. After all, it's not exactly the norm to go into a restaurant, eat bu sit there filming everything you do. At this point, we realised that packing content into our review was going to be difficult. In the end, we tried to be as natural as we could, we ordered food that we would have naturally chosen and generally we tried to have a nice time. One problem we discovered, was yet again the audio. Not only had our microphones let us down again, but the noise of the restaurant was making it much harder to speak at a level that could be recorded clearly. This resulted  in Zoe and I to sharing one microphone, although it worked, this definitely wasn't the sound quality we had hoped for. Note to self* ALWAYS, Always, Always check equipment that the Loan Counter give you before you set off.

The food and drinks we ordered came very fast and tasted lovely, we really had very little to fault on the whole experience so naturally, we made our review very positive and complimentary of Giraffe as a company but we also praised the staff members who served us.
When we had finished editing this feature and exported, we were very proud of our achievements and felt like the whole thing has overall, been very successful.

This is the moment we were then told by Chris, that due to the fact that we were so complimentary and included very few criticisms, this could be seen as a form of malice. Malice can cover a range of different areas in Journalism, one of them being that a Journalist should never promote one company over another and this is effectively what Zoe and I had done without realising. We quickly hit the drawing board a second time, and included voice overs of the areas of the meal we felt could have been included. We also used a text graphic to show the prices of the food so that viewers could then make up their own mind. This then made the whole feature much more fair and removed any malice that may have been found in our first attempt.

I will put up the newly edited version of the Restaurant Review at Giraffe soon. Watch this space.
Zoe and I are also hoping to create many more Restaurant Reviews so again watch this space!