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!