Broadcast Critique

Broadcast Segment Critique

Pre-Production

It took our group a while to decide on an idea. Our initial idea was to interview people on summer trends, or interests. Such as new movies, video games, and other general ideas. However, we couldn’t choose that, for we had seen that someone had chosen for their segment “Summer”. Baffled, we decided to put that idea on standby until we decided to interview the girls tennis team. From my perspective, tennis doesn’t get much recognition as our other sports at Cap, so we decided to shine some light on our hard working tennis players. We ended up interviewing the coach, and volunteers from the team. Many of them were shy, so we ended up pulling people from practice to speak into the camera. Many of our b-roll was situational, and on the spot, except we envisioned a shot of a tennis ball upon the floor, and practice in the background. This shot ended up to be our title.

Production

We shot down on the tennis court in the midst of all the action. We had a helper warn us of incoming tennis balls, and believe me, many of them did come flying our way. Our b-roll was effective, but I think it was standard and cliche. I think we also lacked a few b-roll and we ended up animating a few still images, which ended up looking quite interesting. We used a variety of trucking and panning shots.  We had implemented a shot of the team and managers running diagonally past the z-axis. Our audio seemed to be fine, but there was one problem where our voice-overs ended up in mono, but I believe this was fixed in post-production.

Script
We had Vargas do the voice overs with his exceptional broadcasting voice. We found his voice the best for the questions, intro, and closer. Our questions gave the school a nice informative update on our tennis team. It may not be up to date however, for some players had quit the team since our interview. Our idea was to leave the viewers with a higher respect for our tennis team, considering it doesn’t get much interest as the other sports. We had also added a “Go Mustangs!” from the tennis team, to help add some extra spirit.
Editing
Our b-roll blends in well with our interview shots, we had placed them so one could hear and understand the interview, while being mesmerized by the intense tennis practices. I liked the title Conner had implemented with simple free fonts he had found off the internet. We ended up using a similar one for the labels for the names of the interviewees. I am a fan of the music Conner had chosen for the background audio. Apparently, it was stock audio that came with his computer. We had adjusted the start and end of the audio to sync the “motivational speech” with the part where the epic orchestral strings kick in. It added that extra flare to our project that seemed to tie up the segment pretty well.

Overall
I believe this project seemed to turn out well, considering how many hindrances we seemed to miraculously overcome. If we had more time, I would fix up our voice over, because i believe it is too quiet to hear. But that would be a challenge, for we didn’t have the seperate audio tracks. We had the combined, exported audio from the rough cut that Conner had organized at his house. So we ended up panning the audio in order to make it equal. The most important lesson i could draw from this is to have all the editing done on one computer and one program. Problems will erupt from transferring the project between two programs.