Monday came and, at the news meeting, someone brought up the Occupy Bournemouth movement which had just begun. No one was covering it, so I said I would. What followed was two days that really tested my endurance at news making.
Before we get to that though, there's the quick topic of the Question Time story, which was to become an OOV. I emailed the BBC press office about using Question Time footage in the bulletin - as that technically doesn't fall under fair dealing but is relevant to the story - and never got a reply. I never had the time to follow up for one either, as it would happen. I did however arrange an interview with the press officer at the cathedral - the best I could get at short notice, and with Bournemouth looming over it.
I left home to get filming at 8:30 am on Tuesday, and wasn't to return until 2:00 in the morning. First was the interview at the cathedral, which went well - the interview was short, but the interviewee gave me what I was looking for. I got a couple of GVs and helped Flick with her piece to camera outside the court, where I also first tried connected to the internet and skyping through a dongle - essentially a portable internet connection. It went beautifully in Winchester.
We - I went with Flick, being a bit unwilling to go so far out all alone - got to Bournemouth in the early afternoon and walked the mile down to the town hall from the train station, having been unable to decipher the bus routes in the foreign land. And when we got there, I was admittedly shy about the whole affair - a press officer from the council was there and asked for my details, but that was all my interaction. Flick was the one who actually went down and first started talking - I want to emphasise these things, since Flick on Tuesday and George on Wednesday did as much as I did. I don't want to take their credit. I need to be more proactive about these things.
Flick filmed the first set of GVs around the camp while I was setting up the dongle again - which was working far worse in Bournemouth than it was in Winchester - and then we started talking to the protesters. They were all nice folks, though getting someone who would talk to me on camera was difficult. The most well-spoken of the protesters certainly wouldn't, though I did convince them to lend their words to the written side of the story.
It was a fascinating few hours at the camp, sitting with the protesters and seeing how they were going about their occupation. I fundamentally agree with the Occupy Wallstreet movement, though I'm not the biggest fan of how they've gone about it so far, and I had to remind myself often that I'm to be impartial. One problem we ran into was that despite the fact we had two tapes between us, we both used all the tape we had, which is really why we wrapped up - there was no more we could do.
After our time at the camp, we had to figure out where we could set up an internet connection. The plan was to do a live or as-live update on the Wednesday in Bournemouth, and to do that we needed a decent enough internet connection to Skype. Unfortunately, the connection was incredibly poor. We tried it in a Wetherspoons, and while the free internet there was great quality, we weren't allowed permission to record anything there - company policy - but the manager recommended the local cafe, which while they gave us permission the next day, we couldn't get the internet speed needed.
By then it was getting late and shops were closing, the sun had set. We went back to Winchester, where we got to work, and I was in until 2 AM. I logged and captured the Cathedral GVs and interview, which I left on the Mac - these frustratingly weren't used in the OOV when Lee edited it together even though I left a note and told our news editor Becky about them. I'll have to reversion that OOV at a later date if I want them used. The rest of the time was spent trudging through about an hour's worth of footage for a minute-twenty of news-worthy images and soundbites. I wrote and recorded my voice over there and then, which was pretty awful to be honest - I sound dead inside. It was past midnight by the time I'd recorded it, but that really is no excuse for lacking so much in enthusiasm. I wrote a link, which was a rush-job but I knew I wouldn't be there on Wednesday to do a decent one, and after leaving a couple of notes for everyone to follow - and it seems there were no problems, save for the OOV oversight.
The next day, George and I were in Bournemouth by half-past nine. After a quick catch-up with the protesters and arranging for a phone-interview with a councillor, we headed to town and into that recommended cafe to set up our video connection. It didn't go well, and I couldn't see what we could do about it. George carried us through here with the suggested that we record it via webcam, upload it to youtube, and thus send the folks back at the news room the update.
Of course, even still there were problems. Becky wanted me to record it at the town hall grounds and have something interesting in the background, which was to be a '99%' sign against a wall. Unfortunately, it was a very windy day in Bournemouth. So windy, in fact, that the gazebo the protesters had been using as a base of operations had been blown down in the early hours of the morning. The wind wasn't as powerful as that when I was recording my piece to camera, but as I was relying on the poor-quality microphone embedded to my laptop, it was a fight to be heard over the wind. And, unfortunately, in my best takes at the piece to camera where I presented best, my voice was drowned out by the wind. I had to go with my third or fourth best take, and no one's complimented the quality of what I finally uploaded, though the effort was appreciated. I did as best as I could under the pressure of time to learn my script and present to a high quality, it just didn't come together as well as we would have liked.
The most important thing to have really taken away from the fiasco of the Wednesday update was that dongles - internet-in-a-usb - aren't very reliable when it's a skype call you need to make. At the very least, they're not reliable in Bournemouth. We want to be able to use skype calls for updates on the 30th November, the big strike day. We'll need to work on it. Worst comes to worst, we'll be doing what I had to do and upload the updates to youtube rather than record the things live. I'm considering buying a dongle so as I can experiment in the weeks before then and test its limits.
There's more to say, but I'll leave it for later. So to end this post, here is the package and update:
Update #1: One thing I forgot to mention - that is actually quite important - is that I tried quite hard this week to match my words to my pictures. With an hour of footage it was much easier to do, but I'm not sure yet how well I did this. Introducing Occupy Bournemouth, I used a shot that begins on a sign saying '99%' and zoom out to another with 'Occupy Bournemouth' written. I'm told to use my best shot first, and while I don't think it was, I thought an establishing shot was important - since Bournemouth is a bit unusually a place for us - and so I used this one. When reporting what the occupiers are protesting about - corruption - I used a shot of their statement. And when I saying they were busy, I showed them being busy. It's simple stuff but I'd never managed it before. Having said that, I'm not sure how well it actually worked out yet, but it's an improvement all the same.
Update #2: We went through the package in the debrief and one thing Chris mentioned is that there were far too many signs in the package. The opening shot was boring - perhaps I should've begun with the protester painting his sign. Other signs were wordy, with no time to actually read them - they should've been taken out.
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