For our first show of the semester, everything went simultaneously better than expected and worse than expected. I took Mountaineer Playbook last semester, so I have a pretty good idea of what the expectations for a Television newscast are, but WVU News immediately felt so much more intense.
For our first producer’s meeting, I was expecting to be at Martin Hall until midnight. We got out of there a little before 9:00 p.m. Because of my intense work schedule on the weekends, I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. on Thursday and Friday to get the script finalized. While writing, I had five scripts surrounding me on my desk, and I took the time to reference them for every change I made to ensure I produced a well-formatted script.
After Thursday, I worked to get the entire show written on Friday. My goal was to have everything done by then so I could go through it and pick everything apart. I wanted to make sure that everything I wrote was intentional and matched the flow of the show. I took another long break for work and came back to fact-check everything and go through each of my classmates’ scripts to double check all the packages’ scripts were accurate. Even with the sleep deprivation, I was happy with the script I had submitted. It is the coolest feeling to start a blank Word document and finish with a completed 26:30 newscast.
On Sunday, Prof. Marra sends the final scripts and rundown to the studio crew. Because I knew to expect it, I was anxiously waiting for that email all day long. As soon as I received the email, I went through each line in the script to see the changes. I was happy to see that all of my original facts and research were kept in the script. A lot of the changes were formatting-related or made my words more concise. I have more work to do with making the language feel more casual.
For example, I wish I had gone over the feedback sheets I help create for my classmates’ packages again before submitting my script because I would have caught some simple script changes, but overall, I was happy with my first script.
During our Monday Producer Meeting, I asked my professors how they felt about the show overall. Prof. Marra told me the script I submitted was something she would expect for show 3. That made me proud.
We also had our first anchor rehearsal which went well. I met with the anchors again on Tuesday night and left that meeting feeling confident. I marked out places in the script where I noticed the anchors needed extra coaching so I would have that prepared when filming.
During our first show day, we had major audio issues. For over two hours, we couldn’t receive any audio from the mics. It took a while, but the team at the Waterfront Studio was able to find a solution to allow us to film anything at all. During that period, I tried my best to keep the anchors relaxed and focused on practicing. We started our first taping at 10:30 and got two good takes in.
We were on a time constraint, but I was really happy with the outcome of our second take. In the past we have recorded as many as four takes during our first studio day, so having a mostly new technical team do that well on the first day made me excited.