Recording Reflection (Friday 4th June)
During the recording on Friday after an extremely early start at 7.30 everything seemed to go well putting aside a few glitches along the way. When we first arrived everyone got to work with what needed doing. There were a few people on stapling the wallpaper to the boards, setting up talk-back, moving in furniture for set, making sure everyone had a copy of the script, briefing the guests for a final time and finally sound checking. For a lot of this set up I was over seeing what was being done and ensuring that everything was as we had wanted it. This is when I came across Jasbinder working on the graphics and ident at fifteen minutes before we were to record the programme which was ridiculous. Then after approaching her she began to get them onto the graphics machine but because they were not saved as a jpeg when opened the sizing was wrong, which caused a lot more stress on the morning than what was needed. Also when selecting the graphics on the vision mixer the blue background could not be keyed out, sending the whole image to grayscale or keying out everything on the screen, because the colours used were so similar on the graphic design. So to cause no further problems Me and Mick made an executive decision to not use the graphics as they were causing far to much trouble than they were worth. After this episode we tried out the credits we had made yesterday to check that the blue could be keyed out correctly on this and in fact this worked perfectly which was a relief to the system.
Next once the set up was complete we began our first run through which worked really well and all the timings were great boosting our confidence for the next few takes during out final time in the studio. However when looking over this we noticed that the lighting was not quite correct which meant that a good 20 minutes of our time was taken away sorting this out which Yidan Li Lighting Designer did not think to look at but instead just flicked the lights on and left them to be. This was disappointing as lighting was on of the key things during the programme – if the lighting was out the whole atmosphere of the set would not be right and give off the wrong impression or in this case just leave pools of darkness on the presenters whilst moving around the set.
After this we went through three more run throughs each bettering the other. The ultimate one was the final one however due to the glitch in the end credits being played over the bands performance we had to use the third take.
I am really pleased with all of the hard work and effort that most of the group has put into this programme as it really is something to be proud of and makes you realise just how important each of the individual roles in the studio and outside the studio are, particularly how reliant you have to be of co-workers and when they do not complete something on time or let you down it really is a shame that its them that lets the whole group down and not just themselves through a moment of unwillingness to to their job.
