Friday, April 28, 2017

Week 8: 8 hours

We began the day at 9:45 as usually with the conference call and scouring news sites and the internet for potential stories. The conference call lasted especially long due to the ususla boss being out and replaced by the second in command. 

Because it was Good Friday it was not easy to find a story that was pursuable. Our options included: garvin County kidnapping, which we needed to Call Sheriff Rhodes for. And an aggravated assault on a police officer (which turned out to not be what it sounded like). If not: Science fair saved by a generous generous Ardmorite. 

We began pursuing these cases by making phone calls to the Garvin and Pontotoc County courts. The Pontotoc was closed.  Gary Tackett was arrested for kidnapping but we could not get the affidavit from them so we could not continue for that case. 

We also pitched ideas for Easter events but because that could result in a compromise of interest we could not really pursue any of that without attempting to cover everything.  

In the end, we decided to pursue a VSOT for a fun fun that would be happening the following day, out on by H2O church to raise money for a local teen, Avery Anderson, who is in critical condition after a car crash. 

Along with this we did a package over the man from Ardmore, Dr. Young,  who donated a large sum of money to the annual Science Fair that is hosted at ECU. We pursued this story for a few hours, contacting the man for a phone interview, the organizers of the fair for an in person interview, and getting B-Roll around campus where the event is held. We went back to the office for editing to find SOTs that were between 8-12 seconds.

We heard news of an accident in Johnston county that we needed to do a MAP on for the 5 o'clock. 
I learned as we wrote the script for the MAP that it would be read off of a teleprompter, because of this we separate acronyms such as U-T-V, and put ellipsis for longer pauses.  As we edited I also learned to expand the the sound in VSOTs in case something gets cut off. 

We left the office with a MAP done at the 5 o'clock, a VOSOT for the 6 and a package for the 10 at 5:45.

Cumulative Hours: 52


Friday, April 7, 2017

Week 7: 6 Hours

This Friday was possibly the slowest I have had thus far.

During the 10 o'clock conference call, we did not have much to pitch even for features. We scraped for stories, looking on local Facebook groups and scouring articles and news websites.  We saw that Know EMS had run out of funds and was closing down on March 1, the Coalgate grocery store that had burned down was starting its first day of re building and that an event called the Polar Plunge was going on.

Because the station had covered the fire that burned the grocery store down in Coalgate before we decided on covering that story as an update. We headed to Coalgate in hopes of getting ahold of Kathy, the new store owner. She was nowhere to be found in the town. We stopped by multiple offices and called multiple numbers and were never able to get ahold of her. After an hour or so of his we ran into the town sheriff and he helped us get into contact with her.

When we finally spoke with her she told us she was a few hours out of town and by that time we did not have the time to wait for her so we decided to do the story with a VO rather than a video interview.

When we returned to Ada with the B Roll needed for the grocery store story we pursued the story on the Polar Plunge. We got an interview with the event coordinator and learned more about the Oklahoma Special Olympics fundraising event. We then got some B-Roll of the location and went back to the office for editing.

We edited together all the footage with the stories and voice overs and had two VSOTs for the day.

Cumulative Hours: 44