With new found pride at finally being RUTV reporters, Zikhona and I embarked on our story. A simple topic, investigating why campaign posters have been banned on campus, proved to be challenging to film and condense into a focused 1 and a half minute news story.
Technical glitches
On our first day of filming – we had set up an interview with Siyabonga Yonzi, a politics honours student – we decided to get to our set location early to be super prepared. To our great frustration and embarrassment, we realised once the camera was unpacked and securely on its tripod that we had stupidly forgotten a tape at home.
Click here to watch a clip of Siyabonga that we did not use in the final story due to an unappealing sniff (or snort) mid-answer:
Off the record interviews
While “off the record” sounds really journalistic, it turned out to be more problematic than expected. We were told by an anonymous source that Rhodes has not yet legislated the decision to ban campaign posters on campus. The decision allegedly only appears on SRC meeting minutes.
Findind a focus
We made the mistake of getting all our visuals and conducting interviews with no clear purpose or story angle in mind. When we finally sat down with all our footage we had to ask ourselves repeatedly “what is the story?” While writing to visuals is a strength of the image school principle, our visuals failed us in that they were not amazing and we didn’t have interesting sequences to work with.
Looking at our final story, I realise that we failed to establish a clear angle. We should have either pursued the lack of a paper trail angle or interrogated the claims by the University that posters harm the aesthetics (the visual feel and appeal) of campus.
Click here to hear Kholosa Loni, Rhodes SRC President, revealing the flaw in University Management’s argument (a rare ‘going against the authorities’ moment):
[podcast]http://rutv3.ru.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/soundclipforblog1.mp3[/podcast]
Interviewing a DA leader
Interviewing Mike Lewis, a DA leader for the Makana Municipality, was not that fruitful. He did, however, take a stab at student partying and Pirates Pizza (despite asking him about posters!). We decided not to include him in the final story as we did not want our story to in any way favour the DA or only give a voice to one political party.
Click here to see a Democratic Alliance leader letting his political correctness slip for a few seconds:
We definitely learnt some tough lessons through producing this news story. However, they will prove to be helpful in terms of avoiding the same mistakes in future projects.