RUTV 3

The Pirate Ducky

You may have watched the vlog on Pirates Pizza’s effort to create employment. Although this was an exciting and interesting piece of soft news, the package was harder than first thought. 

Getting the story

Pirates Pizza is a student-owned business which opened in late 2007. There have been rumours of its expansion/move for a while but the owners don’t want to confirm the rumours or speak about the new launch.

But RUTV reporter Grethe Koen knows the owners and was able to persuade them to allow RUTV to shoot the story as a human interest piece.

Narrowing down the Angle

After we got the story, the next issue was tightening up the focus behind the story. We wanted to include more on the credit crunch, unemployment and the informal sector. We even got some great shots of a vendor on the main street. But, because of the limited time of the package we weren’t able to include the information. 

Surprising content

After clearing up our idea for the story we then went on to shoot the interviews. Grethe and I were both surprised by the content and information that came from the interviews. 

One of the things that struck me is the amount of community engagement the business is planning to get involved in. As a semi-new student business, you don’t expect Pirates Pizza to be worried about developing the community. But according to the General Manager, Jonathan Inngs, Pirates Pizza is going to introduce a number of plans and programs to help feed, clothe and employ people from the township. 

Inngs says Pirates wants to create a business mandate which focuses on giving to the community because they feel as a business “that its vital that we get involved” . 

For those of you who are interested in how Pirates Pizza plans to get involved in the community listen to the audio clip, featuring General Manager Jonathan Inngs, as he talks about their future projects.  [podcast]http://rutv3.ru.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/audio-clip-for-pirates-pizza.mp3[/podcast]

We are suffering from technical difficulties

On the technical side, this story turned out to be a nightmare. Between the black walls in the Pirates building which caused serious lighting issues, to reshooting sign offs and faulty equipment nothing went as planned.

The one lesson that came from this package is that you can never have enough shots. As a cameraperson, you always have to make sure that you have a variety of shots as well as enough action shots to fill the story. And even when you think you have enough, shoot some more!

For instance, in the Pirates Pizza  story one problem was that our shots didn’t match our light content. Producer Paddy Donnelly even critisized the visuals as “unexciting and dull”.

But it wasn’t because we didn’t have interesting shots; instead we made the mistake of ‘not writing to visuals’. We should have instead included shots like this action shot which would have given the story more of a feel good effect.

The prized pizza product

Inspite of all the challenges and things we wish we had done better, we are still proud of our FIRST NEWS STORY. It was a fantastic learning experience on how to produce news and we made great contacts for news and pizza!

You may have watched our video on the Get home safe project. A new report gives some of the stats around the problem. They are really shocking. RUTV reporter Matthew Mpahlwa  goes into detail to bring you more on this story.

It is probably uncontroversial to state that all university campuses struggle with containing and controlling alcohol consumption by their students, since the age at which students first enter such institutions is an age of freedom and experimentation, where young people have the opportunity to test the limits previously set by parents and schools. This story attempts to address this gap by reporting on a survey of alcohol usage patterns at Rhodes University (in Grahamstown), the smallest tertiary institution in South Africa, with an annual enrolment of just under 6000 students. This story provides a brief overview of strategies which the University has adopted in recent years in an attempt to control alcohol usage and alcohol abuse, as well as describing the local context, which is also relevant to student drinking behaviour. While the level of drinking at Rhodes University is possibly no higher than that at any other University in South Africa, it does have a rather undesirable reputation as the “drinking university”, and the reason for this is twofold: firstly, the drinking behaviour is highly visible, because of the size of the town, and because of the location of many off-campus pubs and bars near to the university. This means that Rhodes students pursue their after-hours relaxation in a very concentrated, small area like Rhodes University.

As a result of this situation, the Dean of Students Office initiated the Get Home Safe Project, to serve as safety net for students to arrive home safely after long hours of drinking. They will be driven home by student volunteers who are on stand -by on all night. During week days they operate from  Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 10:00 pm to 3:00 am in the morning.

For more information on the Get Home Safe project you can visit the Dean of Students website using the following link :  http://www.ru.ac.za/deanofstudents

A Review into the new production by the Rhodes Drama department, Directed by Heike Gehring and written by Bouke Snyman. The production will be going on tour to the KKNK in Oudsthoorn on the 6th of april and will be taking part in the Sanlam student festival competition in oudsthoorn.

Students are waking up to a cold breakfast every morning. The university has changed the menu to a minimal serving of food and students are extremely uphappy. Mahreen and Laura reports.