allmediascotland.com is about to change, in terms of design, functionality and style of editorial. That may lead to some disruption of normal services over the next few weeks, not least because there are holidays to be had. It does mean also the prospect of new voices, from a galaxy of bloggers. Yesterday, it was the turn of our first blogger, Nick Clayton. Now, it’s the turn of David Calder…
IT’S been an interesting few weeks, not to mention a steep learning curve.
Let me introduce you to BITweb.tv. It’s a new company set up to provide news features for clients and then put them up on the internet, not through YouTube or any of the public sites, but straight on to their own web pages.
Now, for someone who’s spent much of his working life making radio features and documentaries, that’s been an interesting challenge.
Okay, I have done my fair share of TV in my time – the Money Programme was great fun. But I had people to handle the video editing there. Now, it’s MY responsibility.
Yes, we are a team. Alan Downie (a world-acknowledged expert on high-definition TV) is our cameraman. Ian Perry runs the admin. I ask the questions and cut the final features.
What my wife (Penny Haywood of PHPR fame) has noticed is that I adopt a similar approach to TV as I had to radio, ie: make it as much fun for the viewer/listener as possible.
Doing that means thinking laterally when filming.
For example, one of the first pieces we made was about Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s deal with SMART Cars – anyone living in the capital may have noticed them running around town.
But that meant trying to ‘do a Jeremy Clarkson’ with the sales director from SMART.
In other words, I set my little Sony HVR-A1E camera on its tripod up in the footwell of the car as he was driving along the road.
It was hard to get the exposure right – but the results can be seen on Edinburgh Chamber’s website (it’s in the archive in the April edition).
Another video for the same client celebrated the signing up of their 2000th member plus getting an award from the British Chambers of Commerce for being the fastest-growing in the UK.
The glittering event was held in Mansfield Traquair.
We had two cameras and I risked life and limb climbing up into the balcony to get shots of the crowd – over 750 people were there. It made for more interesting TV.
APOLOGIES: the rest of this entry is unavailable, most likely because of a corrupted database.
