First Week in our Television Studio

When we first went into the television studio, we were giving a class in what happens in the television studio, the rules we have to know and the layout of the studio we are going to be working in. 
Our class were all able to have a chance to work on the HD camera's, were shown the editing room and taught about different parts within the television studio.

Afterwards, the teachers then put us all into individual groups of 5 or 6. I was put into a group of 5. Once we had all been put into groups, we had to decide on what roles we each wanted to take for our production throughout the year. I had chose to be floor manager as I thought this seemed like a good role that I would enjoy doing.

The start of Second Year!

My second year at John Moore's University studying Media Professional Studies started on the 17th September. We were given our new timetables for our new term and talked through all that we would be doing.
Each lecture we went on our first week was explaining what each different module is going to contain.
My favourite module for this term is the TV studio. John Moore's had a new television set built for us students that has all the latest camera and lighting equipment. In this module, we get the chance to film our own live programs in this set. I think this gives us all a great chance to work in different roles in making programs and also gives us a sense for how it would be working in a real television studio.

The creation of John Flavel

For our last task for contempory media issues, we had to create a fake character using facebook. Unfortunately the week that the teachers had given us this task I was sick so was not in class. However, instead of joining into a group the next week, James McKeown and I decided to create our own group to make a character. We discussed different ideas for different types of personalities and how we would be able to convince other people on facebook that our character is a real person.
James and I decided to create a character that is really religious. Although this character is religious, we wanted him to be very critical of what other people around him are doing. An example would be teenagers writing on their facebook profiles about going out and getting drunk, John would not approve of this.
James and I added our own friends using John Flavels account. We were suprised as to how many of our friends accepted a man that they did not know just because they seen they had mutual friends with this person. However, we did have some people report abuse against John Flavel and also had one of my friends having an argument with "John" although it was actually me writing to her.
I thought it would be a good idea to have Johns hometown as a place in Ireland called Knock. Knock is known for being quite a religious place and people may thing that this is why he has become so religious if they seen that.
We also added a Twitter account to make it seem as though John was a real character with more than one social networking sight. On this, we talked about religion and followed religious groups on Twitter. I found that it was harder to have people follow you on twitter because when you add them as a friend on facebook, they can either accept or decline but when you follow someone on twitter, that doesn't always mean they will follow you back.
Below are links to both John Flavels facebook account and his twitter account.
http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100003619638228&sk=wall
https://twitter.com/

Twitter!

In Contemporary media issues, we have been looking at what way people behave online and if it is how they would act when they are in person. Our teachers discussed social networking sites and if we are actually ourselves when we are using these sites.
To give a better understanding of using these sites, we were each asked to make a fake twitter account and by using "weavr" we were going to describe what type of person we wanted to create. We were asked diffferent questions about the persons personality, words used to describe them, words that they might use often, gender and many other things.
Unfortunately, I was not able to make my fake twitter account due to technical problems with google mail however I did try to follow other members of the classes fake accounts.
Once the class had their fake profiles set up, they were asked not to log on as their fake person because the person they made in weavr will take over the twitter account and make his own statuses. Next week in class we are going to find out how everyone got on with their twitter accounts and who has the most followers.

Ghost Stories!!

For our final film of our first year, we have been asked to make a 5minute documentary of anything of our choice. My group sat down and discussed different ideas and positives and negatives of each idea.
We as a group then all decided to make a documentary about ghost stories and why people love them so much. We are going to base this more around peoples views on what makes a good ghost story, why they enjoy the ghost stories and also talk to people that work for haunted walk groups.

I think that this will be a very exciting project to do and to find out why we all love ghost stories so much. Our group have already began researching places around the liverpool area to have the best shots and best locations that we can have for our final first year film.
I am very enthusiastic about working on this documentary and I am looking forward to seeing the outcome to our project.

Personal Profiling video!

For our class Production Practice, we had to make a perosnal profiling video for someone who had an interesting life and that would be a good speaker for a video. The group that I was in decided to make a personal profiling video on a teacher that we have for a different class called Keith.
Keith used to be a DJ and was offered jobs in different places over the world. He has a very strong passion for music and had a very interesting story behind his career as a DJ.
Keith took in his DJ equipment which we then got images of him setting up his equipment, plugging in the speakers and hooking up all of the wires. We also got Keith actually using the equipment and playing some songs for us.

I thought that we had a really good person to do our personal profiling on. However, because our location was in a classroom I thought it didn't quite set the mood right for what we were trying to achieve. Our teacher also gave us the same feedback as he thought it would have been better if we had showed his setting up his equipment in a nightclub. I still thought that it was a very interesting personal profile but I think we could have made it alot more eyecatching for the viewers.

Tahrir Square - Egypt!

In class, we were asked to make a wiki on wet paint to show how we can recieve information of the internet about particular topics and events. Each group consisted of four or five people. We had five in my group. We were then given a topic of what we had to write our wiki on, our topic was Tahrir Square. We were each given a bullet point which we had to write a thread for our wiki's on.
I had to write my thread on Social Networking and identity. For this I had to talk about the riots that happened in tahrir square and how people uploading images and videos of footage to their social networking sites would effect peoples judgements of them online.
We also had a main page that everyone contributed to. We added pictures, links to social networking sites and videos so that people reading our wiki could get a better understanding of what was happening in tahrir square during the riots.

Before I started writing about this topic, I had very little knowledge of what had happened in tahrir square. I found out most of my information through the internet which I also think helps to show how important the internet can be sometimes. I also learned alot about how people want to make themselves appear online and how that can be different to the person that they genuinely are.

Below is a link to our Wiki that we created based on Tahiri Square.
http://contemporarymediaissues.wetpaint.com/page/Tahrir+Square