Somerset Awards Live Brief

The live brief for year 1 was a music production, involving the college students from Bridgwater. This year, due to the corona virus, there is a rule of 6, meaning only 6 people is allowed in a room at a time, meaning large scale productions are not possible. So this year, the live brief is online. This year, the live brief is an online award ceremony for Somerset Businesses, and how they have helped young people to gain new skills and evolve. The media for the live brief has been recorded by our lecturer Alan Hardcastle, in the form of online interviews. The corresponding businesses that are involved in the ceremony have sent in clips and images about their businesses and how they have been helping young people out. Our jobs for this production is to co-direct the show, as well as editing the clips together, as well as creating the introduction and the interludes between shows.

The show is split into around 10 different awards, ranging from Careers inspiration in Business and in Education, which is how businesses are working with schools and colleges to help students to achieve apprenticeships and other achievements. Other awards include removing barriers, an award to showcase how students with troubles have overcome them to secure a better future. The award that I was tasked to edit, was careers inspiration in Business 50+. This award showcases how businesses have gone the extra mile to help students get involved in potential careers, as well as assisting students who have learning difficulties, and the award is to congratulate businesses that help out these students. The 3 different nominees for this award was Butlins, a seaside resort, Engie, a construction company and finally Thatchers, a Somerset based Cider company.

Each Company was interviewed by our lecturer Alan, meaning that for each company I have a 15-40 minute interview, where a spokesperson from each company discusses the award, as well as what the award means to the company and how the company achieved the nomination for the award. The companies were also asked to send in other forms of media, such as videos, b-roll and pictures, to spice up the final films.

My first task for this project was to edit together all of the media I got from each company. The brief of my section of the project is to show why each company was nominated for the award, as well as how the company achieved the nomination for the award. To start off with, I edited Thatchers media. This is because out of all 3 companies, Thatchers sent in the most media, including professional standard videos about the company as well as b-roll and images. The interview for Thatchers was also very high quality, with video recording of the person getting interviewed, which was the only company to do so. My section of the award show had to be around 1 minute 30 seconds in total, so around 30 seconds for each company. This was very hard seeing as the interviews were on average around 25 minutes each. For Thatchers, because of all the quality content, I decided to go over the 30 second mark. I first cut the interview to around 1 minute, containing information about who the company is, how they got nominated, and what the award means to them. Then I added in the b-roll and important videos about the company. Thatchers was by far the easiest to edit, because no matter how I edited it, it looked professional, due to the footage itself being of high standards.

Next up, I edited together Butlins' media. The interview itself was pretty average, with some of the responses not being very usable for the edit. A lot of the responses weren't relatable to the award itself, meaning that I had to edit different responses together. The interview for Butlins also didn't include video, so I had to use other media that they sent. This however wasn't easy, because Butlin's didn't send any media other then photos. This meant that I had to overlay the interview only with photographs, so to add some entertainment value, I made the photos move. It was a similar story for Engie, who also didn't send in any media other than photos. The interview however was slightly more usable than Butlins. Both Butlins and Engie's interviews were edited down to around 30 seconds, so well in the time frame. To separate the 3 companies I included a simple fade out of the last clip of the corresponding company, and a fade in to the start of the first clip of the next company.

To finalize my segment for the awards ceremony, I removed any audio mismatches such as heavy sighing or sudden stops in talk. I also tampered with the images and corrected timings of the 3 businesses. We then had to move on to creating an intro scene for the ceremony. Our idea for this scene was to showcase Somerset in a short 15-20 second introduction. We looked at various intro scenes, including the England international football intro, which included famous landmarks around England, and the camera panning around them and transitioning between them in swift motions. The England football intro is an animation, but we thought what if we could do a video inspired by that, but in real life. A short introduction to Somerset in the form of famous structures and landscapes would be a good introduction to an awards ceremony celebrating Somerset businesses.

To finish off the first live brief project, I was tasked to create the introduction to the awards ceremony. Due to the UK going into lock down in November, we had to be even more creative with he creation of the intro.The intro had to be around 30 seconds long, and had to summarize Somerset as a county, and had to include a host of keywords we were given. Luckily for us, a lot of us had previous b-roll of various areas around Somerset, so we decided to make a basic intro, composed of b-roll, related to somerset, being cut next to each other, with text on top of each other. The b-roll that we had compiled together included the countryside, clips of Taunton town center, Tiverton school b-roll as well as other famous sites around Somerset. Due to lock down and having a short time period to get this finished, I decided to stick with what I know, and compile the intro just using basic cut editing. I got the keywords, and learned how to apply a mask, so that the text could appear to enter the screen from behind a mask, just to give it some technical essence. I used all 9 keywords we were given, and got 2 clips from the compiled clip folder for each key word. I made sure to match the clips to the keywords to the best that I could. After the clips were cut between each other, and the text was perfected, I added a few extra subtle effects, such as barn doors at the start and finish of the title sequence, as well as a few edits to some of the clips such as image stabilization and brightness/ saturation. Finally, I applied royalty free music to the footage, and changed the editing a tiny bit to cut to the music. Overall, I am rather pleased with the sequence, seeing as I only had limited clips to work with as well as time. With better clips, I could have been a lot more creative, as well as more personalized direction, rather than doing things just because it fit by chance.