Broadcast Segment Critique:

Girls Tennis

Pre-production:
We came up with the idea of girls tennis when we decided we wanted to do something that related to cap spirit. At our time of choosing, many teams had already been taken, so we decided to take cap tennis. We had to contact the coach and he gave us the “ok”. We found people for our interviews by asking around at the tennis team, and many people wanted to be interviewed. Our questions were more broad ranged questions because we did not go in knowing who we were going to interview. Before hand I did imagine some interesting shots, such as a low angle from the ground with a rack focus on a tennis ball, a shot of the ball coming at the camera, and a shot in which the camera would revolve around a player while she was playing.

Production: Quality:

We shot the tennis player on their “native habitat”: at the Cap tennis court. I only wish we could have diversified our b-roll, and got those “interesting shots bu their simply was not enough time or resources. I feel the most creative shots were the one with he ball low angle and the circular shot of the whole team doing their cheer. Some shots did not turn out as stable as i wished, because we did not have a stabilizer and some pans turned out oddly because of limited room and how I had to climb over the tripod legs during the circular pan when the girls did their cheer. We couldn't tell the players what to do because they were practicing, but we did set up the interview with the rule of thirds in mind. Our lighting was the sun, so we had to compensate for shadow, moving the interview spots to align correctly with how the sun was moving. Our audio actually came from the onboard mic. We had planned to shoot with a DV camera and get audio from that, but it seemed to difficult and not worth the time of capturing it, as our onboard audio was sufficient.


Script:
We introduced our piece by stating what was what: Cap tennis team. We used an oddly vocalized intro from Alex Vargas to hook our audience. I feel as if the interviewees were to brief with their answers and also to “on the surface”. We end with an inspirational interviewee and a closing speech by Alex, with interesting Cap Tennis “cheer” shots.
Editing:
Our b-roll at most points did reflect what the narrator was saying. We did not use transitions for video as it sometimes looks cheesy, but we did use transitions on the audio to smooth out the sound. We included a custom graphic for our main title as well as the built in lower 3rds in FCP, we just loaded the font from the original title graphic. At first I was going to add a simple contrast curve, but decided it would be too render heavy and decided against it, becuase it created too many shadows.
Overall
I like the varying interesting shots in the piece, as well as the font we used in the graphics.I would get longer interviews from the interviewee if I had more time. I got another taste that planning is key, as well as always having a backup plan.