December 2013 - Practicum 1 Summary

December 2013 - Practicum 1 Summary

This semester, I began the Practicum 1 course. In the span of a few months, I participated in various activities to gain hours. In the beginning, I started to write readers for our news show, sat in on Wellness TV interviews, and also filmed women’s volleyball with Tony as a supervisor. Tony taught me a lot about sports shots and making sure I get the right amount of footage and variety for the package. I took a lot of wide, medium, and close up shots and at the first time I shot a game, I got hit in the head with the volleyball, ironically enough.

Since I was in Broadcast Writing while I was in Practicum 1, I learned a lot about writing readers for the news show. In the beginning, I had problems with still writing in AP style, but when I was learning more of how to write in broadcast style and saw what Rachel and Dr. Bradford did to fix my readers, I kept on improving. Most of my hours came from the readers I wrote, which varied anywhere from local, to international, and also events on campus. Also, when we were in the studio filming the show, I always made sure I learned something different each time I was there. I ran the teleprompter one time, operated the camera, hooked up the audio, and then there was that one time where we completely redid the studio, added more lights and we all had to figure out which was which.

After fall break, I was offered an opportunity to edit photos for the Interlachen. Toward the second half of the semester, the last of my hours came from editing in the lab. I used the Lightroom software and learned how to work with that. My experience with photoshop and also the Photojournalism class that I am enrolled in really helped me develop my editing skills. The pictures I have been editing for Interlachen have been campus events, sports, and just general news. I have been editing a lot to make sure that there are great quality photos for our yearbook, and I always make sure that the pictures are a little bit brighter for when they get printed. I have been working closely with Dion and Bob Drake and they have taught me a lot about the skills that I have with editing pictures and also taking pictures.

However, my favorite time I had this semester was definitely when I was on the round table discussion for the entertainment section of the news show. This was an idea that Dion had in mind, and he presented it on our Practicum facebook page. I was very excited for this opportunity and jumped right in. We recorded a discussion about Britney Spears for 14 minutes and Olivia had cut it down to about 3 minutes. I really enjoyed how the chemistry flowed; especially with something that was pretty much unscripted. I definitely would love to do that again. The only thing I think we would need to fix is the audio and how we set up the cameras—but for the first time, the finished product looked polished.

I am happy that I learned a lot of new things and got involved in different projects, and I hope to even learn more in my next few semesters.