DIGITAL NEWS: Project Development with Helen

We spoke to Helen to update her on our project so far and what we had spoken about with Jo. Helen thought it was good but said the theme was unclear. The hangover cures are light and fun but the section with the e-cigarettes was more serious as we can't make "e-cigs are damaging for your health" fun or light-hearted. Therefore, we either stick with the hangover cures bit and find something else fun or stick with the e-cigarettes bit and change the hangover bit to something more serious. As a group, we decided we want to stick with a light-hearted subject, so we have thought about what to change the e-cigarettes to and shortly after we had found a suitable replacement.

Katie passed Broadditch Farm in Gravesend the other day on her way home from work and saw that their 'Broadwitch Hauntfest' was opening for halloween this Friday 13th. We thought we could take our live section there and interview someone about halloween myths and then debunking them, e.g. the Bloody Mary myth - this way we are going down the path of myths and misconceptions which would be a lot easier to make light-hearted. I think we are going to link the hangover cures with myths also and maybe test out cures to see whether they are myths or are actually true.

We emailed Helen with this idea before we found any contacts to find out whether it was news-worthy and she said it was a good idea to go with our light-hearted subject and we should go for it. With this go-ahead we started contacting Broadditch Farm. Katie tried a number of times on the phone and couldn't get through so we left them with an email and luckily they got back to her within the hour. They said they would love to help us out and we agreed to film during the day this Monday 16th.

As a group we decided to do something a bit different with our live piece. We thought about doing half as the interview and half as a mini quiz about Broadditch. For example, some of the questions could be: How long has it been going for? What's the most popular attraction? etc. and then the quiz could be about Halloween and whether the interviewee thinks the statements we say are myths or facts. This would then bring in the theme of the second part of our news report.

Unfortunately, we had to contact Vape Royale again and say that we would no longer need them to interview as it is the e-cigarette section that we aren't doing anymore.

Now we are on a better route for our project we can start the script, get the structure sorted and research more into it. Roughly, we think we'll start with Alex as the news presenter in the studio and he'll talk about what's coming up in the programme, then we'll do the package with the hangover cures which Jason will present and then we will go to our live section with Katie at Broadditch Farm with the interview. I would rather not be on screen as I am awful at learning lines so I will be helping out with the camera, sound, timings and all the little roles during filming. I have also started our website on Wix.com which I am currently working on. We are all happy with this structure and are ready to start thinking about when to take the equipment out.

We all took different roles to help finish our pre-production stage. Alex said he would start the script now we have a better insight to our story and I said I will complete the risk assessments for taking the equipment out and more research into our hangover cures section.