Morning News Break

My TV production class did a very interesting thing today. We did a newscast production! We called it Morning News Break. Well, we're not really wanting to think of some really catchy name - just for the show's sake of having a name. Someone even suggested Gising Pilipinas but that would sound like a major Good Morning, America rip-off. Although there were lots of telling offs (or tellings off? I'm not really sure) by Jane (the instructor I've been having for at least one class since 3 terms back), it was really fun. During the three-hour production class, we didn't have a spare minute to do a makeup retouch (yup, no one was to go on cam without makeup - even the guys), fix our stuff, let alone rehearse the scripts. Everything was timed. We shifted crew work, one 7-minute production after another, not a single second wasted. The worse I was at was spinning (doing the background music and stuff), which is quite surprising. See, we did radio productions last term and aside from directing, it was the best thing I did. Well, anyways, I just didn't know which track to play because it wasn't indicated on the script. What, I was supposed to just guess? Knowing is one good thing. Pretending that I know stuff, however, is one bad bad bad thing, especially in production. Thank god that thing we did was just an exercise. Just to give us the feel of doing an actual graded production.

On second thought, come on. Graded productions don't feel like that. They feel awfully worse. Thinking about what grade you're gonna get for it, everything your crew does, that kind of stuff. TV directors have a lot of things in mind. And I seriously admire them for actually coming up with good shows.

The funniest part of it was when I did the anchor part. Everything was doing fine until the floor director said we were running out of time and I had to double-time and wrap up the show. So I was like, "Huwaaaaat?!" (that's supposed to be a joke if you're familiar with this Dove commercial) I didn't know what to do. I didn't write arrows and stuff that would point to specific parts of the script just in case problems with timing arose. As a matter of fact, I read the script only minutes before it was my time to be anchor. Ah, it really pays off well to be prepared. And I so promise to be more prepared. I mean to be prepared. I wasn't in any way prepared. So let's not talk about makeup.

And this has been another edition of the Morning News... Break. I'm Jim Joquico.



I did the opening bill board. And Jane thought it was great.