Michael Luton
Media Student
Beyond The Tracks Festival 2017
In September 2017 I was a cameraman for someone who emailed students asking them to be a cameraman for the festival, I agreed to do it and had to collect the equipment the day before the festival (camera and tripod) so I could bring it with me on the day of the festival.
On the day of the festival I turned up to meet the person with my equipment and myself and the other camera operators was given access all areas passes and was shown round the backstage areas where we could go in between performances. Then we took our equipment to the front of the stage and started to set up the camera and tripod, we was told that we would be sticking to a member of the band playing and we would follow that person around the stage, we would also have the footage displayed on a huge LED screen that was behind the bands on the stage, which was amazing to see the shots I was getting with my camera on a massive screen shown to hundreds if not a thousand people.
The person we was working for would be speaking to us through a headset and we could press a button and talk back to him, so communication went smoothly throughout both days I did work experience at the festival. Most of the time he just let us follow whoever it is we was following and every now and then we would zoom in and get a close up of zoom out and get a wide shot, just to change it up. But he only spoke to us through the headset when he wanted us to do something specific, and also every now and then he would speak through the headsets and reassure us and tell us we was doing great etc.
Overall I had a great experience, and the opportunity itself was amazing, it was very hands on, you had to stay focused while filming the bands, and it was very tiring, especially when the acts that were on later on at night went on for an hour and another band was on for an hour and a half, it got very tiring standing for that long focusing on filming, but the long breaks during acts really helped. Despite this I still had a great time and gained valuable work experience. Who else can say that they was a cameraman for a festival and had their footage shown on a big LED screen to everybody attending the festival? I would definitely do it again if I was given the chance.
Radio Work Experience
To gain more experience in radio I got in touch with the person who runs a live podcast on Facebook every Monday night, the show is called 'The Tilton Talk Show' which is run by Birmingham City Football Club supporters, I got in touch and asked if I could help out and they invited me down.
The first week I just sat and watched how they did things and the next week I helped out more with setting up equipment and sorting names to pull out of a trophy for the weekly competitions that they do, and during the show I just go through the live comments on social media and highlight the ones that the presenters could bring up and talk about.
It's a small independent show with only one person who works behind the scenes who I help out with but over time I think I would be able to be more involved in the production side of things, because at the moment I'm not heavily involved in that side of the show.
African Women In The Media Symposium
During the summer I helped out Yemisi Akinbobola from Birmingham City University, she is the distance learning programme coordinator and visiting lecturer at the Birmingham School of Media.
She sent out an email looking for people to help her film and edit the event which I replied to, I helped set up the camera on the day with another person she got to help film, we took turns, the other person would film before lunch and then I would take over and film after lunch.
But while the other person was filming they would stop recording the panel completely and turn the camera round and start filming the audience reactions, which is something we could have filmed at a later time, what was important was filming the panel so when editing it all synced up.
I had a problem with this while editing because clips would just stop abruptly and there was a lot of continuity errors in the editing because of this, editing the whole thing together was very stressful because every time I came across continuity errors I had to think of a way to skip past it without missing out on too much of what the person speaking on the panel was talking about.
If I was to work with this person in the future and I saw them doing the same thing I would try to explain to them that it would ruin the continuity and that we can get those 'filler' type shots later and that the important thing is to record the panel.