For the past week, I have gotten to experience a scriptwriting challenge like never before. I had the great privileged to travel with 3 other media personnel to cover the women's NAIA basketball tournament. Before I tell you about the scriptwriting side of things, let me tell you a little about the trip.
When I was first asked to go on this trip, I was a little hesitant. I don't like sports, I'd have to miss classes, and if I had to pay for any travel expenses, I wouldn't be able to afford it the week after spring break. Well, I got over the sports thing, I realized I wasn't missing too many classes, and the trip was paid for by the school. The downside was that I was back from spring break for one day of classes, and then I was traveling again.
Dr. King, Tim Decker, Glenda Rojas, and I spent a long 14 hours in the car on the way to Sioux City, Iowa. We played the highly competitive alphabet game, stopped a few times to eat, Glenda and I watched movies and fell asleep, and after a few hours of driving in the fog and rain, we arrived at t
he hotel. We went to sleep having no idea what was in store for us in the days to come.
Day One: We followed the team to their morning practice, talked to some players about their expectations, and Glenda got some footage of the players at practice. Shortly after, we arrived at the arena to set up our workspace: tables on the second level overlooking the court. Glenda started editing, and I really didn't have much to do for a while. Eventually, I set up for our live pre-game, which required a light, a mic, a camera, a tripod, and my computer connected to a program that would stream our feed to the web. Our station had never tried anything like this before, but live remote television was now a thing of the present for us! I spent about a half an hour on the phone with people from back here, making sure we were all on the same page and our timing was correct. It was a challenge that first night, but we were starting to get the hang of it. During the second half of the game, I was instructed to shoot my first package of the trip. It was a feature story about the small group fans that traveled from near and far to cheer on the team at the tournament. Since the people I interviewed were very involved in watching the game, I didn't get very many soundbites. Along with that, I had the added challenge of shooting in close quarters, making it hard to get the mic close, and the camera at the right angle. Needless to say, I wrote the script to work with what shots and soundbites I did have. The story told itself, the Lady Wildcats have a strong, supportive fan base. Looking back at it, this piece was probably my weakest of the trip, but it was a great starting point and a good place to start learning about how to shoot better to make the writing easier.
The Ladies won their game that night, extending our trip to Friday...
Day Two: Tim and I were designated as the ones to wake up early. We had gotten the most sleep the night before (since we went to bed at 2:30am), so our job was to go with the team to a local elementary school and shoot another story. This was more about the team helping out, and growing closer together. I had a lot of fun with this piece because the kids were cute, and the girls all were having so much fun! I was starting to write in my head as I was shooting which made writing the script easier. Since I was shooting my own video, I already knew the content I was getting. It's much quicker than using someone else's footage and trying to come up with a story. The writing was already starting to get easier.
Day Three: Second game of the week...the women's basketball team made it to the 2nd round of tournament play. I spent about an hour and a half trying to get our broadcasting program to work, which was very frustrating and disheartening. Eventually, people who are smarter than me, got it working, and we were back in business. I was assigned a feature story on Kat Spitler, the team's assistant coach who was a part of the team who won the championship in 2007.
She gave a great interview, which was very insightful, so the package, ended up being more of her soundbites than my voiceover. It was a different sort of writing; writing with someone else's words, and finding ways to bridge the gap. I had a lot of time to work on this script, but didn't actually get it to the point that I was happy with it until an hour and a half before my deadline. That made for a crazy time editing, but I got it done on time :)
Day Four: Sunday. The day of rest. Our day off ... but not really for me. We traveled and hour plus to South Dakota to go to church with the basketball team. Instead of enjoying the time of worship, I was working! Ha. No surprises there. Work doesn't stop for anything, especially a great story about the team refocusing and finding importance in more than basketball. We spent the afternoon eating with the team at church, then made our journey back to Sioux City, where the guys crashed. Glenda and I did not indulge in that luxury. For one, I had a script and package to get done, and second, Glenda decided we should make posters for the parents to hold at the next game. So I looked through my clips, we went to Walmart, I wrote my script, we painted posters, I edited my package, and fell asleep at 2:30am while it was exporting. This day I learned that writing sometimes needs to get done quickly because we don't always have the luxury of time.
Day Five: This was my real day off. We went to the arena, did the pre-game, halftime, post-game thing. Girls lost. We were disappointed. But for me it meant I was done. No more stories to do, no more writing. Just a day of travel to look forward to.
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So what's my point here? I got to experience first hand what it's like to work in a fast paced media environment. It involves writing. And it's a lot of fun! I learned a lot about writing from the four scripts I had to write. I rewrote every script until it fit the story, was conversational, and matched with the video. Writing is an important part of real world journalism. News isn't all about being on camera, or shooting good video. It's about the words that are said to communicate what is going on. All the writing we are doing in class is good practice for what's going to come after college. We often won't have time to think about a script for a few days before we write it. If we waited to write a news story for 2 or 3 days like we do in class, it's old news. No one cares anymore. We need to learn to write quick and well if we want to succeed. It really does involve practice and discipline, and taking advantage of all the practice we can get in this class will help us be better writers in the future.
Thanks.
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