In this weeks class, we watched the leadership debate. If it taught me anything, it’s that our class is probably more capable to film a leadership debate that is less embarrassing to watch.

The issues with the debate were pretty obvious from the start. Bill Shorten and Scott Morrison were seated on very awkward stools, that seemed far too tall to be comfortable. Their notes were on the chair in front of them, which looked pretty unprofessional and continued to look even worse after Scomo dropped his notes behind him.

To make matters worse, there seemed to be a lot of confusion on Shorten’s part about where he was supposed to look. After a host asked him to stop looking directly into the camera, he acknowledged that a producer asked him to look at the camera when speaking (?!). To add to this, the hosts also asked incredibly pointed questions that bordered on biased or at the very least, poorly thought out. For example, a host began a question to Scomo with “As a father of  two children…”. The question at hand had nothing to do with children, so I can only assume it was phrased in such a way as to humanize Scomo.

Watching a televised debate of this magnitude, and noticing how many awkward errors and blunders there were despite them likely having a huge budget, made me feel a lot better about us filming our prototype in a few short weeks. We have already practised our live rehearsals, and I feel like most of us could do a better job with the options available to us at university. It also had me thinking a lot more about how we will structure our set, as we will have two co-hosts and I don’t want them to look as awkward as Scomo and Bill Shorten. Most importantly, I probably won’t have them sitting on two high stools.