THE NEWS IS A JOKE: Week 8

This week was much spent around organising the pre-production stage of our news show. Crew roles had only just been allocated, and to my luck, I was actually placed as director for segment 1, and camera operator for segment 2. If I’m honest, I was shocked I actually got chosen to direct, and despite my anxieties, I’m certainly excited to see how I adapt to working in the two new roles.

This class I would say would probably be the first in which we had all worked together as a whole, as for most of the semester we had a divide of the two groups, as well as our smaller groups we’d been in for Assignment 3. Having the entire class come together proved to be difficult, working collaboratively with the entire class proved to be much different to working within smaller groups.

Generally, decision making ran relatively smoothly, however, issues with placement and prioritising segments were not the smoothest. Assignment 4, being such a large show, does indeed require us to piece a number of different news stories together, even if they don’t entirely correlate. Having such a variety of news stories that currently seem to minimally overlap is going to require some level of adjustability and flexibility within the segments and topics in the program to allow us to avoid having a disjointed and muddled news program.

I think over these weeks and through further discussion as a group, we will begin to come to a better understanding of how to structure a coherent satirical news show. However, with the consistency in in inspiration from John Oliver, I fear we may lose that element in the program as sacrifice for coherence, as we’ve seen in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, there is often a very consistent flow and sense of correlation, which I believe we may find difficult to achieve with our chosen news stories. This may however only be how I feel about the structure of the program. I would ideally like to make the John Oliver style work, but as I’ve mentioned, we may have to adapt and trial different comedic news style presentation, such as something like Mad As Hell, which incorporates a number of skits, comedic actors and a variety of stories into one 30 minute program. I’m honestly not too fussed about the direction the show takes, but I would definitely like to incorporate John Oliver elements as he’s a clear favourite of many of us.