In total, our prototype shoot is around 5 minutes in length, EVS included. Overall, the shoot went very well, which no doubt is the result of our team’s familiarity with the script, the multiple practices we did before shooting and communication inside the control room and outside it. Since we had the opportunity to come earlier to class, I had plenty of time to set up graphics and place them in sequence, ingest the EVS footage. This eliminated a lot of time which would otherwise be spent doing these things during our time slot.

In our first shoot, we had minor timing issues with the graphics and EVS with the host’s delivery; such as a few beats of silence before EVS is played or graphics being a bit delayed. Apart from this, we had the issue where the graphics were overlayed on top of EVS footage like this:

This was due to the graphics still being keyed into the program feed when switching from camera to the EVS feed. In the first shoot, I had to manually take off the graphics on Xpression Studios. We were able to fix this issue in the second shoot by having the vision switcher press the EVS and graphic key at the same time: doing this enables them to switch to EVS footage whilst taking off the graphics at the same time.

The layout of the set is a host behind a table, however, I think more could be done for the background instead of just a black curtain. The current look we have for the prototype does show a bit of halfheartedness, and more efforts towards set design will improve the overall presentation of our segment. We only used two cameras for our shoot: one from the front which allows for over-the-shoulder graphics and another on the side for emphasis. While these two camera angles do the job, I think a further exploration of the camera could be useful for the future such as the movement of the cameras.