DIGITAL NEWS: (Pre Production) Ideas Lab w/ Jo Clark

As a group, we have decided we want to do something with a light hearted twist. We didn't want to do heavy news stories but still wanted the pieces to be interesting and relevant to the audience. This means we need to find the right mix between entertaining and interesting which will be a difficult balance.

To help us work as a group we have set up a google docs folder where all of our documents will be shared with each other. We have started an initial ideas page where we have jotted down some rough starting points:

We started off by thinking of our brand. We decided we wanted our target audience to be similar to our own age as we would know what sort of angle the audience would want. We then went on to think of the actual stories in our piece. To do this, we looked at what events were coming up, what major venues were nearby and things that would be relevant to this time of year and to our target audience. We realised that campaigns for stopping smoking and staying sober for October were coming up. This combined with our other idea of myth busting gave us the idea of exploring myths surrounding e cigarettes and hangover cures.

However, this gave us a little bit of confusion about the brand of our channel as it then sounded like we wanted to go for a health and lifestyle related channel. Whereas, we wanted to go for a more mystery / myth busting / funny channel brand. This means just needing to find the right angle and tone for the production.

Talking to Jo proved very useful, she pointed us in the direction of some potential contributors. We could:
- ask press departments and associations (for the stoptober and stay sober campaigns)
-  ask doctors (about the pros and cons of using e-cigarettes)
- do location recces of potential locations (e.g. any venues holding events for the campaigns)

Our conversation with Jo also helped to sort out the order of our production. We need a 2 minute live section and a pre recorded package. As it seemed more likely that we would find a venue / event for the e cigarette story, we decided to choose that as our live story. This leaves alcohol and hangover cures as our pre recorded package. We want to make the story very light hearted yet informative - we hope to film someone at a party / event with alcohol and then ask them to try hangover cures. This is still very rough and more research needs to be done.

This has given us more direction with our projects. We need to research all the areas of our project and get in touch with potential contributors.