News Production: Making the Promotional Video/ Top Line

Our intentions for the promotional video was to briefly introduce the show; it needed to be fast pace, quick and straight to the point. Thats the energy we want in each episode so its even better to display this in the promotional video.

A way of achieving this fast pace was to start off black and white in a lecture room, which is supposed to have a full atmosphere. This then goes straight into a quick, bright coloured piece to the camera, with quick whip pans. These whip pans were our first attempt at them and they came out really well. The trick was to film in order, remembering the last direction the pan whipped to. When on camera, for one of our first takes he forgot to whip pan at the end. This wasn't too much of an issue as we had chance to re-film and Gavin learned from it. 

I thought the opening would be good to start off dull and boring, as it is interesting, holds peoples curiosity which sound like a bit of a juxtaposition. But when the music perks up, energy perks up and color and brightness perks up there is an interesting appeal. In the edit we also had the idea to add bloopers. We wanted to include these somewhere as they're humorous and show how fun and family-like we are at News Grad. Gavin suggested to included it in the promotional video and it worked out really well.

When coming up with a story, it is important to identify the most appealing and interesting element, AKA, its "top line". The purpose of this is to incise and bring viewers in. To some extent our journalistic top line is our promotional video. It incises our audience and hopefully captures their attention with brief descriptions of relatable and appealing content.



Click here for promotional video


Top Line

"So sit back, relax, push your coursework aside and tune into News Grad'.
We came up with this toppling as its quick, simple and straight to the point. This topple  has a list of key words:

"So sit back, relax, push your coursework aside and tune into News Grad'.

The highlighted words are 'trigger' words. They stand out to the others because they are points of interest for students. So 'relax' and 'coursework' are both relatable phrases, especially the word 'coursework'.  With "tune in" the audience will instantly know its a visual medium. The BBC says on their website: "The top line is the first sentence someone sees and could be the difference between them reading on or going to another story." (http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/19819214).

In terms of researching our 'top line' it did sort of come naturally to us. When filming our promotional video, I wanted to say this at the end; it  was from then on that we realised this could be our top line. The BBC also say on their website "Often this (top line) will be instinctive and you'll know your top line straight away. That kind of hunch is often the best indicator."


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