Monday, 18 May 2015

Golden Rule of TV

One of our TV lecturers favourite things to tell new classes is that the golden rule in working in a TV studio is to 'Never Assume.' I discovered the importance of that rule today.

Today was my dedicated essay day once again, I was due to head down to the library and power through a solid chunk of my work load. I woke up to a rather ominous text from my girlfriend asking if she could come over really early in the morning because she was ill. When she waled through the door she burst into tears and told me she had a really nasty ear infection which meant she didn't get a great bit of sleep last night; this made her very emotional and she clearly needed someone to cry on for a little bit. I'm not going to say this put a spanner in the works of my essay as comforting my girlfriend was genuinely the right thing to do and she was exceptionally grateful that I took a bit of my time to calm her down this morning.

Next came a phonecall from her housemate who informed me that one of their group members was hit by a car this morning and they needed a replacement in the TV studio. While I knew this would take a substantial chunk out of my essay working time, helping them out was undoubtedly the right thing to do. Hell, I even got some work done, while helping them so that was a nice bonus.

However, about halfway through the day the machine I was doing the studio recordings with decided to record the footage with abysmal audio quality for seemingly no reason whatsoever. This made me feel awful because I didn't check over the footage after we recorded some of the takes and I may have been able to nip it in the bud had I noticed sooner. The technician agreed though that it wasn't anyone's fault but the system's but I still feel like I could have done something more. 'Never Assume' echoed in my mind.

So while I anticipated for a big essay work day, in reality I spent most of the daytime helping out my course-mates. No regrets there whatsoever as I knew that they would have done the same for me plus I managed to get about half my work done this evening which is a huge plus.

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