A Twofour production...

...and I have finished my two week stint at Twofour. It's been a great experience. It's given me a little peak into the world of television. Well, outside of me watching Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, that is. I did get to look at the progress of two of Twofour's other shows they're currently working on that are past the transcribing stage. The editors and producers don't mince their words either; they told us straight up that most of the footage we've transcribe usually doesn't get used.

The first show we got to look at was another show being worked on for the Discovery Channel, but it's at the other end of the spectrum. It's a hidden camera reality show where parents go on holiday for a week, leaving their kids in charge of the house, and in reality, the parents are spying on them, seeing what they get up to when they're not there. The guys working on that show told us they have over 50 hours of footage to sift through for just the first episode, and each episode is an hour long, so there is a lot of editing to be done. The episode we saw is of two teenage brothers, so you can probably predict what they get up to when the parents are away. There's also the addition of a couple of chickens in the family's garden, which they also have to take care of, which leads to some comedy moments when they start throwing eggs at each other, as well as used straw that they're supposed to be cleaning up.

Moving on to the other show. This one is a more serene affair; it's a clip show about major sporting events in the 1980s. When we visited, they were working on Ayrton Senna, which I consider perfect timing, as I'm a big Formula 1 fan. It talked about his dominance at McLaren, as well as his rivalry with Alain Prost, and his tragic death at the San Marino Grand Prix.


I won't dwell on that though. All in all, I enjoyed my time with Twofour, and I'd love to work with them again sometime. I kindly asked Laura to keep me in mind if anything pops up, so I guess fingers crossed...

Twofour: one day left...

Quite the change today. Laura transferred me over to another show now over in a different office. The show I'm working on now doesn't currently have a name; it's a show about tropical diseases, and it's being made for the Discovery Channel.

At the moment, I'm working on footage of one of the doctors in the show making his way by jeep to a hospital in Dar es Salaam, which is a city in Tanzania. This footage is a bit trickier to work with, because of all the road noise. The jeep looks pretty barebones, so obviously little to no soundproofing, and the crew are travelling on dirt roads, so it all adds up to a sometimes inaudible conversation.

There's also the odd location shot in some of the clips, getting shots of local animals, the scenery as they're driving by, and signs of the hospital when they get there; the kind of shots that get used to interlude between scenes that have voiceovers on top.

Twofour: days two - four...

...well, there hasn't really been much to say the past few days, which explains the lack of posts. I'll try to summarise in as much detail as possible...

Day 2: Pretty similar to yesterday; still worked on Jean and Jeanette in the Britain's Biggest Hoarders show, and got a more detailed tour of a couple of places; specifically the Master Control Room (MCR), which is where they keep multiple backups of every show they work on (on hard drives, as well as tapes), as well as the required facilities to archive all the material. There's a minimum of two backups to every single show at any time within the Twofour Plymouth building (they also have offices in London, and they're international as well, with offices in Los Angeles, and Abu Dhabi).

Day 3: Bit of a changeup today; Laura (Johnstone, the person in charge of me and the other people on work experience) switched me from Jean and Jeanette to working on Wendy now. She's quite different to Jean; she seems even more difficult to deal with; Jasmine (Harman, the host of the show) looks visibly frustrated throughout too. I did look her up online after the first day and found out her firsthand experience of hoarding; her mum was an equally compulsive hoarder, and they were actually on a show before called "My Hoarder Mum and Me", which is where "Britain's Biggest Hoarders" has come from, and coincidentally, Twofour also did that show.

Day 4: Changeover again. Laura's now put me on Jeff, who is the one from Plymouth, which was who I was hoping for. He's a former engineer (in the footage I've got, he's also wearing overalls throughout) and seems to be quite a computer geek as well; there's loads of old computers and computing parts around his place, as well as a load of computing magazines. Seems I relate to him a little bit with the computer obsession. It turns out there's also a little memento of his in the Twofour office near where I'm working...

No one there seems to know what it is, and I haven't got a clue either. I tweeted that picture asking if any of my followers knew what it was, but no replies.

Answers on a postcard!

One two, Twofour...

Survived my first day at Twofour. It was actually quite pleasant. I got a quick tour of all the areas first, and then I was given the tutorial on the work I'd be doing. I'm working as a transcriber. The show I'm working on is called "Britain's Biggest Hoarders 2". Have to admit I never watched the first series, but from the footage I've been working on, it seems pretty interesting. The footage I'm currently working on is of a woman named Jean, and her daughter Jeanette. And one of the hoarders in the series is actually from Plymouth, so I'll keep my fingers crossed I get to work on them eventually...

...speaking of Plymouth, they have filmed parts of the series down here. Twofour have a big warehouse where they store the people's stuff and get them to sort through it all, so probably about half of each episode on average is recorded there.

"Oh, radio! Tell me everything you know..."

If you get the reference in the title, congratulations, you're also a wrestling fan.


The training session went off without a hitch. Just had to pay the £6 fee for joining the society, and I was shown how to operate both mixing desks, the microphones, and also the software that controls the station.

UPSU Radio uses an open source program called Rivendell. I can't remember which operating system they use, but I do know it's a Linux distro, so probably Ubuntu. There's no installers for Rivendell, and the program has to be compiled from the source code, so I wouldn't be able to practice with it at home, as I am useless when it comes to that. There's no way to get it running on Windows, anyway; it's strictly Linux-only, officially. Well, there is an unofficial Windows solution around, but it's not all parts of the program, so it'd be useless for me. There is apparently a way to get the Debian version working on Mac OS X, but I haven't attempted that yet. Rivendell is thankfully easy to use, and the interface is touchscreen-friendly, which is great, as the station has a touchscreen monitor.

So, I know the station's rules now, and most importantly, I know the procedure for adding new music into the system, which I'll probably be doing a lot, as the music I listen to is pretty different to what they usually broadcast. They have good standards, too; 320kbps MP3 files preferred, no lower than 192kbps (obviously, the files have to have been legally acquired, so either ripped from a CD/vinyl, or bought from a music store, like iTunes or eMusic).

I'm not gonna rush into doing a show yet though, due to the upcoming work experience at Twofour, plus current assignments at dBs. I'll probably wait until the break in-between semesters to do a show. Or failing that, summer break.

UPSU Radio Training

I've had an email from Josh Hancock over at UPSU Radio. He's set the day for dBs students to have their training sessions before they can work at the station. It'll be next Tuesday (the 27th). He's set up a Doodle page for everyone to pick their timeslots (the training sessions are only half an hour long, and they're running from 12:00 to 21:00). I've already marked myself in for 16:00, so I can go straight to there after finishing up at dBs at 15:30.

...well, that was fast!

So, on Wednesday, I fired off an email to Laura Johnstone, the Production Coordinator at Twofour, expressing my interest in doing a two-week work placement with them, and also explaining my restrictions; I wouldn't be able to work Mondays and Tuesdays, due to being in dBs Music those days, obviously. So in reality, I'd only be working six days. After a few back-and-forth replies, it was all sorted, and the next day, I received a confirmation email from the HR department, containing this PDF.

So there we go, I've already secured 51 hours of work experience for myself. I'm also currently in touch with UPSU radio (University of Plymouth Student Union), so there may be more hours on the way...

Unearthing lost relics

I've only just discovered I still had a Blogger blog. Hadn't posted here in over three years (the previous posts have been hidden for this blog's new use). That's temporarily going to change, as this is going to be turned into a journal for the work placements I do during one of my university assignments.

First step: actually looking for a placement. I saw a post on the course's Facebook page yesterday talking about a one/two week placement at Twofour, an independent media group actually founded here in Plymouth. They've supplied programming in recent years to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky1, and various other channels. It's an ideal placement for me (I'd be a transcriber), but transport would be an issue, as there's no buses which go to where they are. The closest I can get to it on a bus is a 20 minute walk away (or just over a mile), and I'd have to walk a mile to get to a bus stop actually on the route that takes me as close to Twofour as possible. So I'd have to walk two miles each way, which at least isn't all in one go; I get a little rest on the bus.

Oh well, I'll apply now first, see if they actually do take me on, and then worry about the potential transport issue.