In my opinion my factual news piece is one of my most successful pieces. It originally started with being selected for the NextGen Skills debate at the millennium point. The debate asked the question of why young people are not currently being employed after leaving education. Originally I was invited by my teacher to just film the conference as part of a team. However when we arrived we were shocked to discover that we were the only young people at the conference and began to understand that this may be one of the issues. The people that are talking about why young people do not have the skills for employment, do not completely understand young people. Myself and another crew member, Laythan Jones, became extremely interested in the problem faced by many young people in getting work after education as we would soon face it ourselves. The conclusion of the NextGen skills debate was that young people were not being taught the soft skills and transferrable skills needed for employment. This statement resonated with me and I felt that it was a valid argument.
After coming back and discussing it with Laythan, it was decided that this would be a joint venture for both of us as we felt as though it was an important issue. Conducting research was our first port of call. I feel as though the success of this project lies in our extensive research. Without this research, our product would not have had the success that it had.
Our research was mainly internet based, however it came from reliable sources, such as the Birmingham city council and some of our stats also came from the BBC.
We shot the interviews in one afternoon and then Laythan edited the product together. After we were both satisfied with it, it was then off to the recording studio to record the voice-over. This took several attempts until we got the sound that we were after. This process took around a month.
One of the problems we came across was the fact that this was a topic that had been covered lots of times before. However, we had noticed that there wasn’t much coverage from the young people and so decided to go for that angle instead. This is the reason as to why we decided to have my voice as the voice-over, I do sound like a young person. This was also the reason behind having interviews with students too.
In hindsight, we could have completed this project quicker had we focussed our efforts on it. However having the time to mull over our ideas and go deep into our research helped immensely. The final product was a success in my opinion as it came to a clear conclusion at the end. It was so well received that the findings of the product have been used in a report for the EU.
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