For this cycle of WVU News the atmosphere was a little different. I am not sure if it was due to Group 1 being halfway through the shows or if everyone was just starting to focus on the last special edition show. But, everything continued just as it had in the previous weeks. The pitch meeting on Monday flew by and so did the Tuesday. However, Wednesday was when I was recruited to go with Reporter Casey Gentile to help her shoot at the Monongalia Sheriff’s Department. She was doing a story on the recently acquired body cameras that are to be worn by the on-duty police officers. I thought that it was a very interesting story and one that I was also a little curious about.

  

We met at the sheriff’s department and since Casey’s story was interesting, she was also picked to be the 360 story of the week as well. The 360 crew met us there and we set up the interview and got really great b-roll throughout the meetings. Afterwards, we were trying to set up an interesting stand up where we would have footage from the body cam so we could see what the officer would see. The slight hiccup with that was that we were not able to get the footage off the body cam in a timely manner. So, we used a go pro that was duct taped to the officer’s uniform right above where the body cam would be and shot the stand up like that. During the shooting, I was very uncertain how the footage would turn out but after seeing it all put together, it was very impressive and definitely creative.

After helping Casey record her package I was asked to help CJ with a Facebook Live interview that he had with Blake Humphrey the student body president. I was interesting using the new equipment and figuring out how it works on the fly, but overall I thought that interview went well. Other than that, the critiques are getting shorter and shorter and it is getting harder to choose which packages make it to show. And then when writing the script, I found that setting everything out and planning it out before diving into it make the process go by much quicker and the time it takes me to finish has gone down immensely since the beginning of the semester.

Then on Monday, I was informed that we would be having guests attending the show that week. The students from Emily Corio’s class would be stopping by and watching what they are getting themselves into for next semester. I remember when I took the very same tour. It was scary, but scary in a way that gets you excited. After my tour, I knew that taking WVU News was something that I had to do and here I am finishing up my second to last show and I wouldn’t change a thing. So, if anyone is on the fence about taking WVU News, do it. It will get you prepared for what is waiting for you after college even if you don’t wish to stay in the television broadcast career.