Being a sound technician

For BBC News School Report, I applied for the job of the Sound Technician, which I got. To begin with I went around the school buildings filming myself in different areas that I thought were appropriate for filming either reports, the live stream or voice overs. At first it took a while to find places available that won’t be interrupted by people or load noise disturbing the recording. It required a lot of thinking, walking around and asking questions to be able to find a perfect spot that doesn’t affect any other classrooms but still is suitable for the recording to take place.

My main focus was sound, but I got a little bit off track and started worrying more about the look of the place rather than how the sound was like in that place, which I shouldn’t have done, but luckily all the places sounded fine anyways so it worked out well. We ended up finding places like the Christ the king sixth form staircase, the front entrance of the school and other places around.

Towards the end I helped film the weatherman’s scenes, as I had nothing left to do, in the different weather which was interesting because he has a very quirky personality, which fit quite well with his weather report. After many takes and practices, we managed to film it with no background sound interrupting, which was hard to find outside in the school. We managed to present them in a way which clearly showed what weather was going on with an umbrella and a drawing of the sun drawn by the weatherman himself.

Although my job was very simple and easy, overall the BBC news report was pretty stressful as a lot of things had to be complete in a short amount of time. It was fun as we got to see what it’s really like to put together a news report.

Harry