Hashtagged is a new segment we created for the Thursday show, See It Live. It operates as a Price-Is-Right spoof where contestants must guess the amount of times a Twitter hashtag was used in a given time frame. The person who guesses a value closest to the actual value without going over will gain a point. The winner of the show is the participants with the most points by the end. I was inspired by my fellow producer Nathan, who had an idea during the J403 class where he wanted us to look at the most trending hashtags related to the See It Live topic for the day. I wanted to accomplish that idea while presenting information in a more interactive way.
The goal with Hashtagged was honestly to try something new. The issue with the ATVN news structure is that its delivery can become extremely repetitive even if the subject matter is interesting. There’s only so many voice overs and copy intros transitioning into sound bites that an audience can watch. Therefore I wanted to create a new segment that attempts to present information in a completely different way.
This week the segment was hosted by Brett Chody who was our correspondent. Since See It Live rotates its correspondents, the plan is to have a new host for the show every week. There were some communication issues that led to Brett giving points to participants who guessed a value over the actual hashtag amount. Next week I plan to make it a bigger priority to communicate the rules to the correspondent.
Another issue that came up during this segment was the level of time commitment that was required to create the visual elements of the show. Editing in the visual transitions took around two hours to complete. Part of the issue was that we had to create graphics from scratch and figure out the best way to implement the transitions which took several trial and errors.
This week we honestly were more ambitious than we should have been. While the segment came out looking great, we could have honestly waited until next week to create some of our visual effects rather than powering through everything on Thursday. Doing so would have alleviated some stress for our graphic designer and made the editing process much faster.
However, starting next week I predict that the entire process will be much more simple since most of the graphics and Premiere transitions have been created. My biggest takeaway from this week is that as a producer you need to be realistic with what expectations you have in order to prevent overworking those on your team.