Summary of the Beeb: Part 1

Well, I finished my BBC placement the other week and I haven't really said that much about what I was really doing so I thought I'd better write it down before I forget. I have a posh shiny presentation somewhere on my hard drive, but it doesn't really give the full experience.

For accomodation, the three of us - me, Dean from the Game Programming course and Alex who'd just finished his IT computing course - were put up in the BBC hostel in Queensway, West London. The BBC hostel is nice, but has a few drawbacks. Firstly, it had no internet. Secondly, the kitchens were pretty unusable. We managed to cook a few meals in them, but you certainly had to struggle, either to find the right equipment or just to find a hob or oven that actually worked. But other than that it was nice.
It was certainly nice to live in central London, although I feel like I didn't really take advantage of my situation fully. In the last week I had my longboard and did some skating in Kensington Gardens and Hyde park, and I really should have done that from the outset.

We turned up at the BBC on Monday morning and were first sent on the tour to let us get to know the Television Centre building. It's suprising how little the studios are actually used at TVC, you can understand why they want to sell the building. We also learnt that the BBC rents out its studios to other channels like Channel 4 to earn itself more money. While we were on placement they were filming the Charlotte Church show in the studio opposite our building, so we saw the sparkly set in various states of completion. We were working in the East Tower, which you can just see in this photo:

After spending a few weeks working in a TV environment, I've found out that it's very unglam. We didn't really see any celebrities - we saw some kids TV presenters and the people off of Eggheads. We did see some rehearsals and sets for shows like Mock the Week, and lunch hour could be very interesting if you just went exploring and poked your nose in all the studio viewing galleries, but Television Centre is really very functional and boring. It's also a lot smaller than it looks on TV and in photos, the massive wall you see with 'BBC Television Centre' written on it is the side wall of studio one - the biggest studio in TVC. It looks HUGE but it's only about 4 stories high.

After our tour on the first day we were given our brief. What the CBBC production team wanted us to do was to generally research machinima and do some test projects to see how viable it would be as a way to produce animation sequences. We would each have an engine and work on laptops to escape the restricted BBC network. However, before any of that could take place, we had to complete a load of BBC training modules as we were classes as employees. These included: law, health and safety, competition fairness, child protection and editorial policy. All of these were extremely irrelevant to us seeing as we wouldn't even be touching a camera, but it did make you think about how things were produced behind the scenes and all the thought that has to go into a programme.

More to come!