Housing story

Watch this TV package. It is a straightforward story about plans to build houses in a town called Newport in Pembrokeshire. The town is by the sea and very popular with tourists. But houses are expensive. There are plans to build some new homes but not everybody is happy about the idea. The package has two soundbites. One with somebody who supports the plan and one with somebody who doesn’t. You can see the importance of getting “both sides of the story” and leaving the viewers to decide who is right and who is wrong.

Let’s look at how the script is written.

First of all there is a link, which is read by the presenter in studio. Then the package starts with the reporter’s voice reading the script.

Notice how the script answers the geography questions. Notice how the sentences are quite short. Notice how Abigail uses simple, short words like “says” and “but.”

Notice how she doesn’t need to name her contributors. Their caption tells us who they are. If she had mentioned them by name, we would have needed to see a shot of them.

Notice how the pictures are shot. There aren’t hundreds of shots, but there are a variety of shot sizes and angles. There are some archive pictures in the report, from when people were protesting.

Notice the natural sound of the dog barking. Pausing your script to let the sound of your pictures come through is a great thing to do every now and again.

There is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to do a report like this.