Digital News Production Unit- Rough Cut for Live Piece

Yesterday Andrei and myself went to Canterbury to collect the rest of the footage needed to complete our Live piece. This would feature me performing a piece to camera which would be used to introduce the Vox pops and also sign off my report which would lead back to the studios where an anchor would introduce the next package segment.
Here is the rough cut:

We chose to film on a Sunday as we believed that Canterbury would be less busy and therefore the filming process would be a lot simpler for us. However, we found that it was in fact very busy and thus I kept getting distracted by passer-bys that would walk into shot, causing me to lose track of where I was with the script and would be forced to do a re-take.

This was the first time I have ever performed a live piece, and it was incredibly difficult trying to follow a script word for word with so many distractions. In the past I have had much experience with performing short pieces to a camera, and I find those kinds of performances easy to do, as it is only small chunks of text at a time that I must memorize, but I have a new-found respect for those who have the ability to remember so much information and deliver it with so much going on around them.

In future live pieces, I think it may be wise for me to not follow the script word for word, but instead memorize the key points of the story I am delivering. In this case, the key points were;

• Free gifts sound appealing.
• The gifts are forced upon you without consent.
• U2's album "songs of innocence" has been put on people's phones without their knowledge.
• People are upset by this.
• Lead into Vox Pops.

I believe in this future this will be a much simpler way for me to perform a live piece with such a large script, and it may help me to sound less robotic when delivering lines.