Studio Production Unit- Understanding the studio and practice workshop.

Today we were visited and delivered a workshop by a guy called Hans, who has a lot of experience working on studio production projects in the past. We began the day by having the layout of the studio explained to us. I felt this was a fantastic thing to teach us about, as although I have used the studio in the past I hadn't had much experience with checking out the actual studios layout, and working a project around that.

For the purpose of this workshop, I volunteered for the position of P.A, and this role was explained to me extensively. P.A is something I haven't really considered doing as a profession in the past, as it seemed like quite a complicated, technical position where I wouldn't really get to use much of my creativity. However, after Hans explained the process to me, and after a couple of run throughs I was confident enough that I think I would be quite successful in this position again if the need ever arose.

An important thing I learnt from this experience was the need to be very careful with the time used on a production. When watching a production normally, it doesn't seem like much time passes. However, when I was put in charge of counting down the seconds to the live performance, the time seemed to go incredibly quickly. This experience would be useful in other production areas, such as script writing and creating time schedules for shows in the future, as I now have an understanding about the methodicalness of being conservative with time in planning.

The studio we used, although quite daunting at first because of all the buttons and switches dotted about the place was actually quite easy to navigate once we were told where everything is.

This experience has allowed me to become a lot more relaxed in a studio environment and I am now very much looking forward to re-entering the studio gallery for future workshops and my eventual position as a sound technician for the final studio production unit.