And I’m back in the United Kingdom again after my one year stint in Germany. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone there who made me feel so welcome! It was certainly an experience I wouldn’t have passed up on, as I was able to learn so much more – not only about the country and the language, but also about my career of choice, television.
It was in Germany that I was able to direct my first full-length television programme (see the earlier post to see how it went), I was able to learn more about studio technology and I was able to get valuable experience on a national TV show.
Almost everyone from the pre-production team (sorry about the smudge in the corner!)
Anyway, as promised, I’m now able to tell you about my time at said TV show, Tigerenten Club for SWR! I arrived about a month and two weeks ago, fresh and ready for the challenge. I was swiftly introduced to everyone in the office and was shown where I would work for the next month. My head was spinning with new names and tasks to do but I soon got the hang of it after talking to them all. In fact, the first thing I had to do was call someone from another department to get my password for my email account – and calling on the telephone to someone I didn’t know, in German, was something I hadn’t done before! I soon picked up the correct German telephone manner though.
I expected the office to be as brightly-coloured as the studio, for some reason. In fact, it’s just an anonymous white-walled office above an electronics shop, across from SWR Broadcasting House in Stuttgart – from here the magic is made which brings one of Germany’s most successful children’s television productions to life! The office mainly consists of women, all of whom wear smiles and are always happy to answer any questions I had about the production! Tigerenten Club is really quite famous in Germany, having had the added boost of the Tigerente ‘brand’ – a little ‘tiger duck’ drawing created by German cartoonist Janosch for his books. The programme though has been running since 1996 and is a mixture of a magazine and a game show format, with informative reportage inserts and adventures à la Blue Peter, but teams from two schools compete against each other in between these features.
During my first few weeks, I was given a feature to organise for several of the episodes of the new series, which will be filmed and broadcast in October/November. The feature is called the ‘WissQuiz’ and it’s a knowledge quiz split into categories: Why? That’s why!, True or Not True?, What do teachers know?, ‘Gamble’ etc. For these, I had to research questions for each of the categories with multiple choice answers, write a script around them, find fitting video clips from the archive and edit them together, for about 3 programmes.
After that was complete, I had to research locations and information ahead of filming they were going to be doing in Rome. Then, I helped plan a further programme and invented a few new format points – including a new game, which could get used in a subsequent series.
My final weeks included a trip to the studio to assist in the goings-on there, whilst they were filming sketches which would be put alongside the quiz in the episodes I had been working on and in later episodes too.
And then it was the end! A month of work which will broadcast later in the year and seen by a 1million+ people, so a great achievement for my early career, having not even left university yet.
I didn't decide the pose for this photo, honest!
So, overall, a very sucessful year! Let’s hope this academic year brings lots of success too – watch out for upcoming posts on my dissertation, new TV production lesson and, next year, the hunt for work.
