Cooking in Comfort

For our second feature, Becky and I produced a short cooking guide in which we prepared a three course meal for four people at just £12. The aim of the feature was to show young people on a budget, and also as Sally Churchward said on WINOL LIFE it can be aimed at people with a good income, that cooking at home can save you money.

So many people are always going to restaurants, sometimes more than they would like to purely because the food is quick and it's easy. However, our feature shows you that it can be just as easy in the comfort of your own home, cooking with your friends and it does save you a lot of money.

Becky and I learnt a lot from the feature ourselves, particularly as I have never actually cooked a meal from scracth (scary thought), so this allowed me to see for myself just how fun and educating cooking can be.

This was also our first time on WINOL LIFE, a chat show where are features are shown to a professional guest who then give us their feeback. It's a great oppurtnity to recieve a professional opinion and advice in order for us to improve on our future features.

Sally Churchward was our guest on this week's WINOL LIFE and she gave us some great advice about our cooking feature. She told us that the shots were brilliant and the whole idea and aim of the feature was very impressive. However, she did say that we need to bring ourselves into the feature more so we have more time in front of the camera. She also said we were fashionable but we knew that already.

We have taken her advice on board with our feature this week so you will have to come back to watch it!

Sigmund Freud

In Anthony Kenny's book "Philosophy In The Modern World" Sigmund Freud is described as the continental thinker who had the greatest influence on Anglo-American philosophical thought throughout the twentieth century. Surprisingly, he is not a philosopher at all, Freud regarded himself as a scientest and an inventor of a new science.

Freud was born in Moravia in 1856. Fread is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression. In 1860 his family moved to Vienna, where Freud trained as a doctor and joined the staff of the General hospital in 1882 where he specialised in brain anatomy. Freud also collaborated with neurologist, Joseph Breuer, treating hysterical patients under hypnosis.

In 1895, in conjunction with Breuer, Freud published work on hysteria which presented an original analysis of mental illness. Freud gradually started to stop using hpnosis as a method of treatment and he began to replace it with a method he called psychoanalysis. He described this form of treatment as nothing more than an exchange of words between patient and doctor.

Freud believed that the reasons for hysterical symptoms was because the patient had repressed memories of a pychological trauma. He found that having the patient lying down on a couch and talk about whatever came to mind would help the patient recover through a process of free association. Freud was investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and psychoanalyst.

In 1900, Freud published the most important of his works, "The Interpretation of Dreams".  Freud argued that our dreams are coded so we are unable to interpret them and all codes are repressed sexual desires.
In Freud's view, dreams were all froms of wish fulfillment which meant these were attempts by the unconscious t resolve a conflict of some sort. whether iwas somehting recent or something from the past. However, because the information in the unconscious is often disturbing, the preconscious will not allow it to pass unaltered into the conscious. The exercise of free association, reveals thge underlying pattern of the unconscious mind.

In 1923, Frud published "The Ego and the Id". In this, Freud describes our Id as the dominant part of our personalities. He descirbed the Id as our basic desires and instincts which we develop from birth but it should be repressed. The ego is the most superficial portion of the id and one which has been modified by the influjence of the external world. The superego dominates this ego and represents inhibitions of instincts that are characteristics of man.

WINOL LIFE with Sally Churchward

Fashion First!

So after a fantastic summer of sun, sea, and long evenings with wine, I'm back at uni and working on the famous WINOL, Winchester News Online. It doesn't quite compare to sunbathing on the beach with a piña colada and a good book, but I must say my first week has been a great success, surprisingly!

When I was told I woud be working on features, I was so pleased! It was exactly what I wanted and after producing my first feature, I'm now excited for the next! I didn't know what to expect when I came back but after Katie, our features editor, explained everything we needed to know, it all became clear. Producing a feature to a deadline every week, I must admit, did sound worrying at first but Katie couldn't have been more helpful. I wasn't sure whether I would have enough ideas or even if they would be any good but now I already have features planned in advance and I can't wait to get filming them!
Chris also stressed a point that I now keep telling myself! He said that mistakes are actually good and the only people that don't make mistakes, are people that don't do anything at all. Well thank goodness he mentioned this!

Our first feature we decided to produce, was a fashion feature on Autumn trends. As the weather gets colder, fashion changes and so it was a perfect time to see what styles you were hitting the high streets in. Becky and I produced the feature together and it was a topic that interested us both so we thought it would be a brilliant feature to get us used to filming.

Once we were out in Winchester with our equipment, we found that everything that could possibly go wrong, did go wrong. On the day we set for filming we didn't even get any filming done.

Problem number one: Microphones.
We got into Winchester high street at 12pm, set up our tripod and camera and connected the microphone frequency to the camera. At that point we realised we only had one radio mic, and we needed two! Not such a great start, so take this tip: Always check your equipment first! We walked back up Winchester's own Mount Everest to the university and by the time we got back into town, it was nearly 2pm. We set all the equipment up again, this time ready to go!

But welcome problem number two: Sound. 
With a lot of time wasted standing infront of a camera shouting 'hello' into a microphone with an audience waiting for something spectacular, we found that the headphones were not picking up our voices. The audio levels on the camera were moving, brilliant! The radio mics were all set up to the same frequency and their audio levels were moving too, Super! But nothing was coming through the headphones. So, after a couple of hours of tantrums and a McDonalds, we phoned Katie who cleverly suggested that we try the headphones in a mobile to see if they work. How had we not thought of this?! Hoping to blame it on the headphones and find that they don't work, strangely they did! With no cause to our problem, we couldn't decide whether to risk it and film our piece in the hope we had audio when we got back.

But that was problem number three: Time.
It was now nearly 6pm, shops were shutting and Winchester was almost dead so we thought we would leave it for another day. A whole day and we had no film.

Thankfully when filmed on Monday and everything went well, ready for our deadline on Tuesday. We found ourselves spending the day filming and the evening editing. Our commitment really showed when we found ourselves editing in the newsroom until 1am with a KFC and a shared hot chocolate to keep us going.

Tuesday morning we arrived at the newsroom looking like a pair of Zombies off a set from a horror film. We still had sonme editing to do and our deadline was extended until wednesday. Once our package was finished, the results were definitely worth it all. Everyone was impressed and we recieved the feedback we wanted. We still have a lot to improve on as we realised the radio mics are on camera so next time we will be sure to clip them onto our interviewees and keep them out of shot. I'm so glad everything went wrong when it did as it has prepared us better for next time!

So take a look at this week's fashion feature and come back for next week's!