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Lifetime

Lifetime is produced by METRO-TV for C31. 
Our sixth series of Lifetime has just finished its Autumn Season, 2011.

Lifetime returns for the Spring Season - C31 Season No. 72 - from September, 2011

Lifetime's Production Team worked hard to get a wide range of stories and segments filmed for the recent season of 13 shows.

Lifetime's Production Team is headed up by Henry Jansen and Peter Roberts.  
And we would like to welcome back, Marilyn Martyn, who will be producing our Autumn Season of Lifetime.

Lifetime covers stories of broad general interest.  Mostly, our stories visit a place or a person of interest.  If it's a place, we like to feature interviews with people involved in the activities.  Obviously, if it's a person, we interview them and discover interesting things about their lives.

A lot of our stories have been about artistic people and their creations.  We maintain an interest in health and environmental issues.  As we're based in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, our stories are located anywhere between Abbotsford (that marvellous Convent and Arts Precinct) and the Dandenongs or beyond.

During the season, you can view Lifetime on the C31 website - http://www.c31.org.au - [hopefully]

You could get involved!  We're always keen to train people in any aspect of making a TV program. 

If you would like to try some involvement, you could "dip your toe in the water" by coming along on a shoot and perhaps "buddying" - assisting in one of the many tasks involved.

We have a Production Team that works on Lifetime, and have been working to develop our second Production Crew (and we plan for more, of course!)

We like to have a couple of extra people come out with us when we film a story or an interview. 

You might already have experience - that would be great! 

If not, then learn as you go with our experienced crew members.

When we go out filming, we take two Camera Operators, each with a camera.  We take a set of lights which need to be set up and adjusted.  We use clip-on microphones connected to the cameras: again, someone needs to set them up and adjust them for best sound quality.  Normally, our 2 Camera Operators do all of these tasks - but we'd welcome the assistance of a Lighting Operator and of a Sound Person.

If you already have a camera, we'd encourage you to take part in the filming as a Camera Operator.

Our Production Crew will advise on how we approach our story filming for Lifetime.

We also take out with us a Presenter who hosts the story with an intro and with an outro - as well as asking the questions in an interview with a person of interest.  We're always keen to introduce new presenters.

The main need regarding presenting is to have someone able to plan ahead with the story.  That's a kind of Producer role - where someone writes the intro and writes the outro, either before going out filming (depends on how much we know about the story at that stage) - or during the process of learning about the story content while on location and talking with the person of interest.

Ideally, we'd like to take out a Story Producer with us and have someone else as  to speak the intro and outro to camera and to ask the questions - but finding two people to do this is not easy!

As you can see from the above, it would be feasible to be out and about with a Crew of six - but to date we've usually gone out with a Crew of 3 or 4 people.

We rely on a collective effort to find and to choose stories for filming.  If a Presenter knows of a story and can also organize a time and date for the interview plus the Production Crew, then that makes our work more easily done - that Presenter by doing that is working on an aspect of Production Management. - really as a Story Producer.

If you feel capable of doing any of these roles and would like to take on some of it, we'd love to hear from you. 

Contact us through our email address - MetroCTV@yahoo.com.au.

We started our filming work for the year working from a long list of potential stories - from our own knowledge and contacts and also by following up leads from interesting local newspaper articles.

After filming a story, we need to edit it into a usable time-frame for the program which is always divided into 3 segments.  This process involves an Editor who uses computer editing programs to take the best of the story and arrange it ready for viewing.  This process also involves a Story Producer who advises on the best sequences.  When the Editor has also been involved in shooting the story as a member of the Production Crew, this becomes a collective process - and results in an edited story - "ready to go".

Sometimes, a story has so much good content, we use it in 2 of the 3 segments, or occasionally for the whole program, ie 3 segments.

Each segment is of approximately 7 minutes' duration.  If a story doesn't have enough content for seven minutes, we can group it with other short stories to make up a seven minute segment.

As we get closer to the start of a season, we make a selection of the stories already filmed, selected using a consensual process, led by our Program Producer and Production Manager.  At this stage, the program is in the hands of our Compilers.  The end-result is a whole program of approximately 24 minutes' duration (including introductions and credits).