Digital News Production: The "Student Night Club" Story (Researching Ideas)

The "Student Night Club" Story

My group and I set up a long meeting to develop our plans for the News project we're working on. (Previous post on 'selfie' story) 

For our second story we decided to pick the student night club idea. We decided that although the idea is quite premature it would be good to gain permission from possible night clubs to film in that cater towards students.

Each of us decided we needed to email different places, Kate and Sam B. emailed Source Bar and Mojo's Nightclub whereas I emailed Wonderland Nightclub in Maidstone.

I sent a message to the popular student night club, "Wonderland"
to add to our list of possible filming locations.

These are the messages Kate and Sam B. messaged to their respective night clubs on Facebook:

Source Bar

I'm currently studying in my 2nd year at UCA (based in Maidstone Studios) I often go to Source Bar and have gone to many of it's student nights even when it was previously Twisted.
For a recent project at uni we are doing a news report on the best students nights in Kent, with your permission we would like to film possibly half an hour of footage and be in the club approx an hour overall. The other clubs we are hoping to be involve include Tap 'n' Tin in Chatham, Mojo's in Rochester and possibly Wonderland.

Mojos Nightclub

Hey Liam,

I'm currently at my second year at UCA studying television production, and one of the projects i have to do is a news report project. We are focusing our news channel on students and are aiming to do a news report showing the best student nights around Medway/Kent. I was wondering whether we could get an interview from you as well as having permission to film in the club for a short time? We were interested in interviewing you about the whole Frat Friday idea or even filming for one of your Halloween nights, we haven't quite decided yet. But let me know if you would be interested about this and we can give you more information, would help me and my group for our uni project and would help to promote Mojos as well! Let me know what you think. Many thanks, Sam

We decided that since our target audience caters mainly towards students, (many of who live a clubbing lifestyle) it would be beneficial to make an interesting story largely for entertainment purposes. We want to make something that they will be able to relate to and perhaps gain some insight into it. 

For these reasons we will make it quite lighthearted and comical. Importantly it will also give them some useful tips they can learn from, this will help to bring us a closer connection towards our audience. As well as also being factual.

We talked about possible story ideas to focus on that seemed relevant, essentially the kind of things that we would relate to as students. We want it to have a point of conflict that is an obstacle our audiences need to overcome. A simple example of this is money. We could focus on how most students don't have much money so they often have to spend cheaply to make the most of a night out. This is easily relatable to our audiences and relevant like the previous 'selfie' story. 

Story Ideas:

We came up with 3 ideas we could focus on:
- The five people you always meet on a night out: For this idea I thought about list articles such as you see on Buzzfeed as well as viral videos by 'CollegeHumor'. The latter is the type of audience that will be watching our channel. They're funny but most of all, relatable. Everyone of a certain age has seen the type of stereotypes at night clubs such as: the drunk person, the party goer, the lightweight, the shy guy, etc. 

We could film some students who fit into some perceived stereotypes on a night out and base the story around this humorous concept.

Poking fun at these stereotypes is easily relatable to our audience.

- Surviving a night out on a small budget. 
The majority of students that want to go out and experience the nightlife will inevitably not have much money to spend with. This is a really  problem for some students, making this choice quite relevant towards them as well as adding some drama into the proceedings.

A typical student is always looking at ways to save money.

This is an easy way to grab the attention of student audiences. Everyone wants to save money, ESPECIALLY teenagers and young adults! We could include guidelines on how to find the cheapest drinks and even best kebab houses for a cheap takeaway afterwards. The point is to make it humorous but more importantly, Show don't tell! Which means explain it to our audience through visual language rather than talking/writing which is harder to process.

- The best ways to survive a hangover
This story is basically very relatable to every type of person but particularly young people who perhaps have yet to get to grips with recovering easily. We could give research into some useful tips to help people decide what are the best "cures" available such as through food and drinks which are less likely to make you feel ill in the morning.

We could test this out by finding a group of students and filming them before and after a night out. Then we can see how they've recovered in the morning. This could be potentially quite difficult to film though, especially since this largely depends on actuality filming.

At the end of the day our channels main focus is to be entertaining as well as informative towards our target audience. (aged 16-24)