Tuesday 24 November 2009

Just Dance!

I started dancing when I was about 6 years old. I have been trained in Disco, Freestyle, Latin American, Ballroom and Cheerleading. When I was about 13 I moved onto Street Dance, which I found was definitely my favourite style of dancing. But unfortunately I had to give up dancing at 16 because of an injury I'd suffered during the City Athletic Championships.
I started getting back into keeping fit around 4 motnsh ago when I joined my local gym. I was purely using it to tone up and start to look healthier. I wasn't really interested in attendign any classes and stuff...I just did my own thing. However 4 weeks ago I found out about a Street Dance class held at the gym, which was just awesome. So I went along and I've been going twice a week since.
It turned out that it wasn't just Street he was teaching, but also breakdance and popping - two styles of dance that I have always wanetd to learn! Anyway
I am now helping to teach the lessons, which is just such a cool experience, and my dance teacher has invited me to be in his 'crew' (haha it sounds so 'down with the hood') and hopefully I'll be going to London next may to compete in a dance off competition at the O2 Arena.
After my injury I never thought I'd ever get back into dancing, but now I don't think I've ever enjoyed it so much.
At the moment I'm trying to master a one handed back flip, and although Ali says its easy, I think I'm gonna have to get some muscles before thats EVER going to happen!

WINOL goes live...

Last weeks edition of WINOL was our first proper launch of the website as a fully functioning student journalism website.

I was asked to be the presenter for the live bullitin, which was an absolutely great opportunity, however, I'm not going to lie, I was absolutely crapping my pants.

I felt like I received a lot of support from my fellow students during the preparation for the live bullitin, especially from James, Richard and Cliff. Also Kay Oliver was an absolutely priceless source of knowledge and advice for me. She went through my questions for the live interview with me and showed me how I should present myself infront of the camera in terms of posture and where my hands should be etc. They seem like insignificant details now retrospectively, btu having that extra bit of help was very comforting. Also Claire, who had been the presenter for the two dummy run weeks gave me some encouragement and advice about what she had experienced whilst doing it.

Now, watching it back I can see so many things I could have improved on. For example, I stuttered a lot, but unfortunately that couldn't really be helped because it was down to nerves. Also, I didn't realise at the time that I'd said "ok" after every question in the interview, and thats definitely something I wouldn't do again because it came across as if I were saying "yeah ok whatever". When in actual fact the reason I was probably saying it was because it was extremely difficult to concentrate on the interview with Leane and others in the gallery constantly talking to me through my ear piece. They say that women can multi-task - it's not true!

The only thing that really went wrong was right at the end when I sign off, I couldn't see the auto-cue because it started so much later than it was supposed to and I had to quickly refer to my script. However I should possibly have been following my script along with the autocue the whole time and that would probably have provided a quicker fall back plan, but unfrotunately there is a gap where I realise I need to be speaking because Leane was saying "Cue Catherine"...and I kind of paniked. Although I'm not sure how obvious that is to others when they watch it.

In terms of features, they seem to be posted up days after the bullitin goes live, which is fair enough because I understand that the production team is VERY busy. But this concerns me for next semester when the third years will no longer be working with us and we will have to run the show on our own.

I'm definitley looking foward to what this week has to offer, however I feel my input for fashion this week won't be as strong as it previously has been purely because the exciting interesting stuff I have booked is in the weeks to come.