College of Production Roundup: Writing for online and Pobol y Cwm

Hello I’m Paul Buller, editor of the BBC College of Production (CoP) website.

CoP is a free online resource for anyone working or wanting to work in TV, radio and online broadcast. The site is packed full of videos, podcasts and articles containing advice, tips and case studies from productions and people working right across the broadcast industry.

Making waves behind bars from the CoP website

This week the team from Wales’ most popular TV drama Pobol y Cwm talk about how they’ve used the online world to bring the soap to a whole new audience and with quite some success in the CoP Show podcast.

They talk about the challenges of taking a well-loved brand to a younger audience from getting the look and feel right to the differences between filming for the web compared to the linear television production of the main soap.

They discuss the partnership between S4C and BBC Wales and the logistics of working on bilingual website and film production in creating their spin off PYC.

How to do things well online is something more and more people in the broadcast industry are having to learn. So we got together three experts in their field to bring you some top advice on how to write for online.

Our panel outlined how writers have to be disciplined in order to shape their own content more effectively. It’s an interesting lesson in transferring writing skills to a new platform.

Finally, innovation abounds in this fascinating article on the prison radio service that has picked up no less than ten coveted Sony awards. It’s a unique project, and it’s brilliant.

Enjoy.

Paul Buller is editor of the BBC College of Production website.