Closing Ceremony 12th August

So this is it, the last day of the Olympics, I can't believe how fast it has passed.

This morning we had a meeting to assign jobs to each person for the closing ceremony.

Ryan was the spokesman for the meeting where each member of the team was assigned different roles and tasks for the evening. I was put into a group with Michael Naunman and Pat Boylan and asked to interview the British public about perception of their nation's performance in hosting the Olympic Games.

First stop was Trafalgar Square where we were asked to go down to see if a big screen had been installed so that people could watch the closing ceremony, in hope we could conduct the interviews there. So at around five o'clock, myself and Corey, a photographer, headed down to check it out.

Unfortunately there was no big screen, so we decided to head down to Stratford station where we had agreed to meet Michael and Pat. This was where we found our first problem... Finding anyone with this amount of people was a complete nightmare. It took Corey and I nearly half an hour to search and find them which lost us valuable time.

Another few members of the group had been in contact with me by this point saying that they were also struggling to get in anywhere. The whole of the surrounding area of the Olympic village was closed off to people who did not have tickets for events on that day. We were part of that group and despite trying to convince a few security guards to let us through to the GB house to meet the others, we were unsuccessful.

At around eight, we decided to regroup and think of a different strategy. We had been keeping in contact using a facebook group message via Josh Blessing's iPad and I had also been in contact with Katylnn as she was one of the few who had a working British phone.

We met Josh, Katylnn and supervisor of the trip Suzzie.
Suzzie had heard there was a lighting show near Tower Bridge so we decided to get the tube down there and use it is as a backdrop for a filming.
Travelling around the bridge British people weren't common, it was actually an effort to find anyone that spoke good English. Our target audience for the video was after all: British people. But there were so many different nationalities all celebrating the ending of the biggest show on earth. As you can see by the photos we used a very basic camera to record the first few interviews around the Tower Bridge.


Taylor had asked us to get some footage as well as the interviews we had planned previously, so we slotted into the back of the bar and set up the camera. There was a sense of euphoria in the air, everyone in the bar seemed to be enjoying themselves - singing, dancing and having a good time. We then went to the bar where we could hear people were singing along to Wonderwall by Oasis.

The footage you can see on your left was filmed by Michael whilst myself and Pat asked the questions. I was given the short straw as I had to approach everyone and ask if they would mind being interviewed as the American's thought British people would react better to my accent. All in all it was an amazing night, we had a few problems here and there but were able to overcome them and get the job done.

NBC's coverage of the Olympics, as I have mentioned previously - is delayed by 5 hours. This gave us a lot of time to get home and edit the content we had produced. Sadly we missed the BBC's broadcast of the closing ceremony ourselves but I plan to watch it back on iPlayer tomorrow.