Week 2: Haiti and Headaches

For our lab assignment this week, we were given the task of venturing out on Lehigh's campus, finding an unknowing interview subject, and bombarding them with a few questions on a selected topic. I picked the very relevant Haiti crisis, and what that particular student is doing/has done to help Haitians in their time of peril. The goal was to shoot a few minutes of interview footage using the "man on the street" technique, come back to Coppee and splice it together using some of the Movie Maker skills we acquired in Monday's lecture. I had my always enthusiastic partner, Liz Martinez, help me out again. She found an old friend outside of Linderman Library named Dominique, who was more than willing to answer a few questions for each of us. I filmed Liz ask Dom about the economy, and Liz filmed me ask her about Haiti.

We had a few problems (the "headaches" in the blog title), the first of which happened when we were shooting our introductions. We didn't realize that you can't shoot subjects in portrait mode on the Zi8 from very far away, or else it comes out blurry. My original introduction was shot outside of Coppee on a park bench, but when we got back to the lab to cut the video up, it indeed turned out to be blurry. Thus the re-shoot of the introduction, which finds me wearing sunglasses inside to match the rest of the video. I am basically Jack Nicholson.

Anyway, the first assignment was to produce an unedited version of our interview, save for a title bar to introduce the subject and a few credits at the end. That's what you'll see here. One of the biggest headaches we encountered was the complications with sound when filming outside. Much of the audio is obstructed by the sound of the wind and because Liz probably shot a few feet too far away, so when Dom talks, it's rather hard to hear her. Still, you get the point:

Next, we had to split up the interview so that text-based transitions replaced my questions:

Lastly, I had to add a fade transition after my introduction into the first question, to complete the grab-bag of skills we learned. (I also added one after the last question into the credits, just for fun, and because it was a bit choppy the way it ends in the first and second interviews.)

Another bit of trouble we ran into was the long load time it took to convert the clips into Prism after dumping the original cameras from the files on to the computer. I guess it was more like a source of frustration. It slowed Liz and I down considerably, and these were only two minute videos, so I can only imagine how long it will take when we convert longer videos.

Anyway, I shouldn't be complaining. Things went relatively smooth compared to some of the video ills that plagued other groups, so I'll be content with what we came up with. The videos we shot may be crude, but the whole exercise was to apply what we learned a few days ago, and I think I accomplished that. Props to Liz, Dom and my wicked sunglasses for being great sports today.

Thoughts on the Looming Group Project

With our second lab scheduled for later this afternoon, I can't help but keep thinking about our in-depth, semester-long project. It's a large reason why I was anxious to take the J198 plunge as a senior; the idea of putting together a group reporting project with Web components is incredibly challenging but oh-so-enticing. My group and I haven't even begun to discuss what our main topic will be yet, but I've been thinking about some points of interest since last semester. Can't wait to dive in...

For my Online Journalism class, I've been doing quite a bit of reading (in the comfort of my bedroom, of course) on the foundations of online news, and whether or not it's reached its potential yet. In this 2005 article, Paul looked back at a 1995 forum at the Poynter Institute that outlined some of the things that newspapers were not providing then that they thought online papers would be able to provide in the future. In the 2005 ten-year retrospective, Paul looked back at some those "promises" (including hyperlinking, interactivity, the 'limitless newshole' and new relationships between words and graphics) and weighed in on how well she thought the news media had taken advantage of them.

I've made it a habit to think about both of these classes simultaneously. I wanted to blog about some of the realizations of these promises, and how they apply to the big group reporting project. I drew inspiration from an executive producer of Web content, Teresa Moore, for a Tampa Bay station, who said in '05 that the station streams "unedited videos along with stories that ran on our air with shorter soundbites. For example, we'll post whole interviews online or show whole press conferences live that won't make it on air." This is much more common on news sites today than it was five years ago, and it's something I envision for our group project's Web site.

Why not give readers as much complementary material as we can? If I were interested in a particular topic -- let's say, poverty and homelessness in the South Side, for example -- I'd be inclined to watch full interviews with the homeless in addition to reading the main feature story. Of course I realize that there's only so much bandwidth allotted for us, and too much information might verge on overkill, but there are so many options to work with here - with video, and social networking, and picture slideshows, to name but a few -- that I'm getting excited for all we can do.

Week 1

Welcome to The Multimedia Reporting Experience! I couldn't think of a better name for the blog, but it pretty much describes the gist of it. I'll be blogging through my experiences as a student in Lehigh's Journalism 198 class, naturally called Multimedia Reporting, from the peaks to the pits of it all. Enjoy.

My first entry corresponds with our first week in class, in which we learned how to use our dandy new Kodak Zi8 video cameras. These are powerful little machines, and remarkably simple for anyone to use. Our first assignment was to shoot short videos of each other, experiment with Windows Movie Maker and upload the resulting product to our YouTube accounts.

Here's the first video I shot of fellow journalism student and Brown and White colleague Liz Martinez.



For the second part of the assignment, I had to edit the original clip above into one question.



Admittedly, I've got quite a bit of experience editing videos through my past work in school and through internships. However, there's a catch -- I've only ever used Apple's iMovie. I'm not used to Movie Maker yet, but I'm confident that I'll be able to master it pretty quickly.

Anyway, that's it for this week. I can't wait to dive into the rest of the semester. I see great things happening with the course.