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.