Storm Troopers

Good morning all! I'm writing you from the plush confines of my bedroom, cozy in my jammies and staring at the white madness outside, happily knowing I won't have to set foot in it at all today. That's more than I can say for yesterday; while the majority of Lehigh students were frolicking in the snow and having a blast for their first snow day since 2002, the editorial staff of The Brown and White still had a newspaper to put together. Much to our chagrin, the 20-or-so of us all trudged up through campus to Coppee Hall, amidst the biggest snowstorm since the Blizzard of '96. I could express the rage that I felt while nearly dying on my way to Coppee, but I think I'd run out of profanities, and this is a PG blog.


While the trip to and from Coppee was indeed a pain in the ass (okay, PG-13), once we kick-started press night, we actually had a pretty great time. For starters, we all reveled in our collective misery together, got to order pizzas up to the press room (no small feat considering the roads were non-existent, props to Campus Pizza!) and in keeping theme with the J198 class, used the snow to delve into multimedia.


Shortly before press night started, we got wind of an awesome campus-wide snowball fight occurring on the front lawn of the University Center, just a hop away from Coppee. Having the trusty Zi8 on hand, I sent out our managing editor online, Adrienne Smith, to go get footage of the fight and score some interviews. Plus, she just really wanted to play in the snow. Using the great footage she amassed with even better footage that (Digita)Liz Martinez shot earlier in the day, I proceeded to make a video of Lehigh students on their rare snow day:



I used all the skills I've picked up in J198 so far - notice the audio overlay with the rugby player's interview - plus tacked on a few more tricks. I'm particularly proud of the opening title shot. I was going for the old grainy news reel from the 1930s feel, especially after I found the fantastic "Black Bottom Stomp" by Jelly Roll Morton in the free-use public domain.


I immediately threw up the video once I was done with it, because The B&W is really trying hard this semester to function as an actual newspaper would, adding multimedia like photo slideshows and crude man-on-the-street videos to our Web site as soon as breaking news happens. I really feel like we're making tremendous strides so far, as we've already put up a ton of videos from campus events on the day they've happened. A lot of that is due to the ease of the Zi8 and Windows Movie Maker, and the skills our editors and videographers have picked up from J198 so far. I'm thrilled that we've almost immediately been able to find the link between this class and The B&W, because I know that's what LU's journalism department intended when they first toyed around with the idea of adding Multimedia Reporting to its curriculum.


So while I couldn't fully enjoy Lehigh's first - and likely only, seeing as I'm out of here in a few months - snow day in my college career, it still yielded some great camaraderie between the editors and some great multimedia results.


BONUS VIDEO!


I also forgot to throw up this video earlier this week. For those of you who don't know, I've had a radio show on Lehigh's WLVR for the last three-and-a-half years nostalgically titled The Honker Burger, and it's been an absolute blast. I wanted to show our audience what the WLVR studio was like, so I armed the Zi8 on its tripod during one of our breaks, and just let it record. The actual footage itself is virtually unedited. All I did was some quick titles in the beginning and threw it up on our Facebook fan page about an hour after the show ended. (For the record, we air Monday nights at 8pm, streaming live on WLVR.org.)


Here's the video. If you enjoy the sound of my voice as much as I do, you'll love it. If not, well, shut up.