B-A-N-A-N-A-S

This post is brought to you by a forgotten hit from the days of yore, "Hollaback Girl."

Like the beat that Gwen Stefani was totally in strong agreement with, our most recent trip to the Banana Factory was bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.  If you aren't hip to the Factory, it's basically South Bethlehem's best kept secret. If you have heard of it, then you probably love it. It's an arts and cultural center on Third Street that 28 resident artists, ranging from painters to sculptors to glass blowers, call home. It's got galleries and studios, classes offered for children and adults, and is basically the perfect for our semester-long final project. (Reminder: We're focusing on the revitalization of the arts in South Bethlehem.)

We got to meet some great folks over at the Factory, including artists Doug Wiltraut and Priscilla Rosenberger, who were kind enough to show us their art and explain their creative process to us. We also talked at length with Mark Demko of Arts Quest, the organization in SoBeth that's responsible for duh, the arts, in the Lehigh Valley. He gave us a personal tour of the Factory and will be a vital resource for us going forward.

As for our video, I think it turned out pretty well. Lauren and I worked diligently on writing a script for the piece and editing it over the course of a couple hours in Coppee, and I'm happy that we were on the same page for much, if not all, of the process. I enjoyed bouncing off ideas with her as to where the video should go. We had so much B-roll to use that paring it all down to 1:30 was almost like putting together a puzzle. If I have any criticisms, I think we still have to figure out how to properly record voice overs and interviews. (We didn't use the lapel mic this time around and stuck with just using audio from the Zi8.) But you be the judge: Tell us how it sounds.

Anyway, here's our video. Stay tuned for more details on the final project, and where we take it from here.

Creep City, Literally

For the second map in today's lab, the entire class collaborated on a big map locating all of the registered sex offenders (per Megan's Law) in the Lehigh Valley. The whole collaboration/crowd sourcing thing is really cool, but I think we all would have preferred to map something else out rather than a list of creeps who live a few doors down from us.

As Jeremy noted, we put together a map of all the sex offenders in the Lehigh Valley in something like 15 minutes. Crowd sourcing is a pretty powerful thing. What other kinds of possibilities can you guys see for using something like this?

The map:

View Megan's Law: Registered offenders in Bethlehem, PA in a larger map

Mapping It Out

Today in J198, we're learning how to effectively use Google Maps to tell a story. Our assignment is simple: We need to create two custom maps. The first one, which I've included below, is a map of nearby places for Lehigh students to go when they're bored or want to get away from the usual bar scene in South Bethlehem. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, but still, it can get a little monotonous sometimes.) As a Lehigh Valley resident all my life, I've explored every nook and cranny the area has to offer, so making this map was a piece of cake. Here are 10 interesting places ranging from baseball stadiums (Go Pigs!) to drive-in movie theaters to check out.

View Hey Lehigh students: What's going on in the LV? in a larger map

Everyone's A Critic

Okay, fellow J198 students, say it with me now: "I swear I'll stick to my schedule, I swear I'll stick to my schedule, I swear I'll stick to my schedule..."

It's hard to consistently blog for this class, especially after being thrown off with the whole spring break thing a few weeks ago. But I promised myself I wouldn't falter this week, which is why I'm blogging close to midnight, fighting off sleep and/or that appealing Curb Your Enthusiasm rerun on HBO. I've got a job at hand, dammit! Blog I must!

On Monday we had an incredibly useful session in which we watched each other's latest TV videos and offered up comments and criticisms -- with love, of course. We critiqued everything from narration to direction to lighting choices, and I think we found that almost all of it was beneficial. I was nervous to see what everyone had to say about our video, which I sort of became married to after completing it. 

I was relieved when mostly all the comments about the video were positive, but the ones that weren't were still constructive. Among the better criticisms we got:

• Framing of the shots could have been better, particularly with the heads of a couple interviewees being cut off. Must be more steady when operating the camera.
• The lighting wasn't great. Find a better location for interviews, perhaps with more natural light.
• Voiceover audio wasn't great either. Try out the lapel mic, play around with recording spaces.

Admittedly, I hadn't even noticed that the cut-off heads were so prominent until I watched the video on the class's big screen in horror. Now it's glaring. But that's one thing we'll always remember to avoid from here on out - all made possible because of other people's criticisms. What a great concept!

The Need for Seed

Long time no blog, eh? Good to be back to the grind, though I certainly wouldn't mind still being in the Bahamas for Spring Break.


Yesterday we had a special J198 class, which found Jeremy bringing back some of his newly acquired tools and tricks from the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin. I'm still jealous. He attended many panels on new journalism and social media innovations, and showed us some of the coolest things he found, including Augmented Reality.


But I was immediately hooked when Jeremy started talking about AOL's Seed. The Web site in a nutshell:

SEED assigns, buys and distributes work for all of AOL's properties: more than 80 of the Web's most highly trafficked and respected websites, including the world's leading sites for music, style, TV, tech and more. [link]

Consider me not only impressed by what SEED is doing, but a little obsessed. This is the perfect opportunity for freelancers, especially college journalists who are looking to make a couple extra bucks a week writing. I've been looking all over SEED for potential stories I can write, particularly in the Arts and Entertainment Section. I could make $10 writing about a song in a television commercial, or $25 for a short piece on the Latin Grammys. This is an amazing concept. 


I graduate in May. I have no idea what I'm doing after college yet. If it takes me longer than expected to get a job, freelancing via SEED could be the perfect buffer for me to make some money while getting reputable clips and continuing to build my resume. That sounds pretty great to me. 

I Want My J198 TV

TV News Anchor: What goes on behind the scenes of making a minute-and-a-half long TV news spot? Amateur TV reporter Andrew Daniels has this and more.


Reporting from my bedroom a mere five minutes after waking up, this is Andrew Daniels for J198.


Last week we were given the assignment of crafting a TV news spot, no longer or shorter than 1:30, of an event happening off campus. The three of us ultimately decided to do a spotlight on the Bobby McFerrin vocal workshop that happened Sunday afternoon at Zoellner. While the workshop was technically on Lehigh's campus, it still had plenty to do with the theme of our final project, which will most likely be a look into the revitalization of arts in South Bethlehem. So Bobby fit.


Opeyemi got some brilliant footage in some less-than-subtle ways Sunday afternoon, which is hilariously documented on her blog. While next time we should probably clear permission to record video at a high profile event like this, our cunning reporter got the story, and we couldn't have made the final product without her work. (Wait for the moment where Bobby himself comes right in front of the camera and sings to it. Priceless.) Lauren also was lucky enough to attend Bobby's concert at Zoellner later that night, and got great footage and interviews with enthusiastic members of the audience.


I was in charge of editing, which is fast becoming my favorite pastime. I don't even consider editing these videos as work, because I enjoy doing it so much, but I did spend close to three hours yesterday putting the whole thing together. Editing for a TV news spot is vastly different from what we've done in the past for the Web, and I might even enjoy it more because of the "rules" we have to play by.


Given the time constriction, the piece had to be short, engaging and have a logical story structure. My two partners got close to 40 minutes / 3GB worth of video, so I had to carefully pick which scenes to include in the report. There was so much I had to cut out, but it leaves us with some great B-roll footage if we decide to incorporate Bobby into our final project. I had to watch several news reports to get the feel for how these editors transition between scenes. Often, they use hard cuts and very little effects to move between footage. So you'll see that in this video. I also noticed their use of natural background noise from B-roll, so I left a lot of sound in, which is good, because hey, it was a workshop about sound.


Lastly, we come to voiceovers. I wrote a script yesterday to guide the story along through voiceovers, which I intended for Opeyemi to read. She originally recorded the VO's for this piece yesterday using the lapel microphone, but when I came back to my house to edit, the sound from the lapel was grainy, distant and from the sounds of it, recorded in mono. I'm not sure if we didn't use the mic properly, but we basically couldn't use these VO's without seriously jeopardizing the natural flow of the piece. So I recorded the VO's myself in the traditional method sans lapel mic, and the results turned out fine. (Though I had to re-read the script several times until I finally became happy with the sound of my voice. Ugh. I hate hearing myself talk sometimes.)


I also had my friend walk with me to Zoellner, which is a block away from my house, so he could shoot my field outro. This should have theoretically taken 30 seconds, but it took us about 15 minutes to get the decent shot I wanted. We tried all sorts of places from different distances for a visually pleasing background, but in the end, I chose a tight shot of me in front of one of Zoellner's pillars where I "signed off" from the report. I also pledge to wear my cheap wayfarer sunglasses every time I'm on camera, because I'm cool like that.


So enjoy the video above, audience. This is by far my favorite of the projects we've done so far, and the video I'm most proud of. I can't thank Lauren and Opeyemi enough. We're really gelling as a team right now, and I hope that we continue to as the semester goes on.