Our final project was on the Bare Your Soles march that happened in early April. From the start, I was picked as “the video guy,” an assignment I was more than happy with. I’m not that great of a photographer, but from the minute I got my hands on the video camera I was in love. One of the big reasons I loved this class was I’m a huge nerd for gadgetry; the digital voice recorders, the various microphones, all of it. If I could find a job in journalism that centered around using and maintaining the equipment, I’d jump on it.
The “planning” stage was mostly taken care of by Justin; he told me where to show up with the camera, and I did. Justin did a lot of work on this project, including actually getting to know the people organizing the march. While he knew names and contact information, I only knew the two-dimensional characters seen through a viewfinder(leader girl, dreadlock guy, beard guy, accordion guy, blond hippie chick). Justin also operated under the assumption that I was going to be angry with him for doing too much work; obviously he underestimated my love of laziness.
The first thing we did was videotape the drum circle and stand up(more like sit down) interview. This was the first time I did something real with the camera that wasn’t people at the bus stop, or myself wandering through the GAB talking to myself. I went over the basics of video shooting in my head while setting up. The interview itself went well enough, if a bit dry. The wireless mic (yes, we got to use the wireless mic, take that other classmates!) acted up whenever the girl would move, causing us to lose several good quotes. Another thing is that the receiver for the wireless mic made the camera look like a spaceship, or the head of a transformer.
After the interview we shot some b-roll of the “drum circle.” I put the quotation marks there because there weren’t many drums, and it was more of a semi-circle to be honest. While I applaud the Seeds of Change people for their activism, their musical skills are lacking. This normally wouldn’t really be an issue, but it made for really, really terrible audio. As nice as Blond Hippie Chick was, she might be the most tone-deaf human being on the face of God’s blue earth. I swear to Heaven if I had to listen to her mangled warblings of “Earth Angel” for a minute more, I was going to bludgeon her to death with the metal end of the tripod.
Covering the march itself was one of the most fun, fascinating, and challenging things I’ve done as a journalist. I woke up at ****’o'clock in the morning to meet Justin and Richard at the GAB, before heading down Hickory to videotape the street sweepers. While taping, I mentally postulated stealing a shopping cart, hopping in it with the camera, and having Justin pull me along using it as a makeshift dolly. Not wanting to appear soft, I trudged along.
Between taping the sweeping and the beginning of the march, we sat outside the Language building and waited. Some of Denton’s homeless gathered there as well to prepare for the march. As Richard interviewed some of them, I realized why these people were as bad off as they were. Some had just fallen on hard times, while others were simply too mentally unbalanced to hold down jobs. This chilled me to the bone. My parents sacrificed a lot in my childhood to keep a roof over me and my sister’s heads, and food on the table. There’ve been times here in Denton where I didn’t have money for both food and rent. This project touched on a great fear of mine, and that will probably stick with me more than anything else.
At some point during the waiting, Justin and Richard ditched me and the equipment to go get coffee from 7-Eleven. Normally I wouldn’t mind(I hate coffee anyway), but Creepass found me. Creepass was the name I assigned to this strange indigent Denton man in a long black trenchcoat and doo-rag, who looked and smelled like he hasn’t seen the inside of a shower in far too long. His attempts at socializing with me came off as forced and weird, and he leered at the camera equipment a little too much. He obviously didn’t know that I would defend the gear with all the fat redneck fervor I could muster, since it is probably worth more than the sum of my organs and tissues on the black market. Almost on cue, though, a Denton bike cop rode in Creepass’s direction, causing him to trot away to talk to them. The way he through his head down, resigned to his fate, made me think that being accosted by police officers wasn’t new to him.
Soon after Justin and Richard returned, more students and homeless started gathering around the Language building. At this point I thought of something else regarding the homeless. How did they feel about the itinerant assistance provided by college kids? What percentage of these people would continue their philanthropy after graduation, and what percentage would abandon it and go on purely serving their own needs? For some of these people it seemed like a hollow gesture; they’d show up, look pretty, take pictures with their friends on their camera phones, do a little bit of work and then head back to their dorm room or upscale student apartment, financed by mail by their parents. Meanwhile, the homeless of Denton live day-by-day, every day, maybe for the rest of their lives.
At this point I’d like to say that walking around with a video camera makes me feel really cool. While other chumps walk around with camera phones and little handheld camcorders, I stand tall and proud with my big, professional video camera, my weapon of choice. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about this, but I had no time for a psychological evaluation; the march was starting.
Taping the actual march was both exhausting and monotonous. There’s really not a whole lot you can do visually with a march, given the restraints we were under. Just various shots of people walking from different vantage points. In addition to having to carry the camera and tripod, Justin saddled me with a backpack full of photography odds and ends. 20% of this time was actually spent taping the march, the other 80% consisted of me running alongside the marchers to keep up, while toting the camera, tripod, and backpack, all the while trying to keep the headphones on my head and my pants from falling down. One of the marchers took pity on me and asked if she could carry the tripod for me; I respectfully declined the offer. I worried that my labored, fat guy breathing would be heard on the tape, a worry that later proved unfounded during editing.
When the march ended at the square, a food line had already been set up and was waiting. I was more than eager to chuck the camera aside and stuff my face, but I waited until I was sure Justin and Richard went as well, to lessen the shame I felt eating food that was ostensibly provided for the homeless. By the time I got a plate full of pizza and cookies, though, I really didn’t care. Over the din of a local rock band, we taped one last stand up before heading back to the GAB.
The editing process was fairly painless, just long. We knocked the lion’s share of it out in one Friday evening, but it took much longer than I anticipated. We started editing around 5PM, and we didn’t get out until 9 or so. I was surprised at how much time cutting sequences together ate up.
One thing I would like to point out here is that on the surface it may appear that Richard didn’t contribute much, but what he did get done pushed us over the top. He was the Jason Witten to Justin and I’s Marion Barber and Julius Jones. He may not have carried the ball as much as we did, but he came through when we needed him and got us much-needed yardage in the clutch.
As far as the Flash thing went, I putzed around with it for a bit before poking it with a stick and giving up. I would have loved to had more class time to play with Flash but at the time my concerns were elsewhere, and it had been a few semesters since my furtive affairs with Dreamweaver in Newspaper Design and Computer Applications in Journalism.
All in all, the final was one of my favorite things I’ve done in journalism so far. If this is the kind of stuff I’m going to be doing in Victoria, then I’m really looking forward to it.
