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.

We were told to watch this video story for class. While watching it, I suddenly realized that I didn’t care about it one way or the other. This video failed to illicit any emotional response from me at all. I’m not sure why; the concept of the recent bee die-offs is fascinating, it’s just this particular examination of it was boring.  I think that the angle on the whole foreclosure crisis is what got me. I’m really, really tired of hearing about it. A lot of the people affected by this, I don’t feel sorry for; they knowingly bought houses with shitty loan terms, many times buying huge houses they didn’t need. If anything, maybe this will convince people to live simpler.

As far as motion goes, with the exception of the bees there is very little. Most of the video consists of stand up interviews, or the beekeeper in question walking from one place to another. This subject matter would have been better as an audio slideshow, I think.

I think the only people that are going to want to see this are people who really love or hate bees. Maybe people in Florida interested in the housing foreclosure crisis, but I can’t imagine anyone else.

We had to watch the Pioneer of the Lower Ninth Ward video for class. I enjoyed watching this video, if you can say you “enjoy” watching such a tale of woe and government ineptitude. I was very surprised how effective stationary shots of landscape could be. I guess it was because it was so empty and desolate.

The sequences the videographer shot were effective, however the one of the woman walking down the street to her nearest neighbor was a little strained. It seemed awfully staged, which is really the only blemish on an otherwise excellent piece.

The storytelling itself was very powerful. I didn’t know that the Ninth Ward in New Orleans was still so bad off. The shot of the woman watching the television report on the government’s failed “Road Home” program provided very interesting contrast.

I hope to at some point produce a piece half as good as this one.

My ex-girlfriend Siobhan tipped me off to this the other day. Barnes and Noble came in and did a little video piece on the UMASS-Amherst Science Fiction Society that went directly to their website front page.

I tried to embed the video, but Barnes and Noble’s silly proprietary video player doesn’t want to play nice and embed in WordPress. Try clicking here instead.

I could see this becoming something that we could do, using the training that we’re getting in class. There’s clearly shot sequences, a little bit of natural sound, and interviews as well.

It’s good to see that if not all of us go into actual journalism, there’s still options open.

In the NT Physics building, David McNeil works with a multi-million dollar machine called a femtosecond laser. The laser uses pulses of light – lasting a fraction of a second, hence the name – to conduct various scientific tests.

McNeil hopes, through his research, to discover new ways of manipulating light and energy, and using that to create new, faster computer technology.

Click here to view the slideshow. 

The beam itself is normally invisible to the naked eye, but was made visible in the photos by pouring liquid nitrogen around the laser apparatus. Liquid nitrogen has an extremely low boiling point, and evaporates almost instantly on contact with anything. The fog created allows the beam to be seen.

I greatly enjoyed making this slideshow. I love covering science topics, ever since I was in 2320 back in 2006. Very rarely do you get to see science in the news, at least in multimedia; you normally see more arts and life focused pieces.

I’m not exactly sure what is wrong with the audio; maybe I edited it incorrectly. Whatever shortcomings this presentation had will be addressed in the next one.

I was really excited after listening to Aaron Chimble talk. This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to do for not just the internship I’m going out for, but for my first job. I admit, I was more fascinated with his equipment than anything else. I’m still curious as to whether or not his camera records to a video tape or to some sort of memory card.

All in all it was a very fascinating presentation, I just had one gripe with it. From looking at his website, it seems he only rarely gets to cover big stuff. Most of his stories are local, human interest stuff. It would be interesting to see more mobile journalists covering hard spot news.

The first part of our assignment told us two choose of the multimedia examples given on the Foust website, and critique them. I chose the first two examples, not because they were the first two I saw, but out of all of them they were the most interesting.

The first was the MPR Budget Balancer from Minnesota Public Radio’s site.  This definitely evoked memories of playing SimCity back in the day, balancing budgets and such. I kept waiting for a little black and white photo of Wil Wright to pop up saying “You can’t cut our funding! You will regret this!”

The graphics were very basic, seeing as how the entirety of the experience is fiddling with numbers. There was no audio, either, but once again it wasn’t needed.

Every change comes with a detailed explanation of the consequences of the funding change. I wish there could have been greater granularity when making changes, but I understand that this is a radio station, and not a professional games developer.
I played around with it for a good 15 minutes, which is a little above average for your usual internet time waster.

My only real problems with it were a lack of more engaging visuals, and the general ease of the game. Photos detailing my changes would be interesting. It seemed a little too easy to not only balance the budget, but create a surplus. Granted, I might have turned Minnesota into a gambling haven while doing so, but still… if it’s this easy to balance a budget, maybe I’m in the wrong business.

The second site I looked at was the BBC’s Supervolcano game.  This site immediately drew my attention due to the Science and Nature content, which is totally my bag. After playing a few rounds of the game, however, I learned one thing; I hope a Supervolcano never erupts in Texas.

I was familiar with the concept of the Supervolcano; I had watched a documentary on what would happen if Yellowstone National park erupted on a massive scale. The game depicted an imaginary volcano destroying an imaginary area. It was a lot less apocalyptic than the documentary the site was made to complement.

The site also included several other features in addition to the game, including a photo gallery from the documentary, articles about concepts in the documentary, and an article about the “science of natural disasters.” The articles were well written, informative, and they explained the concepts in a way that was easy to understand but not condescending.

The best part of the site was, for me, the Supervolcano game itself. The graphics for the game didn’t exactly blow me away, but once again this is a website, not a video game. The audio for the game was surprisingly engaging. However, completely unlike the little budget balancing game, I supremely sucked at it. Under my command, 274,473 people are feared dead in the eruption. Whoops.

The second part of the assignment asked us to find a story that would work well as a multimedia story, according to the  News Videographer Blog’s criteria. I picked a story that fell under the “Something people just want to see” heading. This particular story was close to my heart, being a fan of video games. The story is about a rest home using the Nintendo Wii as not just a diversion, but a therapy tool. The story combines two things that people go crazy over: cute old people, and video games. It would make for good audio to hear old people talk about playing the video games, with the sound from the games in the background. Given how the Wii is played, there is great movement to record as well. A slideshow would work as well, as long as you got the old people in poses while playing the games.

So we watched this video in the last class, and I remember walking away at the end not feeling anything. Well, maybe I was thinking “Gee, that would be an awesome trailer for a movie.”

I don’t think this is so much a function of the video itself, as it is how desensitized I am to violence personally. The climax of the video, where the poor man gets his skull ventilated for him courtesy of some random terrorist, is no more gruesome than my last round of Gears of War, Bioshock, or my own current personal favorite, Cortex Command(go download it, now!)

As far as whether or not we should be showing this kind of thing on American television… yes, yes, a thousand times yes. This violence is partially a product of the chaos Western involvement has brought on these people.  This is the climate we’ve helped to create.  Regardless of your political leanings, you need to see this. If you’re against the war, you need to see it and then show as many people as you can. If you’re in support of the war… sit down, watch it, and ask yourself: is all of this worth it?