I’m not sure if anyone else has figured this out yet, but vacation days are awesome.
As I type this, I have been off from work for a solid week and still have a few days to go. I knew this vacation was going to be solid when I got to the airport after working all night, sat down at my gate and saw this:
That’s a Five Guys if you can’t quite make it out through the greenery. And yes, a cheeseburger at 9:30 a.m. is always a great decision. After landing in Naples, Fla., I spent six days doing this:
And some of this:
Whenever I go to the beach I always try to get out to the shore for at least one sunrise. Since I live on the East Coast that’s the only way to see the combination of sun and ocean. On this trip though, I was on the Gulf side of Florida, meaning I could hang out with the sun on a more agreeable schedule. Here’s my half-effort attempt at time-lapsing the sunset:
I also took a short drive up to Ft. Myers to see a Single-A baseball game between the Ft. Myers Miracle and the Palm Beach Cardinals:
I’m spending the rest of my time off back home (avoided using the term “staycation” there, you’re welcome). That means two Washington Nationals games and a little bit of this:
Oh, and some writing too. Updates on that sometime soon.
I have been sick for a week now, which is extremely rare for me. In fact, the last time I can remember feeling like this was years ago, during my last semester of grad school, when I was sick for roughly 1,871,874 consecutive days.
OK, it was more like three weeks, but it certainly felt like forever. It was a busy time — I was working basically full-time in our Capital News Service television bureau, taking a class on Monday nights and also working a part-time job on Saturdays.
I got sick just before Spring Break, which wasn’t really a break for those of us in the bureau. Instead, part of our experience was taking that time to do a long-form package, one we could spend an entire week on. My story was about a proposed housing development on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that critics said would greatly harm the nearby Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
I took my sick self to the statehouse in Annapolis, where I interviewed state lawmakers and representatives from environmental groups. Then it was off to the Eastern Shore towns of Easton and Cambridge where I spent a few days working on the story.
I remember getting to my hotel the first day and going for a meal at the Denny’s next door before passing out early in the afternoon. I was still holding out hope that somehow a little extra sleep was going to get rid of the sickness before I really got to work the following morning. It didn’t.
The next day I interviewed the mayor of the town where the development was going and also talked to a ranger at the wildlife refuge. Then I did exactly what any doctor would tell you to do when you’re already sick — I spent an entire windy day outside at the refuge with temperatures in the 20s.
Content-wise, I think the story turned out pretty well. Even my narration track convincingly hides how I was feeling, though I remember the first few takes being rejected by our bureau director. Apparently sounding like I was in a coma or had just woken up in the middle of the night were not acceptable.
Fortunately for you, I actually have a tape of this entire show, so you can see my exquisite anchoring skillz along with the story. I’ll even leave in the tease after the story, so you can see me totally mistime how long Aundrea’s part of the script is and turn to the camera way way way early. Enjoy:
In case you’re interested, in 2007 the state purchased more than two-thirds of the land from the developer, who cut the number of houses in the project by 75 percent and contributed about $2 million for restoration efforts.
I also eventually got better. All it took was deciding I was actually going to visit a doctor. I woke up the next day completely fine.
When I was in grad school at the University of Maryland, the women’s basketball team won the national championship.
I happened to be basically working full-time reporting for our campus news station that semester, and given my interest in sports was assigned to cover all things Lady Terps.
When the team made the Final Four in Boston, my roommate Jon and I were pretty close to heading up to cover the event. All we had to do was get media passes so we could get inside the arena, and we would have been in a car to Massachusetts. Well, the NCAA has some ridiculous procedures, and after hours and hours of making phone calls we figured out it wasn’t going to happen.
So I did the next best thing, and found an on-campus viewing party that was being held in the movie theater inside the student center. It ended up being probably the best story I did all semester, and though you don’t see it in this video, was followed by my sprinting downtown to cover the resulting riots.
Since I anchored the show this was in, it doesn’t have the “in College Park, CJH, Maryland Newsline” at the end. I mentioned the prospect of this team turning into a dynasty since all five starters returned the following year. Well, while they remained competitive, things didn’t turn out so well. The next three years went like this:
-Lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament -Lost in the Elite Eight -Lost in the Elite Eight
During my junior and senior years of college, I was the president (mainly by default) of our school’s film club.
That meant running a lot of meetings that didn’t accomplish anything and eventually heading up the task of putting on the first- and second-ever student film festivals.
The first year was tough, as is any event you’re trying to create out of nothing. The club wasn’t very big, and there were more film-watching enthusiasts than filmmakers in the crowd.
As the event approached, it was clear we weren’t going to have many entries at all. So, given that I had a camera and a vested interest in not totally embarrassing ourselves, I walked around our campus for an hour and came up with a project.
I really didn’t know what I was doing when I started, but sort of figured it out as I went along. It’s basically a trip around the Susquehanna University campus using common sights from different areas or perspectives as a way to move from one place to the other.
It’s probably easier to follow if you went to the school, but even those who have never been to Selinsgrove can somewhat keep up. Some of the transitions work better than others — banners using the school logo and signs on buildings look pretty good, lightpoles not so much.
I’m continuing the quest of sharing videos on days I typically haven’t been posting new content.
If you missed the one from last week, check it out here. Also remember you can click the labels at the bottom of posts for similar content — in this case “video.”
This project is one that makes me laugh every time I watch it, even though I’m sure I’ve seen it roughly 2,381 times. I made it for this really amazing class I took in college called Film & Politics. Basically we used films with political themes (All The President’s Men, The China Syndrome, The Manchurian Candidate, Black Hawk Down, etc.) instead of a textbook to drive discussion and papers.
The final exam was one I knew I was going to get an A on as soon as I saw it: Make a trailer for your own political film (or write some sort of detailed summary of your plot).
As a communications major who already spent a good deal of time at that school in front of video equipment, there was nothing I liked seeing more in other departments than the opportunity to make a video. The production value alone on my projects I’m sure earned me high grades, but I also enjoyed the opportunity to share those skills with my classmates (in this case in the political science department).
I have to give great credit to my actors, MB, who is playing an intrepid reporter out to uncover a big conspiracy, and the maniacal Jason, a vice president hellbent on taking over the Oval Office.
Jason, who lived in my suite and was also in the class, had an amazing project we had to abandon because of technical issues. His idea was to do a sequel for Happy Gilmore, where Happy rides the momentum of his golf fame into a run for Senate. It would have been epic.
My brother reminded me the other day that I (a)recently figured out how to embed my own video player here and (b)have a bunch of old video projects on my hard drive.
So, given that I rarely post new entries early in the week, I’m going to change that by putting up some of those videos.
Some of them had specific purposes — news packages, class assignments — but many were made either for the sake of learning new things about shooting or editing, or because someone said, “Hey, let’s make a video.”
I’m starting things off this week with a video called “Literary Chase” that Pat and I made somewhere around 2003. It’s a pretty straightforward story that includes some (hopefully) neat visual effects I wanted to try out. Enjoy:
I have done a lot of video projects in the past, most of which have had a very concrete purpose.
Today, I have one for you that really was meant to be nothing more than learning more about ways to embed video on this site without having to use YouTube.
After work on Thursday I went down to the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., to shoot some video of the cherry blossom trees. On the way there I grabbed some shots of the Capitol, White House, Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.
I didn’t spend a ton of time editing the montage, and did it before creating the background music, so it’s far from my best work. I also intended the music to be more in the “soothing” category than “ominous” (my apologies to anyone with actual musical training).
But the overall result could pass as a film school piece about the possible government shutdown.
What do you think? Do we like this player? More video on the site? Step away from the piano?
Walking into a baseball stadium yesterday with temperatures around 40 degrees didn’t scream “spring,” but the fact that I was there for Opening Day baseball said otherwise.
For the second consecutive year, I saw the Washington Nationals open their season along with my brother Pat. For those of you who don’t know him, he looks like this:
It’s possible that’s not the most representative picture. Lucky for him, this year our mom was around for the game too:
Oh, and I guess I was there:
The weather was far from ideal. At one point I had to resort to taking my arms out of the sleeves of my coat and having my brother zip me up like I was in a straight jacket in order to get my hands warms again.
But there are few better days this time of year than Opening Day. That’s when even Nationals fans can pretend our team has a chance. Mathematically, it’s fun to watch all of the percentage-based statistics like batting average and earned run average that can swing so wildly with such a limited data set.
Plus there’s just something right about sitting among a crowd, eating a hot dog and watching some baseball.
I brought along my flip-style camera with the intention of taking lots of video. Due to the frozen nature of my hands, I didn’t get anything past the first inning. But again, with Opening Day there’s a lot said in those first six outs:
The Atlanta Braves ending up beating the Nationals 2-0, so it was a respectable showing. And at least this year there weren’t legions of annoying Phillies fans around.
One last comical moment. This game was played in March 2011 — not April — but someone forgot to tell the graphics guy at the stadium:
During my sophomore year of college, I took a documentary film class that ended with an extremely disappointing project.
We had a good subject matter, and put a lot of work into the film, but the end result was not good at all. Two years later I had some time in my fall schedule, and took on an independent study project to give the documentary genre another shot. The focus of the project was The Crusader, the student newspaper at Susquehanna University.
I wanted to explore a few things that as a former editor I knew we had sometimes talked about in small groups, but had never discussed as an organization. There were issues like whether staff members should be paid, if the one practicum credit was worth all the effort, what it was like to put in all the work only to see people throw away the paper without reading it and what it was like to go through all of that together.
One side perk was that the communications department had some extra money to spend during the summer, so I arrived back at campus to find a brand new, top of the line Mac G5 editing system. It was one of those pieces of technology that is so beautiful you don’t even want to touch it. Not only was it a big step up from our Windows-based Adobe Premiere system, but nobody really knew how to use the FinalCut editing software. So as part of my independent study, I basically had the machine all to myself for the semester with the understanding that I would later teach people how to use it.
It was a pretty sweet deal.
I interviewed most of the editorial board within a week span about midway through the semester. The only major editor not featured is the sports editor Sarah, who not only had time constraints from playing volleyball but also was not a fan of talking to me with a camera in my hand.
The process for producing one issue of the weekly newspaper encompasses about a week and a half. All of the non-interview footage follows one specific issue — including the initial editorial board meeting, staff meeting, budget meeting and two nights of actually laying out the paper.
Here is the film in two parts, with additional discussion about the process below (after hitting play, change the 360p in the bottom right corner to 480p for optimal viewing):
After showing the film to everyone when it was done, I sent all of the editors a questionnaire to see what they thought. I asked for their overall impression, what insights they may have gained, whether they thought the subject was treated fairly and how they thought my relationship with the newspaper affected the film I was able to make.
The last question was really the most interesting to me. I started as a staff writer for the paper during my sophomore year, and the following year served as the sports editor. Senior year I dropped back to just being a writer, covering a few sports teams and writing the weekly sports column. For the edition seen in the film, I only wrote the sports column.
The editors said that because I had been in their position, they felt they were much more comfortable in opening up to me. They said they would have been much more wary about letting a total outsider into their office, and would have acted differently.
What none of us really expected was the wide range of opinions that came out during the interviews. The pay issue was particularly interesting with who wanted to pay whom, and why.
I also didn’t expect it to be as funny as it was (at least to me). The editors usually work very late nights on Wednesday and Thursdays, and there’s a certain amount of silliness that comes out of the process. I always chalked that up to people getting a little punchy without sleep, but the daytime interviews certainly brought out some sneaky funny people.
In total, I think I shot about 16 hours of footage using two different cameras (Sony PD170 and Panasonic PV-DV851). One of the biggest challenges was taking that monster stack of video and getting it in a somewhat organized state. That began with giving each tape a number (label your tapes!):
I then captured each tape into the computer, jotting down notes about specific shots I might want to use as the tape was playing. By the end of the project, I had kind of a mad scientist thing going on with my stack of notes. I’ll close with a few scanned sheets, with some attempted explanations as to what is going on with each one (links will open in new window):
Interview Questions I started out with a standard list of questions to ask each editor, and added a few more that were targeted to each one. As you can see, there are some issues that didn’t make it into the film. I had some additional directions I wanted to go, but at some point you just have to stop.
Video Bins This was probably the most important piece of paper to me for that entire semester. In FinalCut, you can create these virtual bins to organize sets of clips. What you see here are four sections (one for each portion of the paper), with a number and letter for each clip. I have two double-sided pages like this, and as crazy as it may look, it all made perfect sense to me at the time.
Film Outline Besides keeping all of the footage straight, developing the story of the film was the most difficult part. I spent a number of days hopelessly looking through the video trying to come up with a logical structure. You can see here the basic outline at the top and a more developed list below that with timecodes for where each section ends. Off to the right, there’s a pair of drawings with the words “narrative arc.” I think that came from trying to explain to my professor how each portion told its own story, and that those added up to a total arc that took us from one place to another.
Narration Script With an outline in place, the real anchor for moving the story along was the narration. I tried to say as little as possible, instead letting the editors tell their story. But there were a few parts that just needed a sentence or two of explanation to orient things. Probably the biggest thing I have wanted to redo is the voice track. At the time I recorded it, it was “good enough” to get the editing process rolling and I never went back to do a better version. Oh well.
I also can’t explain why I didn’t hide the mic cords during the interviews, which is definitely distracting. Finally, I wish I had taken the time to make a blooper reel. Sarah wouldn’t sit down for an interview, but I have a tape with an amazingly entertaining segment of her eating a piece of chocolate. The audio from some of the office interactions you saw but didn’t hear would have also been worth the effort.
For a long time the “about me” section on my Facebook and MySpace (remember MySpace?) profiles included something along the lines of “teaching myself to play piano.”
That prompted more than one person to ask the obvious–did I eventually learn how to play?
The answer I guess is in the ear of the beholder. I can punch the keys in an order that makes songs. I have retained a small bit of my ability to read music from my elementary school foray into playing the violin. So in short, I can kind of play the piano.
In fact, I know one complete song that can be found on a commercially successful album. I’ll give you a second to try to guess which song it is. Go ahead, I’ll wait…
Think you know it? Well, you’re wrong. It’s Vanessa Carlton’s “Twilight” and it is ridiculously easy to play. Here’s her version, with a little help from some additional instruments.
Now my international music debut, which only includes the piano part (she wouldn’t come over and sing for you):
Wow, that was amazing. Of course, I am no one-trick pony. As I said that is the only complete song that I know. But my repertoire includes a number of song beginnings that for one reason or another were never followed by learning the rest of the song. For your enjoyment, I made a medley of such songs:
In order, that was:
-Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” in some sort of key -Missy Higgins’ “They Weren’t There“ -Delta Goodrem’s “Not Me, Not I“ -Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” -Norah Jones’ “Not Too Late“ -Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (with extra joy!)
A standing ovation is not necessary, though if you want to politely applaud I think that might be appropriate.
