Editor, revised

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieX5B6Ed0JQ]

What: Multimedia about multimedia. Emerge News is a grant-funded program that lets high school students create news webcasts. I visited one of their tapings and shot video of the process.

What worked: Tight shots. Lots of them. I like the popcorn sequence, but only because it was part of the story; the subsequent shot of the girl working by the bowl of popcorn is meant to establish that. Also, the setting was amenable to using a tripod, which helped keep my shots sharp and allowed me to zoom way in.

Wait, music? After my edit, the piece felt a little flat. My editor at work suggested music. I threw together a quick soundtrack in Garage Band using three loops. I think the result is a livelier video without distracting from the subjects.

Lessons learned: Check out the background on the first interview. Painted cinder blocks. How ugly. How stiff. I need to find better ways to set up my A roll interviews.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46SV8WwyHZI&rel=1]

What: The finished video I promoted in a previous post. I shot it Monday night, edited it Wednesday and Thursday morning and posted it Thursday afternoon.

Why so slow: Partly, this was because the video pairs with a story in the Spokesman-Review’s 7 section (read it here), and I didn’t want be finished too far in advance. But this also proved a more complicated edit for me. I had shot a lot of b roll — part inexperience, part justified assumption that bad lighting would make some of it unusable. Scrubbing through the footage took time, and so did forming my narrative and sequencing my shots around it.

What worked: More variety of wide, medium, and medium-tight shots in this second effort. Fun subject matter. Incorporation of natural sound to help form the narrative.

Gained wisdom: Interview more people than you think you will need; I really wished I had talked to the third competitor. Film my talking heads even tighter. Beware (again!) of echoes; it probably would have been better to interview my subjects outside. Turn tight shots into super-tight shots. In low-light situations, my little Sony doesn’t quite cut it.

I was going to post tonight about my fledgling efforts to learn php programming and try to find some way of making that interesting. Well, I’ve been spared that indignity.

A video assignment for tonight has fallen into my lap, and it promises to be fun: I’m shooting the Iron Bartender competition at Raw Sushi and Island Grill (map). Advance thanks to my co-worker Tom for asking me to come.

This promises to be challenging on a couple fronts. I’ll be trying to condense a lot of action into a short period of time, and the event takes place in a bar, which means lighting and noise levels might not be great. And I’ll need to maintain an extra steady hand, which should be easier for me than the bystanders and those judging the bartenders.

I hope to have a short clip up by late Tuesday; the final cut will probably go live Thursday night at spokesmanreview.com along with Tom’s story, which runs in print Friday.

I was talking to a photog at work last night about video. He’s been in the business for a while, and his experience producing a few videos in the past year made him a huge help Saturday night while I was editing my caucus piece.

We were sort of marveling at what a challenge it is to move into this new medium; the fundamentals boggle the mind when you start to think about everything that goes into producing video that’s technically solid, visually compelling and narrative rich.

I remarked that I had it especially rough coming from my background as a word editor. My colleague came back with the rebuttal that photogs have to go from working with a single frame to thousands. Moreover, he said, the entire concept of storytelling is not something most newspaper photogs get much practice in, whereas the word smiths spend all their time honing narratives.

We dropped the debate, seeing it was going nowhere and my colleague had to get going. Which is probably good; the question isn’t especially useful for improving our videography.  But in analyzing our weaknesses, we also saw our strengths.

So I raise another question for any videohounds out there: How was your background slowed or aided your move to making video?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo-Unqheh2o]

What: A video of Spokane voters going to Saturday’s caucuses

Objective: To get some genuine voices and see what people thought of the process. The primary races this year are attracting record turnout in some states, so I expected an influx of new caucus participants. I wasn’t disappointed, and most of them were a little confused.

Gained wisdom: Watch out for bad echoes. Going without a tripod can allow you to blend in a little better and get people talking before they’ve had a chance to get nervous. However, I’m going to need to practice steady hands. Get more close shots.

If you paid attention to political news over the weekend, you likely read or heard about another round of caucuses and primaries. In Washington state, Obama carried the day among Democrats and McCain squeaked out a victory.

I visited two caucus sites to talk to attendees and produce a video for The Spokesman-Review’s election coverage.

Prior to this effort, I’d had a couple failures that I’ll chalk up to audio problems and user error. So it felt great to pull one off. Let me know what you think.