Final video project: Polka Party

Natalie Jacobson video story

Finally got it done after iMovie crashed on me again. Woo!

@#&#*%^!!!

I just spent two hours putting together my video. it was just about done, just adding the transitions, and then iMovie crashed.

No big deal, right? Just re-open my saved file and continue from where I was a few minutes ago.

Right?

Apparently my saving-OCD completely crapped out on me during the past two hours, because I have absolutely zero to show for it. I'm so pissed right now.

Oops, stupid SD card

I went to office hours with Natalie Jacobson today, all set to do my first video interview. I propped up the camera on a book and a coffee cup to get the video somewhat level and pointed it in her general direction. Six minutes into the interview about MyNextBigThing.com, and oh noes!!1! Memory is full on the camera!

Of course, I didn't bring a back-up card because I thought 512 mb would be enough, but nope, not by a long shot. The interview went well I thought, learned a lot about her upcoming project and she's a pleasure to talk to. Unfortunately, I only have the first 6 minutes to show for today.

It almost makes me miss using only a pen and paper. Almost.

Soundslide!

WebNG was being difficult for a while, but I finally got it to play nicey-nice with me. There's still a little bit left I'd like to do with this, namely fix the sound up a little bit more and add some bumpers in the beginning, although I don't think I'll end up doing that until I finish the sound so I don't have to go back and muck around with it too badly.

Behold:

Photo shoot!

The drum circle is a once a month thing, so for last week's class I brought with me photos of a little Lego critter I have on my desk under my lamp. It watches over me with it's piercing eyes, pointing it's laser blaster at my forehead to make sure I'm being productive (I rarely am).

During that shoot, I learned that my camera has a bunch of settings I never really bothered with before; I was able to finally get the camera's screen image to actually be what the picture looks like. Most of the time there's a nasty flash that brightens everything and ruins the picture. It's not there as much, but from time to time it creeps up.

Anyway, I didn't have pictures of anything drum-related because, as it is, that only happens once a month. In order to have something done for the Soundslide, earlier today I went on over to the Waysmeet Center and took a few pictures of Brickner-Wood and someone I want to call either Monica, Molly or Courtney (I don't remember what her name was, but I know it was one of those). Not all the drums were out, and of course there were a lot fewer people in the room banging on things, but I think what I've got works.

See the annoying flash? Blarg!

I recorded Larry Brickner-Wood saying some things and this is what I pieced together

Got my audio story done, at least as good as I can make it in under 4 minutes. I realized I have a harder time slimming down the good 'uns because he said so damn much that I felt was worthy of getting plopped in. I had to snip a couple things due to time restraints that I otherwise would have liked to work into a print story, but alas, can't win 'em all. I also decided against putting in a voice-over narration because I want to transmograph this into a Soundslide, and I feel a voice-over would go against what I've been picturing in my head.

Here it is. Be gentle.

"Larry Brickner-Wood: Drum Circle Maestro"

So the basic idea is that Larry Brickner-Wood is a campus minister and puts on a dinner-and-drum-circle event on the first Friday of each month. People show up, hit things, and have a jolly good time. I chose this story because I find it infinitely interesting that UNH has a drum circle, however unofficial it might be. I dunno, not something I'd really expect from New Hampshire.

Rip it apart in the comments.

Stop the presses! No, really.

Print is dead. So what? Deal with it. 

And don't solve all your problems by throwing everything and its dead auntie on your news website; nobody wants to navigate that crap. Make it useful and intuitive to navigate or even visit your website. I don't know how many cluttered news sites I've been to where every single damn article is on the main page. Have an RSS ticker or something to point readers in the right direction, but don't make it shoot across the screen like on CNN or Fox News. Annoying, distracting, and I can't read it at my own pace.

And don't call anything a "portal," e.g. news portal or web portal. What does that even mean?

Curses!

I'm thinking I should have pressed pause at some point during this 14 minute interview I conducted. It's grueling to wade through it all again.

An alterntive to using iTunes to convert WMA to MP3

I forgot to mention this before. As a Mac user, for whatever reason I couldn't get my Windows Media Audio files to convert to MP3s in iTunes. I don't know why, but I couldn't import them, drag and drop them, nothing.

After googling around a little, I found a program called Switch. It's free and it works for both Mac and PC. It got the job done so I could fiddle around with my shiny new sound files in Audacity.

Sound recording happy fun time

I've done a bit of sound editing in FL Studio and GarageBand and a limited amount in Audacity, but as far as actually recording my own sounds with an external recorder, I'm kind of a newbie. I've conducted a few interviews on my analogue recorder for stories before, and the sound quality wasn't always that stellar. The tapes weren't exactly hi-fi quality either.

So of course, going into this one I figured I'd make the Official Rookie Mistake and flood the recording with uh-huhs, oh yeah?-s and mhmms. Listening back to my older recordings, I did just that. Oh, and I also had the microphone too far away from the speakers so their voices were a little more faint than I would have liked. Good thing I didn't need them for anything more than fancy (and kinda lazy) note taking. I think I succeeded in avoiding the whole "ruining my recording because my fat mouth wouldn't stop blabbering." Sure, there's a thing or two that squeaked by, but it's largely clear of them, and I even held the recorder close enough too. Hooray!

My interview was only about 14 minutes or so, but it was enough for what I needed. I stupidly turned off my recorder at what I thought was the end of the interview, and as I was getting up to say goodbye and leave, my interviewee started telling some good anecdotes that he hadn't mentioned earlier (although I'll admit that if I were better at conducting interviews then I should have gotten them during the main part anyway). It took me a few seconds to realize that I should probably turn on the recorder again if I wanted any chance of capturing the stories. I got one, but the first one was lost. Yeah, I should have asked him to repeat it probably, but that would fall under the whole being-a-better-interviewer bit.

As I mentioned before, the majority of the sound I captured wasn't the interview. I as at a drum circle at the Waysmeet Center and so I spent most of the time sitting with my hand up holding the recorder and pointing it at various drummers. I have tons of that stuff, so I'm gonna try to piece together something interesting from it.

Audacity isn't too scary. The big wavelengths make it seem scarier than it actually is, but hey, it's just sound. I'll manage.

Streaming MP3s on your blog

Want one of these?

UNKLE - "Hold My Hand"

Embedded Flash players are pretty useful for streaming sound and video on websites and blogs. While YouTube is essentially the only place you'd ever need to go to get your video files on the intrawebs, audio streaming is a tad bit trickier to get running (primarily because there isn't really a centralized site to do it from). First you've gotta find a player, preferably for free, then you've gotta host your file somewhere, then of course you've gotta bring it all together and embed the player on your blog.

Odeo is responsible for the above player and the file is hosted on my Google Pages account. You don't have to sign up for Odeo to post one and if you already have a Gmail account then you've already got your file hosting problem taken care of. If you registered for Blogger with anything other than a Gmail address and don't have an account with them already, you're going to have to create one to get access to Pages. It's quick and relatively painless, so point yourself to pages.google.com and sign up for a free account. If you've got your own preference for file hosting then by all means use that, but Google's is free and comes with 100 mb of storage. That's step 1.

Step 2 involves uploading the MP3 file to your account. After logging in to your Pages account, you'll start with a template for your first page open. Hit "Back to Site Manager" in the upper left corner.

Looking to the right side of the site manager, you'll see a little button that says "Upload." Click that and find the file on your computer that you want to post. Depending on the file size, the uploading process can take a while.

On to step 3, which is posting the Flash player on your blog. Open another browser window/tab and start up a new post on Blogger. Hit the tab that says "Edit HTML" in the top right corner and copy/paste this code into your post (taken from here):

<embed src= "http://www.odeo.com/flash/audio_player_standard_gray.swf" quality="high" width="300" height="52" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars= "valid_sample_rate=true&external_url=[MP3 file address]" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>

See in the code where it says "[MP3 file address]"? Go back to your Pages tab/window and right-click (command-click for Mac users) on the file you uploaded and copy it's address. Depending on your browser, the menu could be worded differently, but pick the one that sounds closest to what's highlighted below (Firefox pictured).

Replace "[MP3 file address]" with the link you've copied and hit Publish. You should now have a streaming Flash player to do with what you will.

What I'm doing here

I signed up for this class because I wanted to see what I could learn about the new direction that news media is unquestionably headed in. Learning what goes into and how to actually create interesting multimedia for net news consumption interests me quite a bit; I'm all for multimedia and new technology, so learning how to use it to my advantage in creating better stories is a plus.

Most of the news I read is not hard news, but that isn't to say that I never read the more "important"-style news. I gravitate towards music journalism, it's where I'd like my career to go, and tend to pay a lot of attention to websites like stereogum or Pitchfork Media, with the latter being my go-to site for music journalism. They offer a lot of musical variety and insightful commentary, and there's always at least one very interesting thing to read/hear/watch on the front page of either website. 

Pitchfork has a feature called Forkcast that occasionally pumps out videos about emerging bands, such as this one on Vampire Weekend playing a gig in a record store. I enjoyed this video because it had a nice mix of band interview and gig footage, overall very well put together. If I could do this type of reporting for a living, I'd be one happy panda.