The Semester in Review

This semester has flown by. In the beginning we started with a basic story. It reminded us of the six shot sequence - extra wide, wide, medium, over the shoulder, closeup, and extra closeup. We had most of the first quarter to work on this project. We were also introduced to the new cameras and how upper class men plan. In this project I learned some basic organization skill on Final Cut Pro- favoriting video or key words. Sydney and I added words in this project. Ms. Morris later said that shouldn't really happen in news unless it's lower thirds (which I learned about later). Over this project we had a meeting with our teacher to decide our goals. My goal: how to add sound.

That was answered in the next project! This was an audio story. My sister is in my class. My teacher was deciding who to put in a group together and we ended up together- he didn't realize what he had done. I saw talking to Katie later that night and we decided that I should have said, "That's okay. I have to get used to working with people I don't like." That's just Katie and I's relationship. Maybe it's not as funny as I though it was or you just had to be there. We learned how to really use the microphones and how to edit sound and voices overs.

Lower thirds became a thing by the time we did our third project. In this project, we got paired up with someone from our class and had to do a story over them. Jasmeet was my partner. She practices a religion that you don't hear about on a daily bases, Sikhism. I talk about it more in a earlier blog post. I made sure to get so much footage when I went. That made organization hard, but I had enough. During this project was when I figured out I'm not the best at voice over. Voice over are hard for me to begin with but adding another language, no way! And if you have ever heard me speak for a while, that’s understandable.

By the end, I felt that sound is much harder than editing video, especially with the blood drive. I probably spent a day and a block on sound and one day adding the footage. During this project, we were completely by ourselves while interviewing and filming. With no tripod! You don't really appreciate it until it done! It was easy to add B-roll that went with the sound. That’s another pro of getting a lot of footage.

That was our last project before our final. Again, I was partners with Sydney. We did two stories around the theme winter. I’ve always wanted to Wall from the Halls, like sense I was in 9^th grade (I’m in my first semester of 10^th). So obviously, it’s been my life goal. Well, I spent one day of my week and a half coming up with questions. Of course, the best place to go was Buzz feed. Within two day, we were out in the stress (halls) asking people questions. We ask about 10 different questions, but only 5 made it into the video. We tried to make it funny but there were a lot of moments we didn’t add.

We had to do a really story. Word from the Halls is more for entertainment. We choose to do a story over Cram and Cocoa. Why we choose to do a story that happened the day before the due date? I don’t know! Before that night we got all the sound and created a script. That night we know what B-roll to get. We got some of the commons and two different classes. We stayed after to edit it later that night. I actually hard a lot of fun. There weren’t many people at 9:30.

When our group went to film ONW NOW, we ran into some problems. At first, we didn’t get all the stories adding to the flash drive so they didn’t make it into the episode. Then, during our first run someone forgot to press record. I was working on the sound. My main problem was determining when to turn the anchors’ mic off. In that backroom I feel like I don’t know what is happening. I, along with other people, had problems deciding when the anchors where done with talking before the new package. Since, I’m not in that room that can see the script, it would be nice to have a screen that could see that. But that might not be possible. Besides that problem, I loved doing that.

We are expected to know the language of the strand we are in, but I don't. For both my topics- video and graphic design. I'm a lot better in video, though. We did have a teacher change in the middle of the semester. That caused some problems because she didn't know what we had learned or not. Next semester is going to be better because we will have one teacher.