Perfecting the Art of Interviewing

There is much more that goes into interviewing than just asking the perfect questions. This week, Professor Jirik stopped into class to talk to us about specific techniques that help to build a solid interview. He referred to the Rule of Thirds, which was discussed in class on Monday, as well as camera angles and other tips that would help to make the interview look more professional. Jirik has worked for a number of news broadcasting companies around the world, so his input was incredibly insightful.

Once we had our lesson with Jirik, Professor Littau sent us on a mission to gather footage from several different places around campus. Debbie and I interviewed Lehigh faculty, staff and students about how the campus handled the incredible snow storm that caused the university to shut down for a day. Through these interviews, we were able to experiment with different types of lighting in an array of settings. As always, these clips were going to be used in the newest lab assignment that we were going to work on later in the week.

Valentine's Day in the Digital Media Center...How Romantic!

Last Sunday, I had my first official on-camera experience with Lehighsports.com. I was filming a post-match extra for the Lehigh women's tennis team with Courtney, a fifth year, who has been working with Lehigh Sports for a while. She did on-camera interviews with the men's team, while I did on-camera interviews with the women's team. Both matches took the entire day...about 7 hours once it was all said it done! After interviewing players and the coach, we filmed our openings and closings and hurried to the Digital Media Center to edit our work on Final Cut Express and be done for the day.

After several failed attempts, Courtney and I were quickly finding ourselves frustrated with Final Cut's inability to capture the clips that we had just filmed. We moved from computer to computer for about 20 minutes, and finally find one that works. We capture our image and start to watch our clips, only to find that the audio did not record for any of our interviews! We spoke with Katie, a broadcast specialist who works for Lehighsports.com, and she had no idea what the problem was.

We were so frustrated because of all the time we spent gathering footage and trying to upload our clips had all gone to waste. No worries though because I'll be getting back at it on Monday as I interview the baseball and softball teams about their upcoming seasons in a preview that should be posted mid-week!

Snowpocalypse 2010!

After a few hours of editing, Snowpocalypse 2010 is finally ready to be unveiled! I am happy with how the whole preview came together and am even happier that this whole movie-making thing is becoming a lot easier. Incorporating transitions, cutting clips, adding title bars and credits are now second nature. I am going to start "branding" myself a little better by providing links to this video (and my blog) on twitter. All that's left is to save the movie file and upload to my blog and YouTube. So the waiting begins...

comPILING SNOW FOOTage for lab 4

After much debate as to which Lehigh event we should preview for this week's lab, Debbie and I came up with a brilliant solution. SNOWPOCALYPSE 2010! We got footage from before the storm and during the storm to use in our video. Our goal was to see how Lehigh students were preparing for the snowstorm and a possible day off. After the first day of canceled classes in years, we went back to those same students to see how they were feeling about returning to school...

We got some great footage of the first snowfall on Tuesday night and then followed up with the accumulation on Wednesday morning. We stopped by Zoellner where we found plenty of students building jumps and sledding down the monstrous hill in anything that they could find! Additional footage of road cleanup outside of Taylor was shot, as were clips from inside of Taylor Gym, where many students braved the blizzard conditions to get in a work out!

The Art of Twitter

To be honest, I am very glad that Monday's class was an informational session on Twitter. Okay, okay, I know what you're thinking. It's 2010 and you don't know how to tweet on Twitter? Yes, it's true. I have been a member of the site for a couple weeks now, and I am slowly but surely starting to understand it. Professor Littau took the time to explain the lists, retweeting and plenty of other Twitter jargon that a user should know.

After the blogging and tweeting information sessions that have been given over the past two weeks, I have learned one thing of which I was never fully aware: brand yourself. I need to rework my blog and fix a few things on my Twitter account so that they are more compatible. They need to be able to market both me as a journalism student and the work that I complete throughout the semester. This will become very important as Debbie and I move forward with our project this semester. I want to be able to (or at least attempt to!) become a part of a small online community shares the same interest in journalism as I do.

Lab 3: Overlaying sound...could this be getting easier?

Today's lab taught us how to overlay sound onto video clips. I used footage from Debbie's interview with Dana Stellar, a senior on the indoor track and field team. Dana did a great job answering the questions, making it easy to edit and create the video. It's amazing how quickly you can become accostumed to using Windows Movie Maker. I am certainly starting to feel more comfortable with using the system. Although there were points during the editing process today where I got confused, I figured it out with a lot less help than I needed last time! I am looking forward to the point where I can say that I understand this program completely and that I do not need anyone's help. I get more and more excited each week to learn more tools to better the quality of my videos. Here is the final product:

Hours of my time this week were also devoted to filming, editing and uploading an Indoor Track and Field Preview for the upcoming meet at the New Balance Invitational in New York this weekend for Lehighsports.com. I, too, was at track and field practice with classmate Kenny Burgess, filming for him as he interviewed players about this weekend's upcoming meet. That experience was one of my first behind a video camera and editing with Final Cut Express. Boy, was it interesting...

Blogging about blogging

Monday's session was an instructional class on how to blog. Since I am not familiar at all with the blogging community, it was good to hear what Professor Littau had to say about it. The class really opened my eyes to the endless universe of blogging and the online communities that are formed as a result of it. Professor Littau covered all of the basics about blogging. He stressed the importance of blogging often, in order to captivate your audience. Additionally, he added that branding yourself through both your blog and twitter are two very important things for establishing yourself in an online community. You want to appeal to certain niches and allow your voice to come through in your posts, so that you can keep your blogs interesting.

The class ended before we could discuss twitter. I am looking forward to learning more about twitter, so that I can maximize the experience of tweeting this semester. Professor Littau encouraged us to add 5 local people to follow each day. This will allow us to have a better understanding of not the only the online community that surrounds us virtually, but of the local community that surrounds us physically.