I’ve been involved in a number of interesting projects recently at work, including one about Hank Hepperly, a Maryville horse trainer who uses “natural horsemanship” to break horses.
A team of three of us followed Hank for several weeks, as he broke Dollar. The video from the first day is above. Here are links for the week 2 and week 3 videos.
Also, read the story by Morgan Simmons and see beautiful photos by Clay Owen.
Technically, I started Bonnaroo two weeks ago when I began interviewing the Knoxville bands performing this year. But today, the first video is up and the 2008 Bonnaroo blog has officially launched.
Check out the Royal Bangs performing a recent gig at the Pilot Light, and stay tuned for a new band video every day this week.
I’ll be blogging again throughout Bonnaroo, so bookmark that and my Bonnaroo Twitter feed for round-the-clock updates.
Earlier this month while on assignment, strong winds blew over a video camera and tripod on a mountaintop in Cherokee, NC. To my horror, the view finder completely broke off from the base of the camera. The camera was rolling while this all happened, and you can see the footage in the video below.
Since I was almost two hours from work, I needed to continue to use the broken camera. I employed the “hail Mary” approach and prayed whatever I was taping included my interview subject in some part of the frame. His head was actually square in the middle of the shot. Not ideal, but at least he was there.
The assignment was a video profile of John Grant Jr. in the Songs of Appalachia video series I produce each month with reporter Morgan Simmons.
On Thursday morning at midnight, a one-mile portion of Interstate-40 through downtown Knoxville shutdown for a 14-month construction project.
I shot and edited this video of the closure. It was really awesome to watch up close and happened surprisingly quick and without noticeable problems.
Find extensive coverage of the SmartFIX40 closure by News Sentinel traffic reporter Don Jacobs.
This week in my online journalism class, students were asked to shoot and edit their first man-on-the-street video in groups of two or three.
They chose a question and had to get at least four responses. Students were asked to keep lighting, framing, background noises and a few other shooting tips in mind. They had one class to shoot and one to edit, using either iMovie or FinalCutPro.
As I should have expected, two groups had video files that could only be processed on a PC, not on the Macs in our lab. When we got to the PC lab, codec issues continued to prevent us from accessing one group’s files. The other group used Windows Moviemaker to edit for the first time.
It was frustrating for the group who had to sit through class, watching everyone else edit. But I let them know it’s very reflective of life in multimedia journalism. You never know if something screwy will happen to your tape, or if you’ll be asked to process a foreign file for the first time. The only thing I can guarantee students of multimedia is that you can never anticipate what you’ll be asked to do or what will happen.
My co-workers and I have a saying for the unexpected situations: Yay for freeware, shortcuts and not having a clue what we’re doing!
It sounds scary, but I’ve actually learned to enjoy it. I took the video files we could not access back to the office and wound up converting them using Ultra Video Splitter, one of the first video programs I ever used for RandomThis at it’s inception. I don’t even remember the last time I opened up the program either.
The group wound up getting a crash course in FinalCutPro and produced this video about the UT men’s basketball team in 20 minutes. Another group used FinalCut for their video on the election. They chose this program so they could fix sync issues with their audio and video. One group worked completely independently of any help and used iMovie to make this video on Candace Parker’s decision to leave UT early. Here is the second video produced in Moviemaker, also about UT sports. And lastly, check out this one on UT dining and health, also produced in Moviemaker. It has a nice surprise twist ending.