Final Project is Complete!

Before Thanksgiving Break, Alison and I completed our final project (which means the semester is over, hard enough to believe).

http://bkb99d.wix.com/qovfmidmo

The final project brought together everything I learned throughout the semester. While I still may not be the best photographer or videographer, I learned how to use different equipment and editing techniques to tell a story.

I think the most important thing I learned this semester was the importance of telling a story- and telling it well. Video b-roll is only as good as the story it accompanies and photographs have to tell a story to be effective.

I learned that I like working with audio the best. My favorite piece from our final project is “Jessica’s Story,” which I put as my last post. The audio is from an interview I edited from the Veterans Day Presentation. The most difficult part of this was deciding which soundbites to use and which story to tell. Her entire audio was nearly 8 minutes long, so editing it down to 2 minutes was time consuming because I wanted to do it right.

One thing this class taught me is that video is not for me. It’s probably because I’ve never actually had to use a video camera or a tripod before, but I felt awkward gathering b roll and doing video interviews. Using FinalCut Pro was also especially challenging, but, by the time I had to use it for the final project, I think I had a good grasp of using its editing techniques.

Thankfully, all the work for this class is now done! While it was a crazy 3(ish?) weeks working on the final project, I can’t believe this course is over and that I finally get to begin my emphasis area in the spring. All in all, J2150 has been a positive experience for me and I know that the skills I learned will help me in my future.

Jessica’s Story

The finished product of the video for Jessica Giacchi is complete! Alison and I went to the home of Jessica and Joe Giacchi on Sunday, Nov. 25, 2013. The couple both served the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War – Jessica as a nurse in Chu Lai, Vietnam and Joe as a surgeon.

When we arrived at their home, Jessica had an old projector set up to show a slideshow of the negatives of film strips from pictures she and Joe took during their years of service. Alison took a video of Jessica reading memoirs she wrote during the war that we used at the beginning of our video. I took photographs of old pictures she had collected and also of Jessica and Joe with their quilts they were presented on Veterans Day 2013.

It only took about 2 hours to collect all the footage we needed, but I was interested to hear the stories about what it was like for the couple during their service. Maybe it’s because I don’t hear these stories enough, but I often forget that many of the veterans like Jessica and Joe were as young as me when they served in the military – a weird thought as I sit here in my sorority house typing a blog post.

The completed video is included in this post! I brought in audio from a interview we conducted the day of the quilt presentation that I edited and added music to. I’m extremely happy with the way the video turned out, and I think I finally have an idea of how to use Final Cut Pro (just in time for this course to end).

Quilts of Valor

My final project for J2150 is about the Mid-Missouri chapter of Quilts of Valor. According to the national foundation’s website,  “the mission of the Quilts of Valor Foundation is to cover all combat service members and veterans touched by war with comforting and healing Quilts of Valor.”

I’m working as a team with one of my classmates, Alison. Alison originally wanted to do a story on Quilts of Valor earlier in the semester but was unable to get in contact with Jan (the chapter’s leader) in time. She contacted Jan again for this project, and Jan agreed to let us cover the foundation.

Our final project is going to be a website focusing on what QOV hopes to accomplish and the impact of the quilts on the veterans’ lives. “Beneath the Stitches,” as we decided to call it, will go much further than telling what the foundation is; it will explain why the foundation is so important both to veterans and the women who make the quilts.

The photo above is from the work day on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2013. The QOV women met at Satin Stitches in Columbia, Mo., to work on their quilts and talk about the upcoming Veterans Day Presentation that took place Monday, Nov. 11, 2013.

After attending both of those events, Alison and I decided that, while our project is going well so far, we needed to add something else to make it great. We spoke with Jessica Giacchi, a veteran who served the U.S. Army in Vietnam as a nurse, and she agreed to allow us to come to her home to tell us more about her experiences.

We will create an audio slideshow with the audio we collected at the presentation as well as photos and video from our next interview. I feel confident that this piece will add another layer to our story and that Jessica will serve as a central compelling character to give our topic a human element.

Overall, I’m both pleasantly surprised and relieved that this project is going smoothly. It has been an interesting topic to cover and, with the help of Alison, I hope to do the story justice.

Peace Corps

Continuing on with the trend of people who inspire me, I decided to focus this week’s blog post on my sister, Colleen. In September 2013, she left the comfort of her apartment in Washington D.C. to start a new career path working as a volunteer for the Peace Corps.

As the commercial from youtube demonstrates, volunteering for the Peace Corps is a two-year commitment. The Peace Corps works to help people around the world by sending volunteers to work with specific programs. Colleen is stationed in Cameroon, located in western Africa, from September 2013 to November 2015. Her volunteer program is Youth & Development, which she will begin once her training ends in a few weeks.

Multimedia is the reason I am able to keep up with what Colleen is doing. Despite the patchy Internet and frequent power outages in Bafia, Cameroon (where her training takes place), Colleen has been able to write blog entries with photographs of her host family and the city where she is living.

I don’t think the stories she writes in her entries would be as strong without the photographs she includes. Somewhere as different from the United States as Cameroon needs images or video to give people an idea of what living there is like. I still laugh at my mother’s reaction to seeing the bathroom and kitchen of the family’s home where Colleen is staying. (http://colleenincameroon.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/my-bafia-house-tour/)

Colleen’s blog chronicles her experiences in Cameroon in a way that would not be as complete were it not for the photographs. Her blending of words with images truly gives the full picture of what working as a Peace Corps volunteer entails.

The Women Who Inspire Me

Joining Chi Omega has had a remarkable influence on my college experience. The women I have met through it constantly inspire me to excel in all aspects of my life because of their overwhelming involvement on campus and in the community.

Katie Cruz, pictured below, is the epitome of this. She is a nursing major, volunteers for Desire to Aspire and Stripes on campus and is always encouraging others to become involved. She also manages to find time to craft a cooler in the Chi Omega basement in addition to her busy schedule.

Both Katie and the rest of my sorority sisters are constantly active on campus which is an extremely beneficial environment to live in. These women inspire me to seek new opportunities and stay involved in Columbia rather than simply focusing on classes, which has made my time at Mizzou unique.

Finished with First Project

 

As the semester continues to speed along, I’ve completed my 7 week story on Yellow Dog Bookshop. Along the way, I learned how to use photography, audio and video to tell stories about the bookshop. Video proved to be the most difficult for me since it was the medium I’ve had the least experience using. Overall, though, I learned that despite the difficulties of using multimedia in journalism, the overall impact of using it strengthens a story.

 

I chose Yellow Dog Bookshop because the used bookshop (Get Lost Books) that used to be in its location always caught my eye when I was downtown on Ninth Street. I don’t know if it was luck or a journalistic hunch, but the location was sold to Joe Chevalier and Kelsey Hammond during the summer and reopened as Yellow Dog Bookshop right around the time I was given my assignment. Joe (pictured below) was nice enough to allow me to cover the shop for the first half of this semester.

 

Yellow Dog Bookshop has a unique feel to it that a standard news story couldn’t quite capture on its own. Using photography and audio, I think I managed to capture some of what makes the store so different while also profiling the business. I enjoyed covering the bookshop for the first half of the semester, and it helped me develop a skill set that will be helpful for the final project.

 

Circle of Sisterhood

I was originally going to cover an event at Yellow Dog Bookshop for my short video assignment; however, I managed to mix up the hours the equipment checkout lab was open on Saturdays and couldn’t check out a video camera. So, I had to improvise for this assignment with a new subject.

After contacting several businesses and organizations, Circle of Sisterhood finally agreed to allow me to cover a meeting on  Tuesday, Oct. 15. The organization was created by a former sorority woman who wanted to spread awareness for women’s education globally. The organization has since spread across colleges in the U.S. and has become the official philanthropy of PHA at Mizzou.

Circle of Sisterhood at Mizzou is currently raising money for a school being built in Africa. The organization has already had a 5k run and will continue to raise money throughout the year. As Director of Education Jamie Beard explains in the video, the organization also works to educate sorority women and people on campus about the need for education for women globally.

This video was the first time I had used Final Cut Pro to edit a video. While it was extremely time consuming, Final Cut Pro allows easy editing of both video and audio. Now that this video has allowed me to get my feet wet with video editing, I will be able to use the skills I’ve developed to create both my TV Broadcast style video and work for the final project.

I can’t believe it’s already week 9 of the semester! Before long, I’ll be working fervently on the final project.

“Shattered”

In lecture this week, we watched “Shattered” by Tyler Stableford. The 5 minute clip is an example of  strong video for storytelling, with all the components that make video as a form of multimedia great.

The film follows Steve House, the author of the script, on his journey as he climbs up a mountain. The script of the piece carries the story, as Steve House’s voice explains how he is broken after reaching the summit that had been his goal. The timing of words “swing, pull, kick, shatter”  (2:23) are effortlessly timed with House as he does those motions, matching audio with video.

The different camera angles add to the piece, as well. The editing is minimal to match the isolated feeling that House is on the journey alone. In a behind the scenes look at the production, the producers of the video explain how they followed House with 2 cameras to achieve get these angles. The viewer feels like they are right there with House, not watching from afar.

While I doubt my own video production will ever be anything close to this, this video was very helpful in learning to use different angles and using an audio script to make my videos stronger. With the upcoming short video and broadcast TV style assignments, I will be able to implement what I learned to create better work.

 

Clicks Before Content

While I’ve been working on my audio slideshow, I decided to write about a video I watched for this week’s topic. Marina Shifrin, a graduate from Mizzou’s J-school, quit her job via youtube video last week. After working several jobs in the journalism industry, she decided she had created enough stories and videos on deadline for clicks and views rather than content. So, she finally created a video that included the content she wanted rather than what would be profitable.

While the video is a creative way for Shifrin to quit her job, it didn’t give me enough context alone on why she quit. Her blog, however, filled in the gaps. (http://marinashifrin.wordpress.com/2013/09/29/journalism-is-dead-to-me/)

The issue with journalism isn’t that it is dying. It’s that journalists and editors alike are allowing the quality of their work suffer in order to make more money and produce more stories. News frequently focuses on trivialities or on depressing events.

As Shifrin puts it, “After I admitted that I could not hit the deadlines needed to put out our long-form, satirical news pieces, I was moved to our serious stories. Guess what I figured out? Journalism is the worst! I mean if you’re not reporting about which Kardashian is pregnant, then you’re reporting about a baby that was shot in the head.”

The sad thing is that I agree with Shifrin. My own personal form of torture was my news writing course last semester (no offense to my instructor or the class- news writing just isn’t for me). News either sacrifices good reporting for views or it covers the worst events imaginable.

If anything, Shifrin’s blog solidified the fact that I could never work for a news organization- good thing too, because I’ve already applied for strategic communication as my journalism emphasis area. Moreover, if I had to write an article about the Kardashians, I actually think I would hate myself long after the “issue” had been forgotten and the family had found some other way to remain famous.

The world needs journalists who actually care about the work they’re creating. Good stories don’t come without quality content and craft. Maybe this is why multimedia is so effective; it allows journalists to use creativity while telling stories that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

 

So, after creating my audio piece for the week, I realized that I can’t add it to WordPress unless I pay for an upgrade. Deciding not to spend my money on this (I’m a college student on a budget, after all), I’ve included an audio slideshow from Yellow Dog Bookshop’s blog instead. This is from their first story event for children, and is an example of what I will be creating for this week.

I had never worked with audio before, and it was more difficult than I imagined. While Audacity is a fairly simple program to use, editing 8 minutes of audio is a long process when you have to make sure it’s telling the story the way you want it to. Editing out clips and including enough time between sound bites takes a lot of time to do it right.

Overall, I was happy with the result because I was able to find music from freemusicarchive.org that fit the story. The levels weren’t perfect, but I can adjust that for my audio slideshow.  Hopefully, I can find a way to upload it to youtube so that I can post it here.

So far, this project has challenged me to master new technology that tells stories more effectively. Audio has proven difficult but rewarding because it tells the subject’s point of view directly. I’m excited to put it together with images of Yellow Dog Bookshop to create a multimedia piece that truly tells the story as best as it can.