Video Studentguy

The most recent episode of This Week in Media, #115 has some interesting comments about Twitter's impact on Brand marketing. TWIM is a great show if you want to understand the developing space of new media. Comments starting at about 47 minutes made me realize how important it is for marketers to stay on top of every kind of marketing, especially social networking apps like Twitter. Daisy Whitney - New Media Minute Motrin Commercial Flak - Forbes

It took a lot of time to complete this show. I changed the format, just this once, to the AAC Enhanced format, so that I can include pictures and links. I have also made the pictures available online. I'm using Photobucket, instead of Flickr, because I was having serious problems loading the files. I've never seemed to have much success using Flickr. You can search for them under the heading, Sheep and Wool NY08. You can view the pictures and listen to the audio through iTunes or on an iPod. I don't intend to distribute this show as an MP3 file unless I get some requests. This is just an experiment at trying to tell a story, in this case about my trip to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival a few weeks ago in October. It was a combination holiday and location scouting trip. I'm planning on extending ideas I presented in my student film about crafts and craftspeople  into a regular video cast and I wanted to learn more about the fiber arts. It was a pleasant event, don't know if I would need to return ne

It's been a while and I've been working, I really have, and it's going to be great, you're really going to love it.  Give me a few more days.You're beautiful, thanks.

I've been spending most of my free time completing the transcription process. This is critical for me to figure out what remains to be shot in order to complete my film, as well as speed up the editing process.Transcribing is boring, tedious work and there's not a lot of stuff I can say about it, though I try my best. I've tried to speed things up by using transcription software. I started out with iListen from MacSpeech and then, when they came out with Dictate I switched to that, Dictate uses a vastly improved software translation engine that was licensed from Dragon Naturally Speaking on the Windows platform. I think I will have to look into using Dragon on my next project and see if that tops them all.I've also been using my time to talk with instructors and get critiques on how well my film works. I know it needs improvment. I've spoken to a number of film faculty at CDIA. It's interesting to see how each person views the essentials of filmmaking.One instructor, who is not a documentarian, emphasized the

It's been a couple weeks since graduation, so I've decided to catch you up with my plans for the coming year. I've got some additional podcasts in the works as well as ideas for this show. you can look forward to more interviews in the near future.This is an unusually long show and I'm loading a lot of news on the front end, so if you want to skip that, jump to 10:40 where I start my eval of Avid.My film, Handmade in America is still in process. I'm screening it with a number of people at school over the next few weeks, to find out how I can make a good film look and play better. I'm conscious that meeting the graduation deadline required me to skimp on some quality features, and while I don't want to dedicate the rest of my life to this story, I do want to look back on it knowing I did the best I could given my current abilities. I already see the need to do some pick-up shooting.Even though I'm out of school, CDIA has a very open approach towards it's alumni, encouraging continuing connections and mentoring

Day Zero - Project Due It's fitting that this show, which is about the final day of my film project for the Film program at CDIA at Boston University ends with a lot of energy and emotion, because, up 'til now I've been holding it in, quite well I think. I wouldn't say I lost it, but it was close, it was more like clawing my way back onto the cliff edge that I was sliding off. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I only want to say that over these past 4 weeks the excitement and fun of editing and completing a film has completely leached away to frustration, stomach gnawing stress and all other kinds of unpleasant feelings due to having too much to do in way too little time. In the end I have to confess to dreaming too big. I'm not apologizing for that, nothing I've experienced so far will change that about myself, but I have learned that I never want to do a film this way again. We'll see if I can hold true to that promise. Today was a race against time, right up to the wire to complete color correction

Day 2 & 1As a result of excellent feedback from Linda, my wife, I've made some significant changes to the order in which speakers are introduced. I had begun with discrete, self contained blocks, where an individual presents themselves. Of course I intended to mix individual's comments together where they touched on the same topic as the film progressed, but it was made clear to me through Linda's perspective that I could begin that earlier, so there wasn't an obvious transition from one person speaking at a time to many people speaking.It was a real structural problem for me and I'm grateful for the insight she provided. You know, I know what I want to do and could have acted alone, but I had nagging doubts that my perspective was too inside, too familiar to be trusted as far as how much I could ask the audience to accept as they were introduced to the film's characters and ideas. Things such as the pacing, I'm using a lot of rapid cuts. It really pays to have someone you can trust who can offer concise,

Days 5, 4 & 3 Still working on the rough cut, focusing on story pacing, removing things that take you out of the story. I'm reflecting a lot on the meaning of craft, the subject of my film, and being as tired as I am I'm afraid I'm not completing whole thoughts. I'm gaining spontaneity at the price of coherency when I'm not reading off a script. You tell me if it's worth it! About five and a half minutes into the show I'm trying to make a point about the life craftspeople try to lead and I'm using a sports competition metaphor and it utterly fails. What I'm trying to say in this instance is that the measure of success is the process of work and learning they're engaged in, their life's journey, not a specific accomplishment or feat. Trust is a perennial issue for me, and exercising trust in the audience is what I need to do as I continue this edit. Just as Jay Moonah said At  Podcaster's Across Borders this past June, the content is the audience. They create meaning out of the context of their experie

Day 7 & 6 Originally I thought I'd name this show Recognizing Mortality. I've heard that if you want people to find your posts you need to give them names that reflect the general nature of your content. I thought that fit because editing requires you to face the death of so many things, ideas, hopes, illusions, favorite bits, not to mention your own inflated ego. However, oblique, inside-joke titles, while clever, don't have much value if no one gets them, or listens. So I decided to change the title to something that at least will show up in a search on film or editing. Am I selling out my art for convention or monetary sake? I don't know if Holistic Film Editing is any better, but I think it's appropriate because in this show I'm all about working the entire story on one timeline, making sure everything works together. There I go repeating myself. Forgive me if it seems like I'm continuously in search of what I mean, but, well, I am. One of the requirements for graduation, besides finishing this fil

Day 8 Over the past year I have been trying, without success to figure out how to use a calibrated monitor to display  video coming out of the computer, as I color correct. Today we had a color correction class for Final Cut Pro, something that was arranged outside of the program, based on specific requests from our class. I think that speaks volumes about how flexible and generous the school and the instructors are towards meeting the needs of students. Anyway, I'm going to create a screen cast, post it on YouTube and you can link to it to see how it's done. The unfortunate thing is that you can' display HD footage through an SD monitor. So there you are, I have HD footage and I can't monitor my color correction, I have to go solely by the scopes, the Waveform or RGB Parade monitor, VectorScope and Histogram. Of course the trick is making sure you're viewing your results on a calibrated monitor. Of course, that's not nothing, it counts for 90% of the way home, but that last 10% is the difference b

 A really long, typical, frantic dayArrive early at school to pick up equipment and I trigger the alarmOnce back at work I quickly set up for the shoot at 1:00, so the shoot in short order, quickly tear it down and capture it before I run off to school to return the equipmentI'm trying to squeeze in a little editing and hand off copies of a rough cut and end up wasting most of my time.Really, the day is an example of how lack of time leads you into making stupid mistakes that waste more time.After wrapping up the day I include a few comments about coping with the stress and  allowing the film to work itself out in the moments between getting things done.  

Countdown to final project delivery. Days 11 & 10.A lot of hand wringing, but there's hope too!

Day 14 Editing Day 13 Shooting Day 12 Driving home through heavy, sticky traffic I'm still pulling together the entire story of my film, still in rough cut mode. I'm just beginning to set boundaries and eliminating individuals wholesale, because the film isn't long enough to include more than a certain number of faces and voices. I don't know what that number is, but I've already eliminated 1 of 4 key interviews I did with potters.  I found that when I introduced each person at the beginning of the film, one individual didn't fit. It was an odd experience that I had never had before and I it hit me like a vague itch as I was assembling the cut. It was completely apparent when I saw it full blown, along with my class, during the screening I reported on a few episodes ago. It's one of those gut feelings you need to cultivate. As painful as these choices are, I know that hanging on to scenes, footage or characters that don't move the story ahead is like driving full speed ahead into a mud-hole. And nobody wan

Day 16 & 15I'm quite busy using all available time editing my film. My podcasting solution is to record summaries every couple days and posting them. I'm counting down the days until I have to hand in the project and this show is the second one in the series, days 16 and 15.Even with this clever idea I still am a little pokey posting these as I still don't have much free time to edit and even write this meager blog post. The days I'm talking about are not in sync with reality, which I think would be much more dramatic, but since I'm not getting paid to do this and my paying job doesn't subsidize my podcast, I'll cut myself some slack. Once the deadline passes and I can walk out my front door and see that big yellow circle in the sky, I'll have time to post them in short order AND finish that symphony I've always wanted to write.How is it I have time to write this now you say? Well, here's an Avid life lesson. I'm using a G4 Mac, about 1.67 megahertz, 2 gig of RAM and a fast 500 gig Firewire 800 external d

Subclipping is a necessary part of organizing your project, creating structure. Doing that will allow you to rip through your media as you pull the story together. With the deadline I have, about 3 weeks when I recorded this show, what I feel I really need to do is begin editing, but that would be disastrous and lead to chaos with the amount of footage I have to work with.EditingI'm using Avid over FCP. I've chosen to use Avid for this project even though I have more experience using FCP. I've discovered a few drawbacks that could negatively affect meeting the deadline.Finally I have begun editing the footage, starting with discrete topics, keeping a general story order in my head. I find this process works for me. Once I got enough footage cut together I moved the contents of these sequences into a single timeline sequence to see how well everything pulled together to tell a cohesive story. It's still incomplete, but I'm very encouraged.

21 days left. I've used my time during the past week transcribing all the interviews I recorded using a tool called MacSpeech Dictate. It does a good job of converting the spoken word to text. It's a new program that uses the dictation software engine developed by the people who created Dragon Naturally Speaking, a PC only program. It took me a week, but I was able to do it during my hour plus commute. I still have to go back and review the text and correct any errors. The best part of all of this is that I'm reacquainting myself with the words of my interviewees and I've fallen back in love with my story and my film. I don't know where I went, but I'm back. So the next step is to subclip the footage based on topic and then I can use that to build my story.

Well, at last, the final week of classes. I talk about compression in DVD Studio Pro and Color Correction in Avid, including some suggestions for improvement on the DVD authoring class. I'm finally out of my lethargic funk too. I have 30 days to complete the edit, pick up a couple shots and finish the film. I'm way behind, so I'm making plans and thinking focused.

I attended the Sunday sessions of Podcamp Boston 3, which was held at the beautiful Harvard Medical School conference center. I met a lot of generous, interesting people and really put the work in networking. There were a lot of presentations, about 4 or 5 every hour, about 5 times during the day, but I spent more time talking to people outside of these sessions.One of the cool features of this conference was something called a BrainTorrent, which was a beautiful oval room full of tables with name tents on them, each one with a different topic or concept and anyone was welcome to sit down and join the conversation. That's where I met Mary Anne Davis and Guido Stein. Mary Anne is a potter and Guido is a knitter and we got into a conversation about social media and craft and before you know it, I was recording it.My own feelings about the even were very positive. I'm so happy I met as many people as I did. More people than I can remember and credit. Meeting Keith Burtis was very fortunate. His live woodworking

2nd week of the last module in the Filmmaking program at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. We're going through the Apple Pro Training series book, DVD Studio Pro 4. It's an excellent book, all the books in the series are great tutorials and are a good introduction to the Pro Tools suite. They lead you through a series of projects focusing on different parts of the authoring process, using media from professional projects. It's interesting stuff, but we're all a bit tired and looking forward to being done in a week.

Welcome to the longest show I've posted to date. On average these shows run about 15 minutes and when they've gone over  3o minutes I tend to break them into parts. The main reason for the length, which is about 52 minutes, is the inclusion of multiple comments and excerpts from presentations from PAB. My main goal here is to give you a sense of the event, which is quite unique among conferences. But the downside is how much time it adds to the show. And editing multiple interviews complicates the production process. Even up to the last few hours before posting I found some errors that required me to rerecord some sections. Most of the changes are changes in attributions, another time sink in production, which I got wrong on the first recording pass. I'm satisfied with the final show, even though it's long. If it's a bother, let me know, I'm compressing it down as much as I can. In the future, I'm thinking about using Apple's AAC format, which makes mp3 files smaller but retains higher quality. It also allow