My first video story

Posted on August 18, 2007 by Melissa Worden

After a micro-mini Final Cut Pro tutorial this morning, attendees in the video track at the Multimedia News Producers Workshop captured video and got to work on editing. We had five hours to pull it all together. Five hours!?!? Surely it was only two. The time passed by so quickly.

Julie Jones and Mike De Sisti were on hand to answer all of our questions from “wait, how do I start??” to “how do I export this?” and many, many more in between.

And also to remind us that we needn’t get too stressed out about the final product because we’re going to fail beautifully on our first attempt. That’s how it goes when you’re learning. It relieved a lot of pressure for me, at least, and I think our class did a great job for 1 1/2 days of video instruction. You can see the full lineup on the MNPW YouTube channel (TK soon).

Here’s what I came up with from my trip to The Wienery, a hot dog/burger joint in Minneapolis:

Lessons learned (of many):

>> I need more nat sounds and video. I had a lot of b-roll but very little I could use for transitions. But I really liked the guy playing the piano while he waited for his order (could you hear the burp at the end?). Mike recommended I use that to move the piece along. Voila. It saved me, I think.

>> As I suspected, I, in fact, got no sequencing whatsoever. So I’ll need to practice that next time.

>> I must GET CLOSE to the person I’m taping. I missed a lot of good cooking/food prep shots because I was too timid to get right up to the stove. This is going to take some practice to feel comfortable interacting with them with a camera in my hands. Julie explained it to me that it’s like having a conversation with the person. You have to interact with them to be able to get the shots you need to tell the story. And if I don’t feel comfortable doing that, they’re certainly not going to feel comfortable, either.

>> If I could edit again, I’d put an outside or establishing shot near the beginning that shows where we’re at so I don’t have to set it up in the text.

>> Shake much? I need to use a tripod. They didn’t supply us with any, but the camera’s just too heavy to hold steady.

>> I’d use a wireless mic on the owner/cook because the background noise is too loud; he was wired to Barbara’s (my video buddy on this assignment) camera, not mine. We didn’t have time to try to share clips.

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One Response to “My first video story”

Late Monday 8-20 links | News Videographer on July 1st, 2008 3:15 pm

[…] Worden went to a pretty sweet training journalism conference too. And she’s got skills critiquing her own work. That probably means she’s going to learn and progress very […]

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