Electric Fishwrap

This Sunday my paper published its first ever video on our Web site. It was for my graduation package (see the main piece and video here, and student introductions and favorite teacher here). [As an aside if you cannot view the video let me know. I can’t on my computer at home, nor on the computer at work. It just flat out won’t load. Our IT guys are trying to figure out why.]

[EDIT: IT guys say if you cannot view the video you need to download Flash 9.]

Years ago, my paper used to cover every graduation. Since there are more than 14 in the area (including alternative schools) it was an onerous task. The entire staff was involved. The editors scaled it down to one profile per school. The whole staff was still involved, but it did not include racing from one graduation to another, or sending four reporters out on a Friday night to cover each graduation.

My task when I came here was to pare down our coverage. We were short-staffed throughout the spring due to inevitable turnover, and editors thought graduation took up too many resources. So I had this crazy idea to invite one student from every school that we had previously covered to a panel discussion. We sat down with the seniors and started asking them questions. Are they ready for graduation? Do they want to keep living in Skagit Valley? Will global warming impact your life? How about the Iraq war?

I asked most of the questions with county reporter Ralph Schwartz helping to moderate. City editor Colette Weeks and reporter Aaron Burkhalter recorded the video.

We got some great answers, and I definitely want to do this again. But because this was my paper’s very first try with video, here’s what we would do differently.

1. Tripod. It doesn’t feel like watching the Blair Witch Project, but the first thing anyone sees is the camera shake.
2. Microphones. I’m not sure how this would work with a large group interview, but I plan to find out. Microphones are not terribly expensive. But to get the whole group we need something else. The background noise is almost more audible than the speaking. I tried to remove some of the noise in post-production, and I was able to with the introductions video.
3. Lighting. When we visited the room, the lighting seemed OK. There was ample natural light coming from the north-facing window. But it looks a little dark to me.
4. Identifiers. In one of the videos, you don’t know who is talking. In the other video, half of the time is eaten up by students introducing themselves. It would save a lot of time and create less confusion if we were to just add their names and school affiliation in a nameplate with them talking.
5. Define the story. The only thing that lets people know what the video is about is that it’s located on the same page as the graduation story. It does not stand alone. I should have introduced the package for the first 20 seconds or so with a voice over.

I am certain we will do better in the future. But we had to start somewhere. Even though I knew we didn’t have enough tripods or mics, I wanted to plunge ahead and get that first attempt under our belt.

On a side note, our intern started yesterday. Keith Chaplin is a Washington State University student who is really interested in multimedia. In high school he took a video class that I recently featured in the SVH. He’s going to be with us for 10 short weeks, and I hope we can learn from him as much as he will learn from us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under multimedia, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.