a pow wow, a photo essay and a process

click on the image for video

pow wow is a hard word to type over and over again. i kept typing powow in my captions after covering the 7th annual mid-winter pow wow here in lima last week. since it was a slow sunday, i decided to mess with video. i definitely made some goof ups -- couldn't find the good mic, so my interview audio was recorded with a shotgun mic in the loudest room ever; struggled a bit with making good photos and good video simultaneously so i feel like what i produced was just okay; still haven't figured out the exposure and wb settings on the video camera; missed some things in final cut that ended up in the final edit of the video [the weird video going on behind the stills in some parts] -- but its a process i hope yields improvement. just like typing pow wow over and over again.

click on the image for video.

one step i did make with the pow wow video was that i did it on deadline. my only other previous video attempt was part of a photo essay i did on alex evans, a kid with cerebral palsy that goes to one of the high schools here and loves his football team. this was my first attempt at messing with moving images and final cut pro, so the video is pretty imperfect and the editing [and figuring out the software] took forever and a half.

click on the image for video.
photo cred to matt

it feels like i might be getting worse with every subsequent attempt. yesterday marked lima's first brush with the presidential campaign when bill clinton came to town to campaign for hillary. seeing that i did the pow wow video fine on deadline last week, the paper asked me to do video for this event and matt did the stills. when we were leaving the house to ride to the high school together, i asked matt if we had packed a tripod. he said yes. when we get to the high school, he busts out the most special tripod ever. having really overestimated the value of a tripod covered in glue meant to hold a much smaller still camera, i found myself in a position where it seemed like the practical solution to ditch the tripod and just shoulder the camera.

as you can see from the video, this was a bad idea. i also forgot a very basic rule -- instead of being all over the place like i was, a shot should be held for five seconds without really panning or zooming or any actions of the like. my defense mechanism has generated a series of excuses for these technical shortcomings --- the first [and probably the only semi-valid one] being this tripod issue. i won't bother with the rest.

i also was totally ignorant to the concept of sound boards at events like this. this time i found the good wireless mic that i used for the interviews, but didn't plan on bringing a cord to plug into the board to get good speech audio. again with the shotgun mic.

the last thing on the short list of horrible things about this video is the glitches in the editing. having overwhelmed myself by filming too much useless footage i had to sort through, i was up until 9 this morning editing the video. sleep deprived people cant catch things like that freaky "unrendered" screen in the interview footage and the lower 3rd bar with the messed up text.

while i was uploading the video, i found myself searching through the mercury news' video stash lingering especially on their use of stills and video in their political coverage [having come off of this event]. i really liked their SUPER TUESDAY video and their Day in the Life of the Mayor. They have a very distinct style and a progressive sense of the use of the medium that I know not every one is receptive to, including our last videographer who scoffed at what he called "weird shit". In trying to break from television broadcast tendencies, i hope i don't end up trying to emulate some of this stuff and failing. I hope to get my shit together with a video camera and plan correctly so don't find myself grouchily tearing up my own work when the video is posted.