Boone Life - Beginnings: New Enterprises

Hallelujah! After much effort (including 13 hours yesterday), I have finished one of the two Boone Life assignments for this semester. What's a Boone Life assignment, you say? Well, the grad students in Staff each have to find 2 people to do picture stories on, according to the theme, 'Beginnings.' My first one was a woman, Kasey Ryan, that I met through my friend, Rachel. She has several beginnings this year: divorce after 8 years, a new business, and she recently (Sept. 20) became a Christian.



This assignment taught me a lot about doing one of these things:

1. Do your interview early on. It took a while (!) for me to be able to check out a Marantz (a fancy video recording system) to tape the audio for this project. And after I was done, there were 5 or 6 other situations that I knew I wanted to get that I hadn't photographed yet. For instance: I would have loved to show her catering. I would have loved to show her COOKING at least. I wanted to show her interaction with her kids (this one I managed).
2. Get bunches of interviews so that it's not just one person talking.
3. Figure out what type of ambient noise you want in the background. I ended up using noise from her store, and a little bit from outside her store, but it probably would have been more interesting if it had been something like while she was catering. Although, that I think wouldn't have quite fit the story.
4. Transcribing audio can take a long time! One, 30-minute interview took me I think 4-5 hours to transcribe and I type quickly!
5. Putting it (the audio) into Final Cut can take a long! time. Figuring out how I wanted and what I wanted to pull, plus cutting it down so it was the right length... Long time.
6. Figuring out what pictures to do - a long time. This was the first slideshow I have put together myself. So, my first edit had way too many pictures in it. The rule of thumb is 3-5 seconds for any one picture.
7. Consistently use a type of transition - even if it's no transition.
8. I love it when a plan comes together (thank you, Hannibal Smith!).

Also, from discussing slide shows in class - if you use video make sure that you use it more than once....