My First Multimedia Slideshow

So last Wednesday I finished my first Multimedia slideshow. Overall, I think the final product came out fairly nice. Granted, I could have done much better…but the goal of this first production was mainly to get myself comfortable with not only the technical aspects of the whole process but the logistics and pacing.

My thoughts on Production #1

Preproduction:
To prepare for the slideshow, I created a mental list of the kind of shots I needed to get and the shots I wanted to get. Unfortunately, this was difficult, as I had never seen the place before. Still, it was helpful to use some imagination. I should have written them down, as it is easy to forget something in the field.

I also double-checked my equipment to make sure everything was charged up and ready to go. Lastly, I created a list of about 10 questions for the interview, this served as a rough guideline as well as a safety in case the conversation died down during the actual interview.

Production:
Capturing the images was typical photojournalistic procedure; I just slumped into the normal Daily habit of taking a photo of everything, making sure to pay close attention to detail. There was a lot of stuff in this workshop so this part was fairly easy.

The one thing I did wish I had more shots of was the actual subject, Jon, doing things around the workshop. This slipped my mind during the actual shoot and would have been easily remedied if I wrote it down.

As far as audio, I didn’t have a good place to set the microphone stand so I had to hold it. Oddly, enough, this really affected my interview, as I was focusing more on the technical quality rather than the content and was sort of spacing out. In the future, I am definitely going to figure out a way (tripod>>to>>mic conversion stand maybe) to fix this. I also need to work on continuing the stream of questions; coming up with follow-up questions in my head to ask while the subject is talking away. Lastly, I need to get nat-sounds or natural sounds. A hammer banging on something could have been a great sound FX to use and I totally forgot about capturing any of that.

Post Production:
As a semi-experienced user of Final Cut, the one thing I really need to focus on is speed. I am used to having a few weeks to edit down a short film. For news, the turnaround time needs to be much quicker. Keyboard shortcuts here I come!

The one part of postproduction that really didn’t surprise me was how long it took. I knew I would have to spend about thirty minutes for every one minute of production. I just need to plan ahead next time.