The Real Deal pt. 2

As promised, here's a link to our McCain youth story.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92633252

Quinn O'Toole

1:28 PM ET | 07-22-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

 

The Real Deal

Ok, so it may not be the most creative use of the web ever -- but our group has produced an honest-to-goodness, living-and-breathing npr.org web page. (Okay, it doesn't live and breathe ... but it was kinda fun.)

Monday on ATC, Jeff Brady will report on the McCain campaign's efforts to court young voters -- a bloc that Barack Obama has a pretty strong hold on. The web page that goes with that story was written, produced, and entered into NPR's content management system by US. That's right -- radio people! Using Seamus! (full disclosure: big assist by digital media's Maria Godoy -- she's a peach.)

So, I'll post the link when it's live. Check it out -- there's a video and an audio slideshow -- in addition to the web text and the link to the radio story. It was a great experience, really seeing how npr.org works -- and as we've suggested, would be a great task to add to future Knight training programs.

-- Quinn O'Toole

5:52 PM ET | 07-18-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

 

Beginnings And Ends

On the last day of Knight Training, I figured what the heck. I'll post our very first project, partly to show how far we've come.

It's about the closing of a Washington D.C. independent bookstore that happens to be a few blocks away from NPR headquarters. Many of us visited it on a weekly basis to pick up books, DVDs and music for radio pieces, or sometimes just to have lunch in its pleasant little cafe.

--Neda Ulaby

5:12 PM ET | 07-18-2008 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

 

Smokin' Larry

Friendship is an elusive thing. This week we tried to illustrate the bond between two guys who hang out -- for no obvious reason.

Here's the result:

The smoker in the video is Larry Massett.

He's a long time independent radio producer and musician who lives in Cabin John, Maryland, not far from Washington, DC but hundreds of miles away in spirit.

The non-smoker is me.

Continue reading "Smokin' Larry" »

9:57 AM ET | 07-18-2008 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post

 

The Coolest Interactive Thing Ever

Check this out. It generates a graph on the frequency of names. Really, it is the coolest interactive thing I've seen yet.

-- Joel

11:24 AM ET | 07-15-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

 

Knights and Lights

Our Knight training includes a lot of stuff about capturing images - both still and moving - that is a little foreign to guys who have made their careers capturing sound. So we were paying careful attention when we attended a morning tutorial by NPR videographer David Gilkey on the art of lighting.

Just the fact that NPR now has lighting kits must say something. And our membership in the Knight Foundation Training exercise allows us to request one. That means we are given a bag with one diffuse, wide lightbox and another small spotlight to put behind people. This second light, we learned, adds a the sense of depth to what's shown.

Immediately we decided that we'd use our newly formed illumination knowledge. We booked some time in NPR's famed performance studio, which comes complete with a Yamaha grand piano. Our big idea - have some people play the piano and talk about what the instrument means to them, and how playing it makes them feel.

Continue reading "Knights and Lights" »

12:18 PM ET | 07-14-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

 

NYTimes Strikes Again

The Times on Sunday had an amazing Flash presentation on the new architectural wonders of the Beijing games. It's really polished but not to different from Courtney and my presentation on the DC War memorials.

-- Joel Riddle

11:22 AM ET | 07-14-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

 

Premiere Problems Peeve Producers

Since we're sitting here watching our movie convert out of Premiere -- an hours-long enterprise-- we thought this would be a good time to reflect on our experiences this week.

We discovered there are behaviors of Adobe Premiere that we don't yet fully understand.

Or, perhaps, it just doesn't understand us.

The video editing program seemed to freeze at least hourly for us. To defrost it, we always had to log out completely.

Also, the laptop often forgot it was attached to the external hard-drive.

Even after we locked the video and audio in Premiere, we found that when converted to a QuickTime movie, we lost sync.

And there was more.

Art's laptop could not be used to capture video.

And Steve developed an unexplained palsy.

We figure this can't be the program. It must be operator error.

-- Art Silverman and Steve Proffitt

2:26 PM ET | 07-11-2008 | permalink | comments (2) | e-mail post

 

Bike Trail Puts in Speed Limits

Art Silverman, Jeff Brady and I shot the video and Quinn O'Toole and I put the flash project together. We produced two videos, which explain the story, but it's essentially about the introduction of a 15mph speed limit on the Capital Crescent Trail and user reaction. I produced the "Users React" button and frankly, it was painful. Adobe Premiere (AP) isn't very intuitive, at least not to me! I found AP's project page design to be too busy and the panels (timeline, viewing, program, sequence) too small. But the main problem was conceptualizing it. Then one evening after finishing the video while I was biking home I had an Aha! moment: suddenly my brain was connecting dalet and AP in a way that I hadn't before and it helped me understand how Adobe functions. For instance, the timeline area in Adobe is the equivalent of a multiple panel surfer in dalet; the viewing area in AP is a single surfer panel in dalet which I generally use to edit my tape, before dragging it to a multiple panel surfer to create an EDL, and the sequence area is my clipboard. All of a sudden things clicked in place-- three weeks into our five-week training program. Got to go.

Marisa Penaloza

1:24 PM ET | 07-10-2008 | permalink | comments (0) | e-mail post

 

A Great Resource.

Our project this week is on the war memorials on the National Mall. We wanted a cool visual way to navigate numerous media elements that will make up the project. We wanted a flash template in the form of a map showing an aerial view from the World War II Memorial, down the Reflection Pool all the way to the Lincoln Memorial. Google Earth was ok but the WWII Memorial wasn't completed when the satellite image was taken. We found a couple of renderings on-line but they were a bit clunky. So, we asked Jennifer Sharp up in the graphics department for some guidance.

She immediately responded to our request with some suggestions and set-up a meeting for the next day. Wow. Then she had Lindsay Mangum join us. We described what we had in mind. Lindsay said no problem and asked when we would need it. We said by noon on Thursday. She said no problem. This was Wednesday at 4pm. She asked if we would want it in Flash with some images we could use for the project. Shocked, we said that would be great.

Then, on Thursday at exactly 12:00 she e-mailed us a map. It was absolutely perfect. What a help. So, if anyone needs some graphic guidance, ask Lindsay. She's on the 4th floor, right above the election unit.

We love Lindsay.

-- Joel Riddle

12:43 PM ET | 07-10-2008 | permalink | comments (1) | e-mail post