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

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

Quinn O'Toole

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

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

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" >

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

-- Joel

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" >

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

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.

Steve Proffitt, left, and Art Silverman, render video in Adobe Premiere.

Photo by Jo Miglino.

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

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

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

Neda and I arrived on a hot Washington summer Sunday with storm clouds threatening and the Bhutanese with whom we spoke excitedly talking about closing their tents early because of the coming storm. It never came but we felt rushed. We set up our camera and got no picture. After about five minutes of feverish fiddling we called Beth, who'd said she might be at the festival. She was...and calmly pointed out that our shutter was closed. But then we could not get any audio - neither the camera mic nor the wireless would work. Somehow we managed to get the lav to function and set out in search of prey. See what we came up with, if you dare.
--Tom

More than 20 artists live and work at 52 O St, NW, a 90-year-old former warehouse in Washington, D.C. Tom, Neda and I paid the artists a visit to find out more about the building that serves as both workplace and home. Explore their studios -- this is not your everyday home office!

-- Beth

The New York Times has posted a video on their home page. It runs over 15 minutes. I watched the first 2 and it was quite compelling. The production was also really good. However, I didn't have 15 minutes to watch.

-- Joel Riddle

This morning we started with a refresher course on Flash. It helped... a lot. Previously, we had been using templates. Just importing new images and changing content paths. Today, we actually built a template from the ground up including some action script. Suddenly, the confusing Flash timeline made sense. We're just using the program for shells so I'm sure we haven't even scratched the surface yet but it was a good session.

Later in the morning, Sr. Online Editor Todd Holzman had us "webify" a radio script. NPR lingo for turning a radio script into a print page for the web. It was hard and I think most of the class came away with a new respect for what the web folks have to do. Again, it became obvious that what's good on the radio isn't always good for the web.

-- Joel Riddle

The New York Times has created a great interactive map showing the individual stages of the Tour de France. It can be found here. It evolves along with the race so the the map is updated with new info after every stage. Check it out.

-- Joel Riddle

In researching a story about the presidential campaigns' efforts to attract young voters, I found a treasure that must be shared. On John McCain's campaign site there's a video game called Pork Invaders.

A McCain logo at the bottom of the screen shoots red vetoes up at pigs, which are dropping little bombs that can kill the logo if you don't maneuver out of the way with the arrow keys. And look for the pork barrels flying across the screen--one I hit was worth 300 points!

Barack Obama's campaign hasn't responded with a competing video game. But he has Nintendorks for Obama on his side. The Nintendorks have an amusing web site. One headline reads, "For dorks who love Nintendo... and Barrack Obama". But apparently "dorks" are not into giving campaign donations. As of Monday, July 7th they'd raised $125 from four people, that despite the offer of a button, magnet or two stickers with the "Nintendorks for Obama" logo.

--Jeff Brady

I was just surfing the NPR site checking out different types of media when I stumbled on this video about oil in the Nigerian delta posted by WESUN. I was mostly interested in who produced it. However, when the video started, I was surprised to see that the video (actually more of a slide show) had a soundtrack. The music is strong and fits the images, which are incredible. It isn't voiced but does use still text effectively.

It turns out that it was produced by a photog from National Geographic and was posted to accompany his book, which was the subject of the radio interview. The music underlying the video isn't my main concern because I hope that NPR's policy, whatever form it takes, will allow for music. However, the video could be interpreted as being a bit bias and it's not entirely clear weather NPR produced it or not. And, if it is indeed NPR policy not to have music on the web yet, how did this get through?

-- Joel Riddle

We started our week with David Gilkey, one of NPR's two Videographers, though I'm not sure how they would feel about that title. He gave us a quick tutorial on lighting. He focused on musical performances, or perf chats in NPR lingo, because that is probably the one scenario where we would have enough set-up time to bother with a lighting kit. It was interesting. He discussed the problems radio interviews cause when shooting for video. Basically the mic is in the way so a video shoot would involve asking the performer to redo a song with a mic that wasn't directly in the shot.

Then he moved on to how lighting works. The up-shot was that you need consistent defused light that isolates the person you are shooting. He talked about lighting problems camera operators run into in the field and how to work around those. This led to a broader discussion on the direction of NPR and its future web presence.

-- Joel Riddle

Ladder-style lacing

Photo by Ian Fieggen .

OK, so maybe its not as useful as fifty ways to leave your lover. Still, there is something alluring about creative shoe-lacing.

But first, let me offer a little background:

Us Knights-In-Training are asked to do a story each week. My partner, ATC producer Art Silverman, came up with a good one. The magazine, National Geographic Kids had gotten their readers to send in old sneakers. They were going to string them all together and set a new world record. It was a natural story for this "new media" world - good visuals, activity and even an eight year-old kid who had collected over five hundred sneakers. So we recorded audio, shot stills and video, came back and tried to make something out of it.

But here's the thing. In Knight training, we are asked to present the story in several different ways. There might be a video, a slide show with audio, and maybe a map. In our case we had the overall story, and we had a nice interview with the kid, but we sort of needed one more element.

So we did what anyone would do in this situation. Google.

And there we found Ian's Shoelace site. In the lingo of the Web, OMG!

In addition to 34 ways to lace your shoes, Ian offers extensive advice on pressing problems such as slipping or crooked shoelaces. He provides a treatise on aglets - those would be the usually plastic things at the ends of the laces. And, of course, he has instructions on a variety of alternate shoelace tying techniques.

Ian lives in Australia, and according to his Web site he's just a regular guy and not a "Knotting Nut." Whatever.

For me, at least, he's yet another reason why the World Wide Web really has made the Real Wide World a much more interesting place.

Oh, and here's the video we made of the successful attempt to set a record for the longest string of sneakers

- - Steve Proffitt and Art Silverman

We're at the end of the third week, hard as it is to believe. I'm feeling good about much of what we've learned. It's been a bit frustrating for many of us to get training in video and photography directly after we go out and shoot video or photos. The slideshow I've just put together is composed of fifteen photos that could have been so much better had I taken them even one day later.

In retrospect, I'm so embarrassed about photos I've submitted to Coburn in the past -- ones I was convinced were excellent and that I now realize really, really sucked. Our collective empathy for the folks in our film and photo department has vastly increased over the past few weeks. / nu