Finally- The end of the semester

To the left you'll notice a new video bar with my project, yeah, I finally put it up. It ended up being just about Catie and what riding has done for her, mainly the ability to speak.
Knowing what I know now, there are a lot of things I would have done differently in creating the whole project. I did a lot of imagining about how this would go, how perfectly set up my videos would be, that the recording would be awesome.... Yeah, the imagining was there, but the planning... Not so much. I went out to do one interview, and I vaguely thought if how I would film it, just because I didn't want to be holding my camera as I interviewed (Awkward!). I didn't bring a tripod or anything, I just kind of assumed/hoped that there would be something there I could set my camera on. Mistake.
I also really, really struggled with some technicalities. Mainly, I couldn't get the format of my videos to work with Movie Maker. I wasted probably 3 weeks of potentially gathering good information while I fought with Movie Maker and numerous file-converting softwares.... It's a long list. Because of that, I unfortunately only had a couple days to edit all of my video after I finally got them converted. There were some looooong nights and some very teary days.
Anyway, it's finally done. People in class gave me a lot of great suggestions for editing-- things I should add, remove, other information that would have been good... I'm pretty pleased with myself and just the fact that I got it done... I actually did a lot of things this semester that I've been pleased with. I took five classes, which a lot of people seemed really surprised by. I got a lot of raised eyebrows and "oh wow, you actually had time to take five classes??" Generally it was a piece of cake, except for the last week or so. I had four papers and this project due all at once, which probably contributed to all the tears. One of the classes I took was Major American Authors (Faulkner) with Lester Fisher. Oh my god, what a nightmare. That was the most difficult class I have ever taken. If I had known in the beginning how hard it was going to be, I wouldn't have taken it. A few weeks into the semester I really wanted to drop it, but I was too afraid to ask him to sign an add/drop form... But I actually wrote my three papers and suffered through it, going to class every day with a nervous sweat and dry mouth. But, seven novels read, one more requirement done. Adding to my list-- There have been no car accidents, no more letters from the RIAA, no insurance fraud and no digging my car out of snow banks at Mast Road :-) Yayyyyyyyy me and for another semester done ...Well, done after my only final Friday morning.

Again: Long Time

I haven't posted anything in almost a month. Crap. I'm a slacker. I'm actually procrastinating at this very moment... I am not enjoying having to finish four final papers this week.
All the presentations we saw last week were awesome. I was really, really, really impressed with all the creativity and the technical skills (both things that I wish I had more of). Melanie's use of the sounds of the bubbles while the beer was brewing was fantastic and Bobby's editing was seamless. I'm so excited for everyone :-) Yeah, we're awesome.
Unfortunately, everyones awesome stories make me even more nervous about my own story. I've had a lot of issues, as you may know, both with getting my information and finding a way to organize and edit it. Tonight and tomorrow night will bring long, endless nights of editing... Oh well. It's not the last week of classes for nothing. I just have to get through three more days and I'm dooooooooooone!!!!!

Wow. Long time, no post.

This will just be brief, since I have tons of other things swimming around in my mind at the moment.
Several weeks ago I had a problem with Movie Maker, the audio bar kept disappearing so there was no way I could edit without totally losing my mind. I had the color scheme on my computer all these funky colors, and as it turned out, I just couldn't see the bar because my colors were off. As soon as I went back to plain old blue, Voila! I could see it again
I've interviewed Cindy Burke, she is Catie and Brian's riding instructor. That went well. We chatted a lot after I stopped taping which I wish I had taped. Oh well, live and learn. I still want to interview Cheyenne, she is Cindy's intern and has known Catie and Brian for several years, and their parents Joyce and Paul. I have chatted with them quite a lot, but I don't have any of it taped or anything.
I had a wicked fun time doing my story map, it was really helpful. I need to see everything all at once to be able to make decisions about ANYTHING. I even categorize my grocery list and prioritize what I need... I know, I know.... It could be an issue.
Well, I need to get back to some awful, grueling homework. I'm taking a class on just William Faulkner *shudder*. I think it's giving me ulcers.

Editing...

I really enjoyed Tom's visit to our class last week, he was definitely the best speaker we've had. I think he was the only one who actually showed us how to do stuff.
It took me a while to get used to using Movie Maker, plus I was having some technical difficulties. The little line thingies weren't showing up when I played my clips, so I emailed Sandy in frustrated tears this morning. We weren't able to get that straightened out, but I did go to the IT desk in the library to get some other issues with my computer taken care of. I used one of the computers in Ham-Smith to edit and wasn't able to finish, which is why my interview isn't here. Surprisingly, I had a lot of fun editing when I became a little more comfortable with movie maker and I'm pretty excited to finish editing my interview...

MIA-- Two weeks in a row

Put bluntly: I am a slacker.

I finally did my first real interviews today with Catie and Brian. I was really, really nervous, but it was pretty fun. Catie was a little difficult to talk to, she spoke very quietly and didn't seem to want to give me much information, I really had to pry stuff out of her. I think she was picking up on my nervousness though. I learned a lot of things about her though that I probably never would have guessed. She referred to herself as a bit of a daredevil, and when she did she got a very scheming look on her face.

Brian, on the other hand, was so, so, so chatty. He's very smart and totally blew me away. He's twelve or thirteen I think (He just started middle school), wants to be a pilot and spent about twenty minutes telling me about how he flew airplanes at summer camp last year. He also had to explain to me what a G-force is and was rattling off the mathematical formula like it was his phone number. I haven't edited either of my interviews yet, I'll save that for another (less stressful) day.

Learning to use Movie Maker in our last class was pretty fun, but once again, frustrating. I'm definitely not the most computer savvy person out there, and when I don't pick up on something right away, I get really, really annoyed. Once again: A personal flaw that I'll need to learn to deal with. I can't really remember all of what Sandy wanted us to write about, so I guess I'm all done for now. I wanted to go to bed early tonight since I had a wicked long weekend, but it's 11:30 and I can't sleep. This is going to be like the Friends episode, "The one where they're up all night".

Is anyone going to Pumpkin Fest this weekend???

I've been MIA

I have been totally MIA this past week, unless of course you know the right place to look. I've been wicked busy-- class, work, and such. I did a lot of things that I didn't want to do, and I didn't do a lot of things that I wanted to do. I had a really hard time finding people to cooperate with me for this weeks assignment. People are either too busy or don't want the entire class to see pictures of them, oh well. Whatevs.
Anyway, I did two little last minute stories, but I'm not really sure which one I want to use. The first one is photos and audio of my friend Riley playing his guitar. I really liked some of the pictures, but they were all the same. I also didn't have a lot of time to take pictures of him because he had to study for a physics test. (Side note-- He's tried to teach me a little, but I'm not a very good student!!! I guess its hard to learn new things at the old age of 20). We actually went to the PCAC late last night to play the pianos. He gave me a solo, but I screwed it up-- go figure.
I cornered my roommate Allie right when she got back from work, before "Private Practice" started at nine and got her to go to The Wildcat Den in the MUB and play some pool with me. (Did you guys know that it used to be a bar? Or so I've heard.) I got some pretty cool pictures, but the audio isn't that great. There are some cool sounds of the balls (or whatever the term is) hitting together, but other than that its a lot of muffled voices and bad music.
I suppose which ever one I use in class tomorrow will depend on what I think matters more: good photos or good audio.
I really enjoyed the presentation in last weeks class-- particularly the Twizzlers from Sandy :-) The chicken catching video was awesome. It's wicked hard to catch a chicken, to anyone thats never had to do it.

Update and TR story

I went back down to the train station tonight while it was still light and had a pretty cool idea. I stood about three feet away from the edge of the platform and videoed the train while it was coming in. It was pretty scary because I was watching the train through the screen but could see it out of the corner of my eye, but not well enough to know exactly where it was. It was wicked loud and windy and I was afraid that I would lose my balance or something and fall into it and die haha. I took some pictures of people getting on and off the train (I was actually brave enough to ask if I they would mind, yay me!!). I haven't looked at them yet, so I don't know how they came out. I videoed the train leaving in the same way. So what I'm going to do, I hope, is start with the train coming in, have a slide show and some of the speeches that turned out okay, and then have the train leave. Kinda fun.

I also went to the horse barn tonight to watch Catie (Catherine) and Brian ride and meet their mom, Joyce. I learned a bit more about Catie and Brian, chatted with Joyce a bit and took some still pictures and videos. I was also talking to Becky, one of the volunteers while I watched Catie groom her horse, Paige. Becky started talking about how much she enjoyed helping with that class because the kids were better riders, and she could see the progress they made through each week and the different things they had learned. I took some pictures, but they all came out really bad. It was really dark in the arena and I didn't want to use my flash. I would feel really bad if it scared one of the horses and one of the kids got hurt. They were also really blurry. Maybe by next week I'll have figured a way to fix that...

Atleast I got a free coffee...

When I read our assignment for the week, I was at home, about 140 miles from UNH. As we all know there are lots of things going on here over the weekend that have the potential to be turned into some multimedia story. Knowing that I wouldn't be back to campus until Sunday afternoon, and then having to work until 10pm, I found myself in a little mini-panic about what I was going to do for a story. Sunday night I was flipping through TNH while I waited for a ride home from work. I didn't want to walk back to my apartment in the dark, much less in the pouring rain. So anyway (I tend to make my stories really long) I found a story in TNH about the construction of the new train station and that they were having their ribbon cutting ceremony on Tuesday morning, today. I thought that might be kind of cool, maybe a video of the train coming in, people getting on and off, speeches, and the best part: The big ribbon and a giant pair of scissors!!!! Did I get what I wanted?? NO!!!!!
Before I start talking about everything that was wrong, I will say that I got a few pictures of some nice looking people waiting for the train. Perhaps they were going home for Rosh Hashanah, but maybe not. Whatever. So I was going to photograph the train coming in. I missed it, as I had my back turned and my camera off. Good timing on my part, right? I did get a picture of it leaving... Ohhhhh goody. Fun..... As I was videoing President Huddleston's very nice speech, a rather large man stepped in front of me. Fantastic. I guess it's not really a big deal though, the whole thing was pretty boring.
So I didn't get my video of the train coming in, a clear video of President Huddleston's speech. Since things always come in threes (or if your me, fours, fives, or sixes...), did I get an actual ribbon cutting? No, BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE A RIBBON AT THEIR RIBBON CUTTING! I suppose I have until noon tomorrow to find some way to salvage this...

On the plus side, I did learn that my camera has an undo-delete feature. Wicked awesome. And I got a free coffee.

Landscapes, Portaits, Campus and others....

I spent a few hours Monday afternoon walking the Harbor Trail in Portsmouth, which is where I took all of the landscape pictures. I liked most of them, but there were a few that I felt were very busy with no focus at all. If any of you know about Art in the Park (I believe thats what they call it), I saw the giant red ant, which was pretty cool. I wanted to go see the other things they had around town, but I didn't feel like walking that far. Instead I had a coffee at Breaking New Grounds, yum :-)
I felt really self conscious about taking pictures of people around campus though. I felt like a bit of a creeper. I just noticed when looking at the few pictures I took, they're all of peoples backs... I suppose that was me unconsciously being self conscious.



I had to add this, everybody loves
a cute groundhog :-)

Portraits

For the most part I enjoyed the video we watched in class, but after a while it started to get a little redundant. This is one of the five or so pictures that I took of Christina on 9/18. The lighting isn't the greatest, it's a little dark, but I think it makes her look a little mysterious. I didn't edit it too much, except for cropping it a little. The one little branch on the left side is making me nuts though. If I cropped that out, it would take off a piece of her elbow, then the picture would be off center, which I think would be worse.

Beginning my story...

Today I went down to the Equine Center to talk to Cindy Burke, the director of the TRP, about some of her riders that I could use for my story, what she thought would be appropriate for me to cover and how I could do it. We decided that I would profile the family (potentially) of a nine year old girl named Catherine and her older brother Brian. Catherine was misdiagnosed with Autism when she was young, has had her diagnoses changed several times and is not deemed to have ADHD. Cindy told me a little bit about Brian, who also has ADHD, I believe. I've worked with Catherine in her riding lessons two years ago, so I am a little more familiar with her.
The reason that Cindy and I thought that this family would be good for me to profile is that Catherine's story is pretty dramatic. She didn't speak until she was at least three years old and went through a lot of different forms of therapy until she began riding horses. She actually said her first word while she was riding.
I'm going to the barn this Tuesday to meet Joyce and watch Brian and Catherine ride. I'm pretty excited :-)

First story

I've been thinking since Thursday about what I wanted to do for my first multimedia story. I generally put a lot of pressure on myself to come up with an idea thats out-of-this-world amazing. Unfortunately, when it doesn't work out that way, it's pretty disappointing. Anyone want to help me out with that one??
I used to be an Animal Science major with a concentration in Equine Sciences. I didn't have my horse Dovey here when I was a freshman and was pretty bummed that I wasn't riding, so for something to do I volunteered for the Therapeutic Riding program here. A lot of the kids were wicked fun. There were two girls that I usually worked with, I think one of them was Autistic and the other had ADHD. Generally, the riders in the program have cerebral palsy, stoke, MD, learning/developmental/emotional disabilities etc.
I haven't decided yet exactly how I'm going to approach this. Most likely I'll pick one student to profile and interview them, their parents, and possibly their instructors. Obviously I will take some videos and still-photos of them riding and the types of things they do around the barn. That's basically all I've got for right now, but I'll write more as it comes :-)

Making things personal.

I spent a good part of this beautiful rainy afternoon browsing Sandy's list of websites that he wanted us to look at. I got pretty side tracked though and ended up picking the pieces of dog and horse hair out from between the keys of my laptop. I have a white Brittany Spaniel and a white Thoroughbred, interestingly, I can tell which is the dog hair and which is the horse hair. It very quickly became some sort of addiction.
By now, after cleaning my keyboard, I've looked at most of the websites. My favorite one so far has been Mediastorm.org, where I watched Marlboro Marine, and a few other videos. Last year I took Intro to Creative Non-fiction, with Janet Schofield. I really enjoyed it, but I always struggled with finding a way to make other people understand and relate to things I went through in my stories. It was very frustrating. In Marlboro Marine, Luis Sinco, a photojournalist from the Los Angeles Times profiled LCpl James Blake Miller in his personal struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It is something, I think, that everyone knows about, but doesn't ever want to talk about, for obvious reasons. About 12-20% of soldiers returning from Iraq will develop PTSD. You read about it in the paper or hear about it on TV, but unless you know someone who is dealing with it, it seems so generalized and you can kind of shrug it off and say "Yeah, okay... Whatev's".
Sixteen minutes of pictures, some voice clips and some good music got rid of the generalization and turned PTSD into something that can be personal to everybody. Sinco's story, for me, gave PTSD a voice, a face, a wife, friends, a house in Kentucky, and a sweet Harley.
Today, nearly everyone has a friend, a family member, or a lover on deployment. My ex-boyfriend came home from Iraq in May. I had heard things about his Company on the news sometimes, so I knew a little bit about what was going on, in regards to attacks and such. I didn't ever realize how little they showed on TV until I knew someone who had actually been there. There was a Marine in my ex-boyfriend's Company that hanged himself within a few weeks after arriving in Iraq. The guys had to cut him out of the rafters. Though my ex did not develop PTSD, the same thing applies. Things don't become personal until they're a little closer to home. Even though I don't personally know LCpl. Miller, I feel now like I do.
On a much lighter note, the Virtual Grocery Store at Interactivenerratives.org was pretty cool Next time I go grocery shopping, I'll pay attention to the prices at eye level versus the prices closer to the floor :-)

So...

I feel really awkward doing this... This class (Engl. 721) seems like it'll be pretty cool, I'm stoked that we don't have to buy a book, as I've had to buy books for four other classes and I'm flat broke. I have absolutely no experience with multimedia stuff, except I made a sale-video once for a friend that was selling her horse.
I took photography as a high school senior, which I really enjoyed.
As far as journalism goes, I took Newswriting last semester. It really wasn't my cup of tea, but I was also working +40 hours a week on top of being a full-time student, so I didn't always have the energy to run around and interview people for stories. I thought I'd give it another shot and see what happens, so, here goes...