This week was interesting, with the snow and all, a few plans got cancelled.

After the holiday Monday, I started Tuesday by working on an editing project, the Tumwater History Talks. It was an interesting experience to learn multicamera editing on Final Cut. Not only did I have to switch between video, and I had to switch between the two audio tracks, sometimes matching one audio track to a separate video track. Later that evening, I worked on the Tumwater City Council Meeting. This night was a lesson in how to fix disasters. EVERYTHING went wrong.

We pulled up with the truck and plugged it into the building, and made all the connections. But audio wasn’t coming through, the switcher program wasn’t loading ANY of the CGs, and worst of all, the camera controller wasn’t connecting to the robotic cameras. All we had was three fixed shots which weren’t even pointing in the right direction. One by one we were able to fix things, switching out all of our cables to find bad ones, restarting computers. We managed to get the audio going. The graphics were all gone, but we were able to find the template for the graphics in the computer’s hard drive and remake the graphics by hand. But the cameras never quite worked. At first we just stood on chairs and manually pointed them in the right directions. But then someone restarted the rack mounted camera brain, to try and fix it, and once all the cameras rebooted, they returned to their default setting, zoomed all the way in and totally out of focus. There are no manual zoom and focus controls on these cameras, and the controller still didn’t work. Ultimately someone had to run back to the station and pick up a camera and a long HDMI cable. We just filmed the meeting with a single camera on a tripod.

I took the rest of the week off until Friday, where I planned to have a long day (9 am-9pm). I was supposed to shoot an interview for my Community Media Matters Doc in the morning, work on a field shoot with Robert in the afternoon, and return to attend the Studio Production class in the evening. Unfortunately my interview subject, and the class were cancelled because of the snow. So I had a short day. It was a fun afternoon, however, filming interviews. We did a standard technique, two over the shoulder shots, so we could see both the interviewer and the subject. It’s always good to learn new techniques.

Also, as an aside, on Saturday I did my first shoot in the studio for a personal project. I recorded a live set with the JNX! I produced and directed the shoot, and was able to get a few volunteers to help on camera and the sound board. I got to put together my experience from video production and my audio recording classes.