The irony of success

One of my primary motivations for starting this blog last June was due to our newspaper’s website not allowing the display of anything but text – regurgitation of stories already published in newsprint. If I wanted an outlet for teaching myself how to produce multimedia stories, it would have to be on a blog of own or on someone elses website, someone who actually wanted to post one of my slide show productions.

The prospect of this symbiotic relationship with someone elses website has been in the back of my mind for each one of my story projects.

My first audio story on a garage band workshop was offered to the city parks & recreation department for use on their website. They loved the production but never posted it. My first audio-driven slide show about an annual chalk art festival was offered to the sponsoring art association for use on their website. Again, the slide show was praised, but the organization never actually got around to posting it. After finally completing a slide show last month on an elementary dual language program, one that I was ASKED to produce for use on the elementary school’s website, it has yet to be approved by the school district administration.

That made three for three of my slide shows that went unpublished outside of my own blog, so the irony was not lost on me that my first successful placement of a slide show was on the news blog at my own newspaper. That sense of success, however, was short-lived.

The blog at my newspaper was started last fall by a staff reporter out of his frustration over corporate restrictions placed on our newspaper’s website. He was instrumental in gaining approval to set up a blog from the newsroom for “breaking news” and bgan doing some interesting things with it that we weren't allowed to do on our own website: using photos, graphs and even short pieces of video – mostly all his stuff. Officially, it was the newsroom’s blog but he was the gatekeeper and practically the blog's sole contributor. My efforts to contribute to what had become essentially "his" blog didn’t get much response from him.

Not until I got assigned to shoot the photos for one of his pet stories and thought of a way to benefit our mutual interests.

His story was a somewhat whimsical outing to the Portland International Raceway in the company station wagon to see whether Oregon’s mandated E10 ethanol gas actually costs drivers only 3% more gas consumption than standard gasoline, as the state claimed. Our newspaper wanted to do an entire page on this “challenge” to the state’s claim. On the way out, I casually asked the reporter if he was interested in my doing a slide show on the challenge for use on the blog. Sure, he said.

I spent the next two hours documenting our excursion in audio and images without planning or preparation. That was on a Monday afternoon. Our next newspaper production day for the issue that would carry the full page on the challenge was Thursday, giving me only three days to complete the slide show production in order to have it ready for timely posting on the news blog – in stark contrast to the three months my last production took.

Production workflow had to be compressed, starting with the story line. The story to be told was simple: A reporter conducts a test to tell whether one type of gas gets significantly better mileage than another. Does it or doesn’t it?

Production workflow was further simplified, inadvertently, due to my under reporting in both images and audio. I should have gotten a wider variety of driver shots instead of shooting only from the back seat. I could have traded places with the second reporter and shot side views of the driver and even grabbed a few shots from immediately in front of the driver. I should have miked the driver and conducted a running interview rather than settling for the casual banter between the two reporters – audio that was mostly unusable due to background engine noise. I should have had more specific coverage – audio and visual – of the test’s methodology and the switch between the two types of gas. As for the post challenge interview, I should have thought through my interview questions instead of letting the reporter do his own stand-up routine.

In short, my lack of planning limited the amount of material available for the production. Nonetheless, I decided to go ahead with what I had on hand and set the priority of expediency over quality, just to see whether I could meet a three-day deadline. Constructing the audio storyline took more than half the time, starting and ending with some of the stand-up monologue from the reporter. The rest was ambient audio of gas being poured into the tank, external engine audio of the car pulling away, audio of the car passing by on a sharp curve, and brief-but-relevant excerpts between the two reporters from inside the car. I had to develop info slides to explain the testing process and to conclude the storyline, due to the fact I that I had neither the audio nor the images to do this efficiently.

At one point, the reporter offered to let me include video he took with his point-and-shoot camera through the windshield from the front passenger seat. I explained to him that the slide show production software I used – Soundslides – couldn’t include video clips. Actually, I knew video clips could be incorporated with video editing software, QuickTime Pro, after converting the Soundslides production to video, but the reporter’s video was pointless and uniformly poor in quality – a shaky, handheld record of lap driving and incidental conversation between the reporter and another reporter assisting him with the driving. I didn't give it another thought.

Three days later, the ethanol slide show [click to view] was complete. It ran just under two minutes long and received rave reviews in the newsroom. That was very satisfying even though I knew it wasn’t my best work. It was a newspaper assignment converted to multimedia and completed on schedule, and I was proud to have my slide show placed on the newspaper’s blog.

Imagine my dismay the next morning to discover that the reporter added a production of his own – more than four and a half minutes of essentially unedited video right next to my slide show.

Mountain biking – Part II

The four-week class introducing kids to mountain biking culminated in a group outing to our county's only state park, 1,650 acres of rolling forest perched on the eastern margin of Oregon's Coastal Range. The trails there were not particularly formidable, but before the trek was over, it was clear that I'd put a lot more thought and preparation into my equipment than into the logistics of my coverage, much less my own conditioning.

If I had thought through the project like a producer instead of a newspaper photographer, I would have foreseen the value of scouting the trail ahead of time. The class instructor mentioned in our phone conversation the night before that he and a park ranger had ridden the trail that morning just to be sure it was suitable for the kids. I hadn't been invited along because I hadn't mentioned that such knowledge of the trail would help me plan my coverage – knowledge such as only the first mile of the five-mile trek would actually involve anything resembling a steep, rugged mountain trail. The other four miles of the trek would be spent on a smooth, asphalted path that was once a railroad bed.

For a slide show on mountain biking, I needed the mountain trail images, and not so much the smooth, nearly flat images of the fortest path.

What I also failed to impress upon the instructor was the necessity of my getting ahead of the group – frequently – in order to shoot them riding toward the camera and across the frame, rather than mostly away from the camera. To do this, I had to find a suitable site ahead of the group to stake out for photographing and audio recording as they rolled by, then get ahead of the group again and do the same thing. The instructor didn't seem to get this at all. Once they swept past the initial site of my coverage at the top of the mountain trail, the group only stopped once to rest during the initial one-mile descent. That gave me a chance to catch up, but I had to skip the breather they were taking and keep riding to find the next site of coverage.

This went on for the next four miles. I knew I didn't have enough images of kids riding on an actual mountain trail, but figured I'd have a second chance on the way back up – and the climbing shots would be even more crucial to the slide show than images of their breezy descent.

That descent was deceptively breezy. Retracing the gradual four-mile incline of smooth path back toward our starting point soon left me panting. It got much harder to catch up with the group as I fell further and further behind. I knew the group was scheduled to stop and rest at the base of the final one-mile stretch of mountain trail. I planned to confront the instructor there and convince him that unless he gave me a better chance of getting ahead of the group frequently enough on this last leg of the climb, I wouldn't have enough images for a slide show.

Imagine my disappointment to find no group of kids waiting at the base of the mountain trail. They had gone on without me. Instead, another adult was waiting to tell me that I could either chase them up the mountain trail or take the park road – a "short cut" – back to our starting point and try to head them off near the top of the trail. The road was probably only a half mile, I was told. I chose the road and began peddling hard to salvage the slide show.

The road back wasn't a half mile. It was 1.25 miles of steady incline that rose more than 400 feet, and I didn't really have a good understanding of how to work the 15 gears in order to cope with that. I finally reached our trailhead – gasping for air – only to see the last of the kids coming off the trail.

I had enough material to produce a full-page feature for the newspaper (finessing the fact that I didn't have any decent mountain trail shots), but I had missed the main point for a slide show about mountain biking!