Like someone rolling a large stone uphill

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks stewing unhappily over the situation with my first production posted on our newspaper’s blog. In my view, a succinct audio-driven slide show that took a lot of work was given equal weight to an overly long, unedited and pointless piece of video shot YouTube-style and slapped together by a reporter. I even offered to incorporate some of the reporter’s video into the slide show if he would just remove his video. He said he’d be glad to swap my original slide show with one that included video, but adamantly refused to remove his own video because it was “fun” and had received a lot of hits on the blog. Never mind that most of those hits resulted from my posting our side-by-side slide show and video on three different forums devoted to multimedia production, inviting comments on the contrast between the two. Nor would it have made any difference to the reporter if I showed him some of the scathing remarks on the video.

Quality control was not the issue. The issue was who held the territorial rights to the newspaper's blog.

This particular reporter was in charge of the newspaper’s blog. He initiated it and kept it alive. It was his baby and he had the final say on it. He was its editor. My greatest source of frustration with the whole business of producing newspapers, large and small, has stemmed from the clash between my professional ego and 'someone else in charge' – editors. The fire-bucket style of teamwork involved in newspaper production depends upon its editors serving as gatekeepers. The editors in charge set the standards for quality. All too often, more especially on smaller newspapers, the only thing that matters is being in charge.

I don’t know why I thought this paradigm would change with the transition from newsprint to Internet.

All this has left me very discouraged. Over the past year I've spent countless hours teaching myself the basics of audio slide show production, using somewhat less than basic means. I think I've accomplished what I set out to do with my own blog. If there is no meaningful future outlet for these efforts at my own newspaper – with no access to its website and no standards set for content on its blog – then there isn't much reason to continue.

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!

Taking another crack at a slide show

In the past two weeks I’ve managed to crack the screen on my little camera – again, solve a persistent wind noise problem on my ersatz shotgun mic, and fail at yet another slide show project.

After such a long production time spent on the DLP Learning project, I wanted to try to complete the next slide show as fast as possible from scratch. The next subject to catch my attention was a new city parks and recreation class about mountain biking for kids. All that remained of the class was one session of instruction before the the group of kids ventured onto a real mountain trail to test their new skills. One class and the outing would be all the material I’d need for a slide show.

Participation in that one class taught me three things. For openers, 1) Riding a mountain bike is considerably more complicated than riding my vintage 1979 street bike – not just the additional gears, but the whole body language involved in negotiating uneven terrain. Of more immediate concern, however, 2) You shouldn’t try to operate a camera while riding a bike over uneven terrain. I nearly lost my balance going over a hillock and smacked the camera against the handlebar in the lunge to recover. The same camera that just come back from repair for a cracked screen last week, now had its screen cracked again, and I had to shoot the rest of the class without a viewfinder.

The third revelation from the outdoor class came when I sat down to review my audio: 3) Wind noise that may not sound so bad in the field on ear buds, sounds a lot worse in production. Nearly all of the class audio was tainted with the scratchy rumble of wind noise. Something had to be done to improve the wind screening.

I knew from reading about audio quality control that fluffy “dead cat” windscreens were considered the most effective defense against wind, so I bought a small patch of fake fur from a fabric shop and improvised. Starting with a new Swiffer duster handle to get the benefit of its full extension, I used a heavy rubber band to secure the cabled mic head to the end of the handle extension, then Velcroed the furry ‘sock’ over that.

It worked beautifully – no more wind noise!

Unfortunately, lavender was the only color of fake fur I could find that didn’t have a scratchy glue base that might rub against the mic head. Consequently, my primary piece of outdoor audio equipment was now a fluffy, lavender eight-inch sock at the end of a corded, purple three-foot-long Swiffer handle.

So much for looking inconspicuous.

As for the other two problems, I’d have to separate my bike riding and equipment operations, and I’d have to devise a way to access and secure both microphone and camera as quickly as possible. The camera was simple enough. I used the same Lowepro REZO 15 camera case that attached to my belt with Velcro and a snap, reattaching that to a wrist sweatband on my left hand. With the camera strap already around my wrist, I could simply pull out the camera in one movement and be ready to shoot left-handed.

The audio equipment was another matter. I had to pack and unpack a three-foot shotgun mic at the end of a six-foot cord for each recording session. This is where the Swiffer handle’s combined folding and telescoping design came in handy. The cord could be wrapped around the collapsed handle which could then be attached to a belt loop with a snap ring added to the end of the handle, and Velcro-strapped to my right thigh. I could strap down and unstrap my audio equipment within seconds.

The setup made me feel like Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter with the sawed-off shotgun strapped to his hip in the old “Wanted: Dead or Alive” TV series . . . except maybe for my color scheme.

DLP slide show completed + minimal gear reaffirmed

Image sequencing for the Dual Language Program production went smoothly enough, but for the frustration of having shot hundreds of images and still coming up short on key shots for points made in the audio track. How could I cover three DLP classes and not shoot more images of Hispanic and non-Hispanic students working together? I wound up relying heavily on informational slides. That was a disappointment, but then again, the production was meant to be expository rather than tell a story. What was surprising was how much time it took to write and rewrite the copy for those information slides. I had to keep the flow of written material supplemental to the audio track without being too wordy or redundant.

For the entire four-minute production, I wound up using only 42 slides due to holding the info slides on screen a bit longer to provide reading time. For this production, I shot everything horizontally and matched the info slides in size to give the entire image sequence a consistent flow. I don’t know if there is an optimal file size for use on the Internet, since Soundslides automatically resizes everything, but I standardized on a 6x4.5-inch frame at 200 dpi.

As for the Soundslides process, I wasted a lot of time adjusting the image intervals, then making changes in the sequence, and then having to readjust the subsequent changes in image intervals. I should have nailed down a final sequence before fine-tuning the timing. What helped with recalibrating after each image shuffle was my project spreadsheet. I wound up using the numbered sequence for images in the first column (a pain to have to renumber with every change, but ultimately useful), then listing the time lapse for each transition, then transcribing each audio segment, and finally, noting the duration of each audio segment.

Here’s my final project spreadsheet in Excel.

Even so, it only took a week to finish the first edition of the slide show, from image sequencing to final image timing. I spent another week incorporating suggestions made by several key people who viewed the initial production, and delivered the final edition of my DLP slide show on March 14: “Learning en dos lenguas.”

A few follow-up thoughts on equipment and quality control . . .

During the lengthy process of repairing auto-leveled audio, I lamented over not having a more professional digital recorder. I even went shopping for the next step-up in audio gear, one that would justify an investment in a decent shotgun mic. I came up with three good candidates: the Zoom H-2 retailing for $200, the Edirol R-09 for $300 and the M-Audio MicroTrack II for $350. Any one of these might be worthy of attaching an Audio-Technica AT897 shotgun mic (another $275).

But then I looked at the quality of images produced with my little Fujifilm Finepix F30 and thought of the sharp, full-toned images I see in most of the slide show entries for the NPPA Monthly Multimedia Contest.

It makes no sense trying to optimize my audio quality when I marginalize the quality of my images with a point-and-shoot camera. I decided to stick with the minimalist gear.

My choice in gear may seem like reverse snobbery, but using equipment with such a low profile in the field is liberating. Rather than entering a story project laden with the heavy-duty slr and totebag of accouterments common to all media photographers, I can walk through a crowded room wearing all my equipment for a slide show project, and not even draw a glance. I can certainly work a room full of kindergarteners or fourth graders without disruption. Imagine trying to shoot with a 35mm camera only inches away from the ear of a five-year-old. The point-and-shoot is silent and the child doesn’t even look up. My “listening stick” draws more attention (Swiffer-mounted microphone – see Oct. 5 blog), and even that doesn’t hold much interest for long among kids.

No, the sense my minimalist gear makes is that all of this – equipment, software, early morning hours and even this blog – is for the sole purpose of providing an alternative to my work for the newspaper. It isn’t practice for freelance work because I don’t expect to earn any extra income from it. It isn’t self-development for the prospect of professional advancement – not at my newspaper, not at my age. It is simply for the hands-on challenge of teaching myself something new about a rapidly changing profession.

Okay, maybe there's just a little genuine snobbery in trying to get the most out of the least amount of “professional” gear.

DLP audio production finally completed

It has taken a ridiculously long time to complete the audio part of the Dual Language Program production, and the end result runs just over four minutes in length. That is more than a full minute over the conventional standard for audio slide shows on the Internet.

Oh, well.

The chief problem with delay in the process of production isn't procrastination or distraction or any variation on writer's block. It simply comes down to lack of work flow discipline. Disorganization seems to be the greatest detriment to my productivity. I can't get up if I don't have a clear task in mind: This morning I will complete this specific task. A good work flow plan sets up the order of what needs to be done, but something as simple as creating a Post-it note at the close of every work session establishes specifically what needs to be done NEXT.

As for the production process itself, if I can't speed up the editing, then audio slide show projects aren't going to be worth the effort, even if the newspaper does eventually develop an outlet for them on the Internet. I see an occasional fully-faceted gem among the monthly entries in the NPPA Multimedia Contest, and I wonder how many hours of editing time are involved. Something as simple as better equipment and perhaps even better software would speed up the process. I spend hours just repairing the dips and clips rendered in audio recordings made with the little WS-300 series Olympus recorder. Without a means of setting the recording level, there is no way to avoid volume clippings and dropouts created by the recorder's auto leveling. Investment in a decent shotgun mic would be pointless under this circumstance, and I can't invest the $300 it will take to move up to the next level in digital recorders. Until I can significantly reduce the learning curve involved in audio slide show production, the minimal equipment I do have will have to do.

The recording sessions themselves went smoothly with both DLP families. The father of the English-speaking student had a very distinctive, guttural voice, but I decided let it stand on the merits of what he had to say. The father 0f the Spanish-speaking student spoke English well enough that I had no trouble conducting the interview. Even so, I had him reply in Spanish, as well. The idea was to go back and dub in his daughter's voice translating his replies to English. When it came time to arrange for her recording session at the school, I also invited the other English-speaking student, too, and recorded them both introducing themselves and speaking in their non-native language. My daughter suggested that prospective new DLP parents might like to see examples of how well their own child might do with a second language skill by the fourth grade.

All of this stretched the audio content well beyond what was originally intended, but then again, this whole project has taken on a life of its own.

Here is what I've added to the original DLP narration track from January 13: Learning final audio.

DLP narration + classroom audio

I finally completed the task of adding classroom audio from both schools to the narration for the Dual Language Program production. Finding suitable clips from the classes in English was not a problem, of course. I even managed to glean what I needed from the Spanish side of the kindergarten class, but I could only get the bare gist of the Spanish at the fourth grade level. That last hurdle was cleared when my bilingual daughter came over to listen to the few audio clips I had prepared from more than an hour's worth of recording. As a brand new mother, my daughter's time and attention span was limited, so this meant sitting down with her at my computer – grandson in arms – and reviewing three brief audio clips that had sounded promising to my ear.

What contributed to the final decision had more to do with extraneous classroom noise than with content. Although I had carefully monitored my recordings in the classroom, I was astonished over the general noise level that remained in the audio: a warbling wall of student babble in the background, punctuated with goose-like noises from desks and chairs scooting across linoleum. Our choices of clean sound bites were severely limited, but I settled on an exchange between the Spanish teacher and the entire class going over a point of Spanish grammar. This would roll out of a brief clip of the English teacher discussing a vocabulary word with his small reading group. Those few seconds of classroom audio were all that would be used from a couple of hours spent with the Spanish portion of the fourth grade class, but that was all that was needed.

So now I had both narration and classroom audio combined for the production, and it all timed out at 2:48. In order to complete the audio, I had two more interviews to line up: one with the English-speaking parents of a fourth grader for quotes on their initial reservations about signing their kindergartner up for the DLP program five years ago and how it seemed to be going for their child now, and the other with the Spanish-speaking parents of a fourth grader on what their child had gained from dual language education. It would be a challenge to add all this to the audio and still keep the production time down around three minutes, but I'd deal with that when the time came for the final tightening edit.

And regain an interim camera

This has been a very bad week for sound slide production. I haven't spent a single morning working on audio. Instead, I mostly slept in during the last of three weeks covering for the other staff photographer on vacation.

Meanwhile, one interesting development that occurred at the newspaper was an announcement by the publisher in our mid-week staff meeting that all of our news reporters would be provided with point-and-shoot cameras this year. They would be expected to keep these cameras handy at all times and use them frequently. This notice was given amid a litany of issues that were brought up by the corporate CEO during a recent visit with the publisher.

I was given the responsibility of making the camera thing work for our reporters.

Having already done my research on replacing what I had considered the best point-and-shoot camera for photojournalism – the FujiFilm Finepix F30 – I took another look at their F50fd, and then I broadened my search to include all 12-megapixel compact cameras.

Imagine my surprise to discover that FujiFilm had already introduced the successor to their F50fd, due to hit the market in March: the F100fd!

The 50 units of improvement between their F50 and their F100 included an 8th generation image sensor to capture a greater range of detail in shadows and highlights, improved face detection technology, an ISO range of 64-3200 at full resolution and up to 12800 (!) at reduced resolution. The F100 also sported a 5x optical zoom lens providing 28-140mm coverage (albeit, with a maximum aperture of f3.3, compared to the F50's f2.8 for their 3x lens).

The only serious wrinkle with the F100 appeared to be that FujiFilm dropped the Aperture and Shutter Priority modes offered on the F50. However, their F10 retained the Manual mode. The problem with the F50's Manual mode is that it allows manual control of everything EXCEPT aperture and shutter, so it isn't a true manual control in the conventional sense. If the F100 provides true manual control of aperture and shutter, then this might actually be an improvement for serious point-and-shoot photography.

That was the oxymoron for the week – "serious point-and-shoot photography" – but since I was expected to equip and train our reporters to become more than visual duffers, it seemed to apply.

Once again, I found no significant alternative to the FujiFilm Finepix F series for available light shooting in a truly compact camera, one a reporter wouldn't mind sticking in a pocket or purse and actually using.

I did find a very interesting website regarding the march of the compact camera industry toward ever higher megapixel counts (http://6mpixel.org/en/). It provided evidence that for the tiny image processors used in compact cameras, about six megapixels proved to be optimal (as in the 6.3-mexapixel F30). Stretching 12 mexapixels across such a tiny processor actually degrades the quality of image capture.

By the end of the week, I had arranged through the newspaper to send my F30 to the FujiFilm factory repair service in New Jersey with a total repair estimate of $85 – including part (no problem on part supply, I was told), and a three-week turn around on the repair. I was also given the go-ahead to buy one F50fd locally at $250 for staff training, and wait and see what reviews revealed on the $380 F100fd.

At least that would provide a camera similar to the F30 for me to complete the shoot on the Dual Language Program slide show.

Gain a grandson, lose a camera

Monday morning I finished the rough audio edit on the English side of the Dual Language Program classes. I even sent email attachments of two brief MP3 files in Spanish to my daughter for translation at her convenience. Her baby, however, had other plans for her. That Monday evening was the first of three mostly sleepless nights spent waiting at the hospital for her delivery. Of course I took my little camera, strapped securely to my belt. It was during the early morning hours of that first night stretched out across one of those hard, undersized waiting room couches that I rolled over on my side. The best news of the week was that we eventually wound up with a healthy new grandson. The bad news was that the LCD screen on my camera was shattered.

No serious problem, I thought. Most point-and-shoot cameras aren’t worth repairing, and I’ve had the little camera for two years now. Maybe it was time to upgrade the camera, or more likely, replace the broken one with a more affordable used camera of the same make.

Several days of research on the Internet left me better informed about my dilemma, but no closer to a decision on whether to repair or replace.

It seemed the FujiFilm Finepix F30 had become something of a cult camera for its singular ability to render good images in low light. Two years ago I paid a little over $200 for the camera brand new. I could now find only three used F30s on Amazon.com, ranging from $440 for “refurbished” to $550 for “like new.” Ebay auctions for F30s started around $300.

For that kind of money, why not upgrade to the current incarnation of the F30, right? I discovered that the Finepix F50fd that retailed for more than $500 brand new, could now be had for as little as $220 on Amazon – and they offered no less than 30 used.

What?!!

Backtracking through the reviews on the successive generations of the F30 revealed that not only did FujiFilm fail to market a truly unique niche camera, they moved away from their innovative image sensing technology in pursuit of mass consumer point-and-shoot standards. They now trailed the pack, at best. The F30 begat the F31fd, adding a marginally useful “face detection” (fd) feature and a little extra internal memory. The F40fd boosted the 6.2 megapixel sensor to 8.3, but only for an effective ISO of 2,000 (compared to the F30’s ISO of 3200 at full resolution). The only significant improvement was allowing the use of the more popular SD memory card, but gone were the aperture and shutter controls, as well as the sturdy metal casing and the topside control design that worked so well for my left-handed operation. The F50fd continued the sensor expansion to 12 megapixels (now limited to an ISO of 1600) and an LCD screen size to 2.7 inches – current standards among point-and-shooters. The optical zoom range remained at 3x, however, while most other compact cameras now offer 4x zooms. Reviewers agreed that the F50fd was “nice but unexceptional.”

Back to the option of repair: The LCD screen would cost $127 for the part alone, plus $50 labor, but the part was backordered until “at least March.” Parts-only F30s were going on eBay for more than $70, but with no guarantee that the salvaged LCD screen would work at all.

All of which put me back at square one. I’ve been partial to FujiFilm color technology since clear back in the day of film, but their shift to pursue the mainstream consumer market will likely force me to search other camera lines for a suitable alternative.

New digs for an old prospector

Over the past week I've been slammed with a double work load at the newspaper due to the other staff photographer being on vacation for three weeks, my expectant daughter thinks she is due for delivery "any day," and I bought a new computer. The new computer is actually a used iMac, but one that runs at 1.25 GHz with an 80-gig hard drive, has the all-purpose CD/DVD Superdrive, the wireless Airport Extreme and a 20-inch flat screen. The seller even threw in the original OS 10.4 installation DVD and the iLife '06 DVD (including Garage Band), all for $475. Seems he was a young work-at-home graphic designer who had just replaced his two-year-old system with the latest thing Apple had to offer. I've been playing with his old system ever since and wondering why my newspaper remains entrenched in OS 9 software.

The distractions to my production schedule have been intense, but I managed to work up an outline of the first two stages for audio production. It is an outline that I will very likely come back and revise, as needed.

PRODUCTION OUTLINE – [Word file updated 3/16/08 to include slide show production]

For as long as it takes

Rather than start yet another slideshow project, I decided to continue working on the dual language program (DLP) production for as long as it takes for completion. I had already figured out that I didn’t want to pour considerable time and effort into another slideshow production only to have it sit largely unviewed on my humble blog. Each production would need a target website that could carry the slideshow as part of its content. This was an afterthought on the “Chalk” production, but when I offered the slideshow to the Valley Arts Association, sponsor of the chalk art event, they were delighted to have it for their website. I proposed the DLP slideshow project to Minter Bridge Elementary as something that could go on the school’s website to provide a brief introduction for parents who were considering enrolling their children in this program. Finding similar symbiotic relationships for future slideshow productions would lend a good deal more purpose to the hours and hours spent on editing, than mere practice.

The DLP production project quickly outgrew the single kindergarten classroom where it was being introduced at Minter Bridge Elementary. Had I confined it to that, it would have been relatively simple to pick out two kindergartners – one English-speaking and one Spanish-speaking – and develop parallel storylines. However, I thought the subject of DLP needed broader treatment to give the viewer a sense of direction for a program that expected at least a seven-year commitment of its participants. That meant not only covering the kindergarten class at Minter Bridge, but also covering one of the upper classes at the other school where the DLP program had been running for five years. It also meant having to find an appropriate person to interview for the narration to provide the production’s framework, similar to what was done for the production of “Chalk.”

I wound up going to the district office to interview the ‘executive director of school improvement’ – in charge of both the Dual Language Programs and English as a Second Language program. The interview went smoothly and the subsequent editing resulted in a narration track that ran just under two minutes, but it took well over a week to achieve. In the process of shuffling files from desktop computer to laptop and back – trying to edit at every chance I had during a day – files got lost, including the original recording of the interview. Not only the randomness of my work schedule worked against me, but the process of trying to edit audio without a clear step procedure left me disoriented each time I sat down to work. Editing the interview into narration under these terms was a challenge. Trying to edit the several recording sessions at two schools was a disaster.

Creating a specific schedule of work was my first breakthrough. I managed to stay on schedule over the past week – for the most part – although just getting into a productive daily routine was the high achievement for the week. It gave me a sense of progress, however tortoise-like. Five in the morning my alarm goes off. I get up, get dressed, get coffee, read the paper, feed the dogs and then sit down to my laptop by six and work until eight. That’s the schedule. I edit only on the laptop, transfer files to the desktop for backup, and then to the external hard drive for archiving. That’s the flow.

Working up a practical step procedure for editing will be the key to proficiency, and that is evolving. I keep a procedural outline handy, along with a scratch pad to note little efficiencies that come up in an editing session. For instance, I discovered this week:

• that the Mac operating system I use (OS 10.3.9) allows me to select the option “Show Item Info” under View on the Finder Menu, a feature that automatically posts the length of an audio file (all but the Windows files my little recorder produces, of course – these have to be converted to MP3 files). I don’t have to open the file to get this information.

• that the best way to open an MP3 file in Audacity is to first create a new, blank Audacity file and then Import the MP3 file. Actually, I knew this already. I just forgot.

• that the Audacity’s Label Track can have only one label open at any time. If you suddenly can’t add or edit a label to your Label Track, it’s because you have another label still open somewhere in the track. Go back and look for the label with the box around it and close that one before adding or opening another.

So at this point I’ve managed to go back over all the classroom audio in English, cataloging and screening for usable segments that can be worked into the narration track. The week(s) ahead will entail selecting and placing the English segments from both schools. That done, I’ll conscript my bilingual daughter into helping screen the classroom audio in Spanish for segments that can complement the English segments. After that, I can decide whether to include brief interviews with English-speaking and Spanish-speaking parents of upperclass DLP students about their experience over the years, and perhaps even prepare a parallel translation into Spanish (via my daughter) of the finished production for viewing by Spanish-speaking families.

And then I will look for a much, much simpler slideshow project for my next production.

Coping with a crisis in confidence

A hiatus has been necessary in order to regroup after a series of discouragements over project setbacks and distractions from the original purpose of my blog. The original idea was to teach myself how to produce good audio-driven slideshows about community life in my area. I got off to a good start by learning first how to produce a decent audio story ("Hillsboro School of Rock"), then by learning how to produce a fully-developed slideshow ("Chalk"). I kept good notes on both projects in the blog, but then I got distracted first by trying to stimulate discussion on the journalistic protocol involved in audio editing, then by soliciting exchange of views on entries in the NPPA Monthly Multimedia Contest. While these are both worthy blog projects in themselves, the silence was numbing.

Add the fact that I couldn't seem to produce another slideshow for more than two months, and the result amounted to a crisis in confidence over the whole endeavor. Of the two, the project setbacks have been most frustrating.

Hooked on Flies – Something as simple as a loose cable connection completely unnerved me during the initial interview of a man who spends most of his spare (indoor) time tying his own fishing flies –hundreds of them. The sound check revealed a steady hum in the recording, and I could not figure out the source. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting the microphone cable several times without results. We tried shutting down his computer, his wife’s computer, his son’s electric guitar and even their refrigerator, all without effect on the hum. I wound up recording an unusable, buzzy interview just to gather background information, but the technical snafu so thoroughly demoralized me that I couldn’t bring myself to reschedule another interview. It wasn’t until I did the sound check on my next production project that I realized the microphone-to-recorder cable connects at both the recorder AND the microphone. The hum was coming from a loose connection at the microphone end, not from the recorder end.

Dinner for 9,000 – One of our area communities has hosted an annual sausage and sauerkraut dinner for nearly 50 years. I made the mistake of trying to cover this one-day event on the same day I had to shoot no less than seven assignments for the newspaper. I just don’t have that sort of stamina any more. Besides, I had already missed a significant part of the story, the preparations for that dinner. Instead, I wound up simply hanging out for a couple of hours to practice working left-handed with the little camera while operating the ‘shotgun’ equipped recorder with my right hand. That was fun. In the end, I came up with a plan to cover their 49th dinner this coming fall in a two-part project. Part one would document the preparation leading up to the big day. Part two would portray how the entire community turns out to orchestrate the dinner, from the youngest school kids to the oldest seniors. The two slideshows could then be used to promote their 50th dinner the following year.

Expectant Fathers – A class for new fathers at the local hospital seemed like a good, straightforward subject. I cleared the hurdles of gaining permission for an audio-slideshow production from the hospital and the instructor, but decided at the last minute that I had a personal reason for not following through with the coverage. My own son-in-law was enrolled in the class. My presence as an observer would affect his participation. All I could do was interview the instructor and wait for the next time the course was scheduled. During the interview I realized that the course was entirely classroom-based, which would make dull visuals. Unless I could come up with a storyline to pursue outside of class, the production had little prospect of engaging viewers visually. I shelved it and moved on to the next project.

Dual Language Program – My own expectant daughter proposed the next project: a new dual language program started at the kindergarten level in the school where she teaches. This is now the second school in our district to develop what is also called two-way language immersion education. Half the day in the classroom is spent teaching in English and the other half is spent entirely in Spanish. I plunged into this project, interviewing two people at the administrative level for a narrative frame along with multiple visits to both schools for both the English and Spanish sessions. I managed to develop the narrative frame in short order but bogged down trying to sort through all the classroom material. I couldn’t seem to get organized even on the English sessions, never mind that my knowledge of Spanish is minimal. When a software glitch wiped out what little progress I had made on the production audio track, I hit the wall and shut down for the holiday season.

I am now refocusing the blog, developing a strict workflow for production, and establishing a disciplined work schedule.

The blog will be limited to accounting for my own production efforts, the production workflow will start with step procedures for processing audio and developing the audio story first, and the production schedule will consist of five to six two-hour sessions per week on mornings before leaving for the office. I’ll devote Sunday mornings to the blog.

If I can’t develop a reasonable amount of discipline and consistency, and still enjoy the challenge of learning new skills, then I’ll have to give up on multimedia and let the profession leave me behind along with my newspaper.

It’s that simple.

The worst part of being your own producer is being responsible for your own productivity. The second worst part is having to recognize and solve your own problems.