I filmed this video of my family’s backyard bonfire with a point n’ shoot while visiting home over the winter break. (Kate, here’s your shout out.) It features my girlfriend, Kate Drance, my father and some new and old friends who are traveling across the country on a luxury touring bus. (Thanks Aric, Tim and Robin!). I think they’ll agree, that sitting around the fire and eating fresh oyster stew wasn’t a bad way to start Louisiana. Tim?

I gotta say, I like this short clip. And it probably has a lot to do with, if not all, my old family home and the song selection. “The Lonely Shepherd” stuck with all of us who watched and liked Kill Bill. When I heard it coming out of the F-train at Broadway-Lafayette today, it prompted me to finally make this clip in iMovie. (Side note here: After you’ve managed to learn Final Cut basics, iMovie is wretchedly counter-intuitive. Yes, I’m slightly bragging.)

Watching the footage with the song produced, for lack of a better word, an emotion, granted, probably because it’s my old family home. But it also really hammered home the cold hard fact – that Professor Duy pointed out today in NYC24 – that if your audio is off, your video, no matter how good, suffers…badly. The music over the top of Backyard Bonfire, to state the obvious, really makes an impact. But you compare. See it without the song. Mmmm, oyster stew.

After nearly five hours of photographing and recording the NYC bocce finals in Staten Island, I spent another eight hours+ editing the material down to create this two and half minute long slideshow. It’s still too long, in my opinion. [Post edit: Class review of slideshow was positive, however, everyone, including myself, agreed that there was way too much use of the Ken Burns effect.]

The amount of time it took to plan and source the content vs. the amount of time to edit and design it was terribly disproportionate. The first lesson at Columbia was to “zoom with your feet” so to speak – to report closeup. The natural byproduct of that is a prodigious amount of content to edit through later. How to reconcile “zoom” with “speedy reporting?”

It seems obvious, but the trick to producing these digital stories quickly (probably any story), is knowing what you want to get in advance of getting it. I often lump too much time in the “zoom-first-edit-later” category. But the bottom line is: to be a professional new media journalist, you need to have a strong storyboard before going out to shoot. So storyboard.

The best tutorial I’ve found for storyboarding is at Knight Digital. It focuses on knowing what you want before going to get it. Quick tips to get started: Seek out a smaller anecdote in your story to tell the larger one. Try and find a beginning and responsibly predict an end to your story when you arrive. Find a character and chronicle their story. Just don’t point and shoot and hope for the best.

Once you get better at knowing how to look for the “story” in the article, the trick then becomes knowing what you can avoid or overlook. You speed up. You begin to produce not only quality work but you can also outproduce your competitor or deadline.

A short cut to embedding your SoundSlides slideshow in your blog
It should would make SoundSlides a whole lot more easier and probably, more popular if it could host the slideshows its users make. Without this hosting feature, it’s a pain in the ass to embed your slideshow in your blog or site. Knight Digital has a great tutorial on how to do this, but even still, this critical embed component is too hard to find.

Last night, after hastily filing the Student Mentor Request form, I showed up five minutes late to David Isay’s lecture in the main lecture hall. It’s easy to blow off these late night (started at 6pm) lectures, should you wish, but as Isay’s lecture revealed, you are potentially missing a critical moment in preparing for a career in journalism. Once settled in the lecture hall, I quickly regretted missing the first few minutes of his talk. He is, quite simply, or in his words, “not an asshole”. Instead, he is one of those few humans whose work seems to raise the waters of humanity, saving and raising the boats of the rest of us. Isay is a radio producer and a story teller extraordinaire. He founded Story Corp and is rightfully out there selling his book, “Listening Is an Act of Love”.

He answered questions and shared some incredible stories with us lowly Columbia J-School grad students. Eyes watered, notes were scribbled and we all left feeling a greater reverence for our profession. The links to some of the stories are below:

• Tossing Away the Key
• Witness to an Execution
• Danny and Anni

I highly recommend listening to them under the influence of alcohol or with tissue paper or both. Boats will rise