Ten things I’ve learned so far making Hoop Knight (they are not in any order and there are certainly more to come)

1. I’m lucky to work with Chris Kieffer. Really lucky. Works hard and knows his stuff better than most. (Chris, you need a Web site.)
2. I can buy, host and manage my own domain name and server. I know that sounds pretty mundane, but I can do it now, no problem. Before, you’d catch me bull shitting.
3. The elusive HTML and CSS horizon are inching closer and closer. By March 20, 2009, when the project goes live, I’ll know CSS well enough to originally design an entire site. I think.
4. Twitter. Please. No problem. Key is to offer a consistent slice of info. rather than simply say what it is you’re doing right now.
5. Basketball. Sorta. But I’m getting there. Been a long time since I went to a high school sports game. Like it. But not nearly as much as Chris.
6. Shooting sports. Wow. Tough. Need two cameras to do it well. One wide and one medium or close. Sheesh. This is the tough spot.
7. Audio gain. Man, in a gym your gain is either too low or way too high. Need to be able to adjust quickly.
8. Final Cut Pro. Still, have a ways to go with this one, but I’m much closer. Basics are accomplished. Would be ideal to learn some more shortcuts. Learning the program is actually easy, compared with making quality videos.
9. People care about Mount Vernon High School basketball. It’s a big deal to everyone in and around the special town. It’s important to me now too. Hope they manage to get the 2010 school budget passed.
10. Story board, story board, story board. This is a big one for me. Don’t get this right, you’re a mess. And did I say Chris Kieffer?

Oh, and I should note that I have watched me a fair share of basketball videos. I recommend the truly amazing documentary, Hoop Dreams and Nike’s “Road to Redemption,” the buildup to the 2008 Olympics for USA’s basketball team. We live to honor these films in our master’s project.

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.