On Wednesday Jacquelyn, Jenny, and Spoorthi went downtown to interview a Channel 4 meteorologist.  They came in Thursday morning bubbling over.  Kent Ehrhardt was gracious enough to grant them an interview and let them use the news set.  He even gave them editing and camera tips–he showed them how to do a fake interview to do a cut away shot.  What a terrific experience.  The kids got a tour of the studio and they even got footage of the weather studio.

In class on Thursday, most of the kids were involved with Special Olympics, so there were only a few kids here.  But Jacquelyn showed us the raw footage of her group’s interview.  We paused the film and discussed

• lighting (it was really good since they were in a studio)
• sound (it was very clear)
• microphone placement
• frame–there was too much headroom at times
• bracing camera with tripod or other solid feature (the image was a little shaky at times)
• decisions about a tight or wide frame–do you want the interviewer in the shot?

We also looked at Andrew’s footage from the Forest Park Earth Day Celebration from last weekend.  He did a great job of getting different kinds of footage (panning shots, close-ups, and interviews).  He didn’t have the release forms, so we can’t use many of the interviews, but some we will be able to use the images without sound because he doesn’t have faces in all the shots.  There is one that shows how to make power out of household items–that could be useful.

Jason also posted some of his footage–many of his images will be terrific for background/voice-over segments.

In class on Thursday we looked at the EVC Student DVD segment on visual metaphors.  It was great to have examples to show the kids.  In class they brainstormed 5 different visual metaphors that they could actually film.   They came up with really interesting ideas that will make for powerful images.

They were also supposed to evaluate which metaphor would be the most effective and why–I need to work on helping them explain their thinking–the reflections and evaluation sections of their blogs are much weaker than their summaries.