Justine McDaniel, Video 1, Phone Records

Student Voices: Phone Records and the Government from Justine McDaniel on Vimeo.

I really enjoyed this first foray into video. It was a lot of fun to learn how to frame and shoot, and it was also fun to hear people's answers. I thought Premiere would be a lot harder to use than it is, and I enjoyed the editing process as well. That said, this was one of the more frustrating projects for me so far. It's so easy to mess up your shoot with one little thing and not realize until you're at the computer. For my first shoot, I talked to five people and I had perfect lighting-- but I didn't watch the camera enough and after I adjusted the tripod, it fell down a little and ended up cutting off the top of two subjects' heads, so I couldn't use either of those. It was also frustrating how much outside noise was picked up, and I had a few of sound bites ruined because a bus or motorcycle happened to go by. When I did my second round of shooting, the sun kept going behind clouds and coming out again, so the lighting was really inconsistent and hard to manage. The videos from the first round look better, and the videos from the second round sound better (and have head room). Basically, it was a really good learning experience and I feel like I picked up on a lot of things to remember to do or not do next time. I definitely need to build a mental checklist to go through when shooting video. I learned a lot and am excited for our next video assignment.