Week 5: David defeats frustration

This week was a great learning experience. I competed my second shift at the Missourian as a convergence reporter. Originally, I was planning to produce multimedia for the child soldier story the Missourian was going to run, but because I did not go through the proper procedure the story was given to someone else. Although I was mad when I lost the story, it taught me to always contact at east one of the editors and make sure they know I am doing a story so they do not assign it to someone else. I quickly picked up a story about the exercise phenomenon Zumba. The class has been offered at the Mizzou student recreation center for a few semesters now and it is steadily growing in popularity. The reporter doing the story wanted some video for it so readers and viewers could get a better idea of what the class is like. I enjoyed shooting the video for this assignment although it was difficult because the studio where it as held is lined with mirrors. It was difficult to get a good shot without getting footage of myself in the mirror. I had to play around with the angles a lot. Once I finished shooting I went back to the Missourian newsroom to start editing, but as I was halfway done editing the footage the program crashed and I lost everything. It was a huge setback so I decided to take a break and then start over in the futures lab. Because I had to do so much extra editing though, I learned a lot more about how to use Avid and even Final Cut. I believe this story really helped me improve my video editing skills.

Once I had finally finished editing it was time to export the movie and get it onto the Missourian’s production server. This task should have been easy but it proved to be the most difficult part. The convergence editor Jacqueline Brixie and I did trouble shooting for about 3 hours before we finally got it to work. IF IT DOESN’T WORK THE FIRST 30 TIMES, TRY AT LEAST 30 MORE!!! My patience was definitely stretched to the limit during this assignment, but I gained a great deal of experience through it. I must have ran back and forth between the Missourian and the futures lab about 5 times over the course of the night. Although this part was very frustrating, I think it helped me learn more about using the computers in general. I am glad the story is done and I think it turned out well. I am still waiting for it to go up onto the Missourian website but it should be soon.