Production Memo

When this project was first assigned, I knew I wanted to do something about cars. There’s no question about how much I like cars and driving, so why not do my project on something I’m interested in? After all, it still has journalistic value. Anyway, my first thought was to do my project concentrating on female car enthusiasts because I figured that when most people think about car enthusiasts they think of males. I wanted to get the other side of the story and show people what it’s like to be a female car enthusiast.
However, when I started on my contact list, I realized that to make this happen I needed some female contacts. I went online to car forums and asked around to see if anyone was interested in talking to me. Some seemed like they were and when one finally got back to me, I had already decided to change my topic.
I decided that since I couldn’t really get in contact with female car enthusiasts, especially ones that were available and in the area, I should concentrate on something else. Since there is a lot of talk recently about gas prices and how they just keep going up and about how the economy isn’t doing well, I figured I might as well see how that affects car culture and people who modify their cars.
Getting contacts for this was much easier because I already knew some people in a local car club called Forward Motion. I was able to get two of them to talk to me so that was one of the easier parts of this project. I also tried to contact some people who I considered experts or at least those that had more experience with cars and car culture. I called and called and sent e-mails but never got responses. The two people I tried to contact were Alex Roy of Polizei144 and Adam Weinstein of Manhattan Motorcars.
After getting my interviews and doing my stand-ups, putting the video together wasn’t too bad. But I realized that I needed to figure out a way to transition in some voice over because interviewees don’t always answer questions the way you want so that they fit perfectly into your video. Then of course Windows Movie Maker decides that it doesn’t want to work after all the time spent cutting videos to the correct sound bite, putting in transitions, etc. Just great! Or even better, the program won’t open in the first place. Well if it doesn’t open then I can work on it even less. Wonderful.
So let’s move on. Unfortunately, the pictures I took for this project are too big for Flickr so I had to put them on Webshots. I was just glad that at least one free online photo storage site accepted very large files.
Another small snag I ran into was when I wanted to transfer audio from my voice recorder to my PC. Unfortunately, the software to the recorder is for Windows 2000/XP and I have Windows Vista. It wasn’t a big deal because I just used a friend’s computer to download the audio file and then e-mailed it to myself and used it that way.
Since we’re talking about snags I might as well add the timeliness aspect that comes with any news story. Since I’m working with rising gas prices, the numbers are changing almost every day, so the information I use in my story today is different from the information I had last week. Luckily, I said the date in my stand-up and will be mentioning dates in my text story, so my different information shouldn’t look too funny.
I also had some problems with my video because a green panel is covering half the screen for any part of my video that I recorded using a flipcam.