J198: The game is slowing down

Part of a continuing series of posts about JOUR 198, our first foray in multimedia reporting here at Lehigh …

Since it’s Super Bowl week, we’ll kick off with a football analogy. Old timer quarterbacks often compare the process of maturing as a player as being somewhat correlated with the speed of the game. Consider NFL great Warren Moon:

“You’ve seen pretty much everything. I think the big thing for older guys, at least for myself, is the game really slows down for you. It really is a slower game. And even though you might be slower because you’re getting older and you’re not as quick as you used to be, because the game has slowed down to you mentally and the way that you view it, you’re still at the same speed of the game.”

Experience, the “I’ve seen that before” kind of recognition, allows you to focus on the game and not technique. NFL rookie QBs get overwhelmed by how fast defenses are, but in time they adjust as they learn to read blitzes, recognize defenses, and so forth. What they’ve had to learn on the fly soon becomes instinct. The game slows down.

The game is slowing down for the students in J198 as well. The focus is shifting from the entry level work with technology and back to the familiar stuff: storytelling.

Last week I kind of overwhelmed them. In the first week it was a simple assignment of shooting video, getting it in Windows Movie Maker (WMM), creating a video, and uploading it. Last week, I sped up the game. They had to go out on campus and shoot the video on the fly, come back and work on it. In addition to just making it into a video, they had to apply newly learned skills to add title bars and video credits. All in 2 hours.

About half of the students finished by lab’s end. Before the assignment started I had no idea how many would be done by lab’s end, but I wanted to throw them into the deep end and see what they could do. This is the Missouri Method part of me at work, the thing I learned so well at the world’s first school of journalism: you learn by doing. Better, you learn what you need to know by doing and failing a little bit.

Still, the professor side of me spent some time over the weekend thinking about how to handle lab this week, just as I have been doing every weekend as a way of constantly reassessing where we are in this experimental course. I told those who struggled to spend the weekend practicing by redoing the assignment (“Practice, Practice, Practice”), but I contemplated giving them the same assignment again on Thursday just to see if they could improve.

But in the end I decided that when you struggle, you plow ahead. On some level I have to trust that my students are going to practice the things they know they’re not as good at, and so instead of retreating I upped the ante this week. I had them shoot video outside of class this week and bring it to class. One clip would be an on-camera interview where a person talks about a job or activity that they do. The second clip would be footage of them doing that job or activity.

The goal of the assignment was a simple audio overlay, where they would take footage from the visually boring interview and overlay it on something action-oriented. At the same time, they had to do all of that other stuff (title bar, credits, and fade transition) that had been struggle points last week. So they were doing all the old stuff plus adding new skills to the toolbox.

The results were quite good. Recall that many of these students had never held a video camera before this course:

That one was by Liz Martinez, who showed that knack for curiosity that I have come to love about Lehigh students. Really this assignment was about muting the video audio and overlaying another audio file, but she instinctively knew that blending some of the video’s background audio would be good. So she asked me how to combine them using fade techniques. I showed her how to do it on the fly.

I had been planning to show this later on as a more advanced technique, but I was more than happy to give a little one-on-one lesson on the spot. This is one reason I really like the lab format.

I really liked this one by Alyssa Salem. I didn’t require fade transitions but she wanted to add them, partly to practice but partly because she knew they might look less abrupt than rough video cuts.

The thing is, we haven’t spent a minute in class yet on good video composition, lighting, sound, etc. Really the first three weeks were about how to work the Zi8 cameras and the editing software. So the rough edges will be smoothed, but this is a hell of a starting baseline. I couldn’t be more pleased.

So today I’m a little bit pumped, and labs like today are really exciting when you see the game slowing down for them. We’re going to rest on our laurels for the rest of the day, but tomorrow it’s back at it. This week we talked about blogging and my assignment for them, after letting them kind of feel their way through blogging, was to kick it up a notch. From my recap e-mail to them:

I’d also like to take this discussion online. Andrew had a great ending to his latest post today, asking others for comments. So I’d like you to post comments on the blogs of 2-3 other students, if for no other reason than to see how this 100/100,000 readers thing works. Andrew also did something else good with Twitter that we’ll talk about on Monday: He posted a link to his latest blog post. Now his Twitter followers are sharing in his J198 work. He is now turning his readers into nodes. I practice what I preach here. I’ve left some comments on a few blogs here and there in the past couple days, and I’ll be leaving more. If you haven’t enabled the ability to leave comments on your blog, make sure to do so. What we’re creating here is a type of online community through social media, starting with blogs and next week into Twitter. This thing is going to grow, and you’ll be watching it unfold firsthand.

I have thrown so much at them in the first three weeks. They have learned for the first time how to shoot video, edit video, stylize video, upload to YouTube, blog, and tweet. They’re learning about the structure and architecture of the read-write Web, and they’re learning it by doing it. Walter Williams would be proud, I think.

Best part: the students haven’t wilted a bit, and in fact the energy of the class has been one of soaking it up. As I said before, we’ll refine this as it goes along and make it better. But I couldn’t be more pleased with where we’re at to this point in the semester.