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Ever since 911 I’ve worried about our freedoms…and, as a journalist, about the right to freedom of speech. All of my life I’ve kind of taken it for granted that the media has a right to seek and tell the truth. In these times that right can not be taken for granted.
And ever since leaving the real world for the shifting shadow and light world of education I’ve found an even more frightening situation. I’ve heard about attempts by school districts and administrators to restrain the rights of student journalists…some successful/some not. These stories used to chill me. I just couldn’t believe that an educator – a person in charge of guiding young minds – would deny anyone the rights guaranteed every citizen. It happens – believe me.
I found it curious that my first principal was very nervous when the issue came up – he knew the state education code and district policy prohibited prior restraint…and asked that I be careful with a very touchy story.
In my present situation I am not facing a wary principal, but an administrator who told me last week that, “video is not journalism” and he had a right to review any material my students wanted to enter in contests (and I assume want to put in the daily student bulletin…scheduled to go online in October).
Funny…I could have sworn I’ve been shooting video for years and it was journalism. It seems to me that newspapers are doing this daily too.
We all have choices…the last time the rights of student journalists came up I told him I was tired and really didn’t want to fight. I was right and he did not have the right to prior restraint. When the dust settled, the students published and nothing happened.
My choices this time are bothersome. As much as I truly love working with students, I abhor the politics and childish behavior that goes along with working as a teacher. All I want to do is my best at helping students learn. So what to do? Shutting up and obeying mindlessly is not an option. I’ve been considering leaving and finding a job more suitable for a malcontent…but that leaves my kids in the wake. Having a knock-down, drag-out fight is not my style….I’m more of the sit-in type. Passive resistance. Listen to the ranting and calmly refuse to give in. But it is tiring and a waste of both of our times.
Oh well. Give it time…
One of the tricks for a successful blog is to keep it focused and not turn it into a personal diary. Today I break that rule. Ron and I have three daughters (gotcha beat by one Lens) – two who are out the door and in charge of their own lives; one is at home, but looking out the door as she enters her junior year in high school.
Carol/#1 – Aggressively intelligent. Limitless potential (well, we all like to think that about our kids).
Alexis/#3 – The most athletic of the three. Compassionate (too much so, considering the five feral kittens I have to find homes for), inquisitive, and social.
Pearl/#2 – Graduates (fingers crossed) from Navy boot camp this Friday, which is why we are in Waukegan, IL. this week.
Don’t expect much for this week (sorry Angela) or next week, when school begins. This week is for fun and next week is for work.
Oh – and GO NAVY!
July 27 – She graduated, along with 700 plus other recruits. They were glowing, dressed in brilliant white, full of pride in themselves and their country. They made it through boot camp and they will go on to protect our Constitution and freedoms. Pearl has learned more about teamwork and trust in these past two months than I could ever have imagined she would. She was pushed to her limits and pushed herself to a point where she almost thought failure was possible…but managed to push enough to put it behind her. I know most of you in news are used to pushing too – I, along with others, have pushed myself physically, psychologically to points where neither my body nor my mind could take much more….all because of a passion for news and communicating the truth to my audience. The young men and women who enter our services learn to push themselves too – to meet their own expectations for themselves. Maybe that’s what is missing in many of our youth. Passion to go until you drop…and keep going…
No need to be dramatic about this – we missed the 48 Hour Film Project deadline by 15 minutes. My goal was to have my students take part in a real challenge – make a movie in two days. That we accomplished. And there were lessons learned…mostly by me, but also by them.
They learned how to use prosumer cameras properly. How to use the manual iris, focus, and white balance. They learned how to improvise when plans had to be changed. They learned that making a movie is a LOT of work…but there is fun to be had along the way.
I learned that a two hour trip into San Francisco is not a good time to finish editing the movie. Adam Nino got motion sick.
We couldn’t export our final movie to tape after numerous tries, so exported as a video file. Now you know and I know that five minutes of video takes up one gigabyte of hard drive space. Sure – it doesn’t. Our final video was about 4:57 – and 1.3GB.
At 7pm we went for a quick cut – took about :10. Still too big. Finally whittled it down to 4:35 and an 857mb file that would fit on a 1GB flash drive.
On delivering our movie, we found out we weren’t the last – there were still six or seven teams still out. Elena Cruz, the San Francisco coordinator, said about 20% of films come in late on average.
So the bad news – we were late and can’t really compete.
The good news – our movie will still be shown in San Francisco in a week to a real live paying audience AND we are still eligible for the audience choice award.
Sweet.
Adam and I are staggering…we got to my place around 3:15am this morning after a full day of shooting and editing (and trying to find stuff in the school storeroom). But no, we still weren’t done – we edited most of the movie.
Still a movie with no name though.
What have we learned so far? Well, next year I won’t have construction crews all over my studio, so I can get in a few days beforehand and get all my gear lined up.
Always have food – these are teenagers and if they aren’t constantly fed, they slow down. Mentally and physically.
Be adaptable. What you planned doesn’t always work. We thought our breakers would all be there at 2pm so we could begin shooting…the last one filtered in around 6pm.
Don’t change your script too much…be adaptable, but stick with the plot.
Willfully independent teenage daughters can surprise you at 2am with near perfect readings of their portion of the script.
The quiet students turn gregarious once they feel comfortable with the group. And this group did bond. We worked through our barriers, shots that weren’t as visualized, always running late schedule and left on better terms than we began on Friday night.
So Adam and I will continue. My husband pulled me out of bed (ugh) at 8am. Adam beat me to the kitchen and had already slid into the edit chair, where he was fine-tuning some scenes.
It is now 10:36am. We have a screening for parents at noon. Thank the skies above we not only found suitable music…but the title of the music has become our movie title. Some days things just work out.
Late tonight I’ll post the final on this.
Last night was the night. I moseyed down to San Francisco with a load of students, followed by Becky, one of my mothers in tow in her supercharged pickup. We had time for a quick snack (dim sum) and then we were off to find Fat City.
Now I’ve lived and worked the streets of San Francisco and my old station wasn’t located too far away from where we were heading. But there are massive changes in every city’s face as years pass. The feel was the same, the names new.
Fat City was everything you would expect: plain, undistinguished storefront…dark and moody with tiny spotlights inside and a stage. Lots of bodies milling around. Anyone under 21 had both their hands “X’d” just in case they tried to get past the guard on the stairs up to the bar upstairs. Great preventative measure.
The noise level was high and excited…we finally figured out they were already drawing genres up on the stage for Group A. We were Group D, so kicked back and relaxed. Finally it was our time – Adam Nino/former Middle College High School student of mine – went on stage to do our drawing. He ended up at the end of the line – so, as it turned out, we would be stuck with the last piece of paper in the hat.
He drew and whispered in the MC’s ear…and she announced: Thriller/Spy!
A collective sense of relief. We’d been dreading several genres – felt we didn’t have the depth in actors to pull of Romance or Drama.
Then they announced the elements:
Character: Gus or Gloria Lorenzo/trade expert
Prop: bus, airplane, or train ticket
Line: Forget it. I already have.
We bunched together back at Becky’s hotel room and pushed ideas back and forth for at least an hour and came up with a rough, yet simple, plot with a killer ending.
No…I won’t tell you. Yet.
Wait til it hits the theaters (our movie will go on the big screen in San Francisco’s 48 Hour Festival on July 28).
So the next two days will be fun-filled with 8-10 hours of shooting, editing, collaborating. We called our key actors last night on the way home – Rhythm Emphasis/the McNair break dancing club – to let them know to be on campus at around 2pm Saturday.
And congrats to them – they made the semis in a competition in Fremont yesterday!
Hardware and camera stores are bad for my budget. Yesterday I wandered into my local camera store (Wolfes…the only full service camera store around since Gluskins went out of business a few months back), intending to pick up a filter for my HV20.
Wouldn’t you know they don’t carry what they call “camcorder” filters. Which means my little buddy with its 43mm thread wouldn’t be getting a facelift today.
But – oops. I did need a few batteries for my lav mike. Done.
And a lens cleaning kit – good idea/something in a nice hard case I can toss in my bag.
Hey – what’s that? A mountable grip that will hold two accessories! Wow. Gotta have that.
So for the price of a good filter, I got off cheap and escaped before I started looking at cameras…hmmmm.
Today I’m playing with putting old toys together with the new toys. I haven’t been able to easily use my wireless with the HV20 because there was no real way to mount it. With a little work I can glue a shoe to the receiver and run a short XLR to mini-jack plug to the camera.
I can also add an on-camera light or shotgun. The camera itself has a shoe holder, but since the wireless receiver is longer than the camera…well, that sure won’t work.
Now I can add up to three accessories! Wheeee! For about $15 it might make sense to get more of these for the Elura 100s we use in the classroom.
The nice thing is that the grip and accessories add heft to the camera…it feels more real. And hopefully it will impress the heck out of my hapless victims and I won’t be mistaken for Grandma Green – again.
Photos added later…gotta run to prep for the 48FP.
I know…I’m a journalist. But I think everyone who’s held a camera at one point or another has wondered if they could shoot a movie…yeah, right. (Just as every reporter has a book inside them.)
So tomorrow the great experiment begins. I’ll be blogging along as my students and I work together to create a movie for the 48 Hour Film Project. We will be gathered together in San Francisco tomorrow night to draw our genre, get our line of dialogue, prop, and character(s). Then it’s back on the road for the two hour drive home, with students brainstorming and writing the script. Hopefully that will be completed tomorrow night.
We’ll be shooting Saturday and Sunday…and editing furiously at the same time. I have a small crew of about six students from broadcasting plus a tight-knit group of break dancers and other students who made the mistake of talking to me at the wrong time.
Stay tuned…and remember, we are not out to win…we are out to be winners.
Sissy the Space Cat
From photokaboom, a camera that you can clip to your pet’s collar. You can set it to shoot at intervals and see what Fido and Fluffy have really been up to while you were at work.
Hmmmm….wonder if it will work with Robby the Rooster?
How do you secure your extension and other electrical cords? I use those little elastic bands with hard plastic balls that I used to tie my girls’ hair up when they were little.
Another favorite for organization is freezer ziplock bags. (Don’t use sandwich bags – they are too flimsey.) Quart size hold cords and mikes. Larger sizes you can put a whole mini-camera kit into. Plus they make good emergency rain jackets (just make sure you use the clear ones/not the blue ones).
White balance on a cloud? Hey – white balance is like Switzerland. If it’s neutral, you can white balance on it. Asphalt, tennis shoes…just don’t do teeth. Ya never know.
And finally, this almost-a-posting from last spring: After a dry spell in postings, the garden is in…finals getting graded…and the gnomes are springing up all over the property. Take a look above to see how farm critters response to a rootin tootin garden gnome. (…yeah, it’s spring and I’m feeling silly…)
There…all my little notes to myself are out of the draft drawer and posted for all to see.
July 18 – Sometimes I type so fast I forget that visuals would help. Just added a few extra. Enjoy.
Heads up kids – the 48 Hour Film Project is next weekend!. We will be working in teams from 7pm Friday night through 7pm Sunday to script, shoot, and edit a movie. Hope you’re keeping an eye on this.
The first meeting is tomorrow at the little park at the end of the street from the school. Be there at 4, preferably with a parent. I have model releases and waivers to be completed and signed.
Later in the week we’ll meet at the school to view past entries in the contest and get an idea about what we should be doing.
If I don’t hear from you by Wednesday…well, how ’bout you just get in touch BY then. You can reach me at cyndyg@mac.com.
Go Eagles!
Stockton (California) has a unique Fourth of July parade. First comes the color guard. Then the usual military units and then politicians looking for recognition and votes. Then it gets interesting. Asian-American groups in ethic outfits. Vietnamese/Hmong soldiers. African-American cowboys. Ya gotta love it. Every one a patriot and proud, not only of our country, but also of their heritage.
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