Project Memo

Jrnl 80 B Final Project

I initially had a hard time giving my project a focus. I started out with a very general idea of what I wanted to cover and compiled a lot of information from my links. I knew I wanted to cover green initiatives on Long Island because I had written about it in the past, but with an angle concentrating specifically on Hofstra. It was very difficult to condense it into a focused piece, centered on one specific topic and one specific location. The information I had was scattered and my project idea was too vague.

I also had a bit of a hard time getting contacts together as well. I got 16 out of the 20 suggested and ended up with 2 solid interviews. In the end, I really let the interviews guide the direction of the article. I had a friend who worked and was passionate about the Citizen’s campaign for the environment. I thought she would be perfect because she grew up on Long Island, went to Hofstra, and was heavily involved in a citizen-run group campaigning for the environment on the island. Since I planned to include an interview with a politician, I thought it would be a good balance to have a resident involved in environmental initiatives speak as well.

The interview that I may be missing is an opponent of protecting the local environment. That kind of person would admittedly have been hard to find, particularly with the time constraints. However, I ended up focusing on the Town of Hempstead and Nassau County as a whole and talking about why it’s important to live in a manner friendly to the environment and how a local resident can do it. Mainly I focused on the stuff the local government is doing to support it and what other groups are doing, too.

Getting the actual interviews was not exceedingly difficult, just stressful with the deadline looming. Further, editing the film was not as difficult as I’d imagined either. It isn’t perfect. I had a little trouble editing down what my politician said because he cut himself off a lot. However, getting the piece to exactly 2 minutes was not as hard as I expected it to be. Beyond that, compiling the transcripts and getting all my content together and ready to present, was basically just tedious.

I do consider this valuable experience. I have never produced a video piece for the web before, and I found that it is a lot different than producing a text-only article. With text you can pull out what you want and display it neatly in one small package. With video and all that we’ve done, you can’t fudge it. If the interviewee stutters or says something in a certain tone, it’s right there for the viewer to see. It is a completely new skill that I look forward to experimenting with and honing.