For our News story, we interviewed students from our cinematography class whose families owned local inns and lodges. Our interview was based on the fall foliage and with the foliage season, we get the leaf peepers. While most residents of Manchester have the pleasure of sharing the roads with the leaf peepers, not many have to live with them for weeks at a time. We interviewed Ray Chen and Sarah Asciutto to get a inside look at to what it's like to live with them and how they effect their family businesses. As soon as we got our group together, we came up with a list of questions to ask Sarah and Ray and set up a date to interview them.

 

We were scheduled to interview Sarah at the Olympia Lodge first. We grabbed our camera, lens, batteries, SD card, lights, light stands, tripods, and rode mic. As we we started setting up in the lodge, we realized we had forgotten batteries for the lights. That cost us about 20 minutes because we had to go back to school to get them. While we were waiting for the batteries, we lit the fireplace in the background of the shot to get a fall feeling and tested out the microphone. When we got the batteries and were adjusting the lights, we had trouble because there was a large window to the right of Sarahs face which made one side of her face very bright. Using the lights to even out the natural light, Sarah looked very pale and washed out so we had to move her to the other side of the frame. The actual interviewing part went very well and we had plenty of footage with many questions to make editing easier.

 

The next day, we interviewed Ray at the Inn at West View Farm. Because we had forgotten batteries the day before, we made a checklist of what we needed for the next day to insure that we would have all the supplies we needed so we wouldn't waste any time. Setting up the camera and lights at the Inn was easier because we had hardly any natural light due to the rain outside. We got the perfect lighting on Ray and had the camera focused in on him perfectly. Interviewing Ray went almost too perfect. We didn't forget any supplies, we didn't have any technical issues, Ray was the perfect candidate to interview and elaborated on all of his answers which we knew would help us when editing. 

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As we went to put the footage on the computer the following day, we realized that no one took the SD Card out of the camera. So when the next person went to use that camera and they formatted the card, we lost all of our footage.  So the next day we had to start over from scratch and film both Sarah and Ray's interviews again. This time we didn't get as good of a shot of Ray and he was a little blurry.

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Due to loosing the SD card, we couldn't start editing until Friday. I started editing Friday while Sarah and Grace filmed Celsey's intro for BBA News. They got an amazing shot of Celsey doing her intro but forgot the closing. As I was editing our footage, I noticed that there were times when Celsey would add another word to the end of her question just as Ray or Sarah was about to begin speaking which made cutting out Celsey's voice hard at times. The other thing we noticed while editing was that when we moved Sarah to the right side of the frame, we had also put Ray on the right side so when you put all the footage together, it looks a bit weird but we could fix it a little bit by putting some B-Roll in between the two interviews. The other challenge I faced while editing was Ray's voice was much louder than Sarah's and Celsey's voice was in between so I had to change the volume of the sound in order for it to have a smooth transition. I haven't finished editing the video because I still need to put in a little more B-Roll and figure out how we're going to end the story because we don't have the correct closing statement from Celsey.

 

Overall, I learned a lot within just one week of filming. After the first day I learned that a checklist of your materials is very important in order to avoid wasting time. I also learned how to quickly focus the camera onto a certain subject and keep it focused throughout the whole interview. I also got to see firsthand how the weather can affect your film. Like I mentioned earlier, when we first filmed Sarah, it was very sunny which gave us too much natural light. When we filmed her again, it was rainy so we were able to get just the right amount of light in the right places. While shooting B-Roll, I noticed that on one of the very sunny days, it was challenging to get a good shot because it was so bright out. I had a lot of fun going outside of the classroom and learning hands on and I can't wait for our next story