Feature Story Reflection

Andy Donnelly - Transplant Mentor/Liver Recipient 

Assignment: 

Our assignment was to create another feature in hopes of improving from our first feature story. We were to plan, film, edit, and produce a story noticeably different than the first. 

Pre Production: 

The process began with extensive planning. Coming up with a topic, creating interview questions, having a day-to-day schedule, as well as having days we were taking cameras home for additional footage. 

I chose the foundation of Gift Of Life as my original story. After conducting interviews with Kim Harbur and Andy Donnelly, I found that my original plan involved too many stories. I was trying to tell the story of Gift Of Life, Andy's Transplant, and Kim's experience as a recipient mom which was too much for a simple feature. From there I went with Andy's story, and began the production process.

Production:

Production began by sorting out all of Andy's good soundbites where he answered all the interview questions. After that I decided I was only going to use a small clip of his interview to tell the story. After that, a voice over was created, B-Roll was collected and the video was pulled together. The final product is what you are shown below. 

Post Production:

In post production I noticed many things I thought were good, but what also what I really struggle with. B-Roll seems to be the most difficult. None of my footage was relevant to my story except for the pictures at the end showing a liver transplant. My peer critics let me know that the video story was very good, and they felt the additional interview was not needed but relative B-Roll would have made the story much stronger, as well as slowing the pictures down a bit because they were very fast. 

Along with that, we took notes during the critic process in how we can improve our feature videos. This will be useful as we are going toe doing a news package next, and then come semester time we will be moving into entertainment.
In conclusion, I do believe this project was much better than my last although I did not blog about it. My audio skills, as well as my video skills have improved even though I know I need to work on rule of thirds during interviews, as well as the 6-shot system during B-Roll.