We have reached the half way point of AU Bootcamp. The past week and a half have gone by so quickly and we have all been bombarded with so much new information and knowledge. I don’t know exactly what I will be doing professionally in ten years, but I do know the information I have learned will be helpful. We have heard from some fascinating speakers, taken an awesome field trip and been exposed to an incredible amount of technology. All this in only 8 days!
Student Lauryn Smith takes photos for her blog
This morning started on a bit of a depressing note. It seems that nearly everyday our group is given information about new equipment that we need to purchase. $150 for a Flip Cam, $100 for a digital audio recorder, $200 for an external hard drive, $1600 for a Mac Book Pro, the list seems to have no end. That’s a lot of money for grad students who live on Ramen noodles. At this point we are not required to buy anything and American University does have equipment we can use. Everyone appreciates the fact that the university has equipment to loan out.
Professor Olmsted showing different types of digital audio recorders
Professor Olmsted showed us several different kinds of digital audio recorders available for purchase. Everything from the Marant 620 on the high end to a small Olympus recorder on the low end. We were also shown microphones we could buy to go with the audio recorders.
Our speaker today, Deborah Bolling, was the most entertaining speaker to date. Bolling has enjoyed a 30-year career as a journalist, film producer, music video producer and most recently a teacher. Bolling shared a documentary she produced with high school and college freshmen chronicling President Obama’s inauguration on the National Mall. The documentary used still photos, video and audio clips to produce a true multimedia experience.
Brianna Pellicane recording sounds heard on the Quad
Bolling took our group outside onto the Quad to record sounds. We then used the sounds we recorded to write a story. The exercise was designed to get us to start showing what is happening instead of just telling what is happening.
Erissa Scalera using her Flip cam to record Deborah Bolling
Bolling gave some parting advice to our group saying, “When they walk away from your story they should be able to tell the story themselves.”
This afternoon we honed our skills with editing audio clips. Considering I have only spent one afternoon working with the Audacity editing program, I feel like I am understanding it better than some of the other skills we are trying to learn. I hope you can take a minute and listen to the short audio clip I recorded and edited from my classmate Sean Connolly about his impressions of Deborah Bolling:
Professor Hatch concluded class today by showing us a few multimedia projects that he worked on for USA Today. Although it is not necessarily important that we know how to design and construct multimedia projects, we do at least need to understand what is possible.
Note to self for tomorrow: bring a jacket, the computer lab is cold enough to hang meat in!
Great post. Yours and your classmates are getting better and better with every day. I love how you folded in the audio.
By: Joshua Hatch on August 6, 2009
at 1:51 am