J198

I learned a lot this semester in J198; more than I thought I would learn. I did some video editing for projects in high school, so I though that wouldn’t be bad. And for the most part, I was right. What I didn’t know anything about was actually shooting video. I had heard of b-roll before, but had no idea what it really was or how to shoot it. B-roll was easy; find something interesting and pan slowly, to give the viewer of sense of where they are or what they’re looking at. The worst part about video for me was the awkward part. Setting up an interview by phone or e-mail wasn’t so bad, but I hated walking up to a random person, explaining the project and asking for an interview. It was especially frustrating when someone would be friendly and talk to us but would back out when we mentioned a video camera.
Another aspect of the class that interested me was blogging. When we were first introduced to the idea, I knew immediately that I’d be blogging about the Reds; they were making their playoff push and were seemingly always on my mind. This idea worked for a while, I wrote about whatever I thought, usually a recap of a game. Come playoff time, when the Phillies swept the Reds, I was out of ideas. I wrote about the rest of the remaining teams and matchups but couldn’t really relate it to the Reds. I quickly learned why the Reds blogs I read and followed died during the offseason. I could write about next season or about re-signing players, but that wasn’t of great interest to me.
At first, I was apathetic towards Twitter. I thought it was just another social network but didn’t know how it was different. Once I started following people, my friends, community members and celebrities alike, I found that it was much more useful than Facebook. I tried to promote my blog with Twitter, but to no avail. Twitter eventually became more and more of my friend. I used it to talk about whatever I was thinking about (usually sports) and to see what others were saying about it.
The biggest part of this class was the final project. Jackie and I used every skill we had already acquired; video shooting and editing, making picture slideshows, audio slideshows and podcasts and using Twitter to contact possible sources. We also learned how to use different formats to present material and information on our website through Weebly. What I got most out of the project was setting aside other work to make progress on our project. As busy as we both were, we found time to meet together and get valuable work done.
J198 was certainly an experience for me, it got me out of my comfort zone and taught me about things I had no interest in before the class. I learned how easy and useful it was to create a brand for myself and our group project. I learned a whole new aspect of journalism; an aspect I want to learn more about in the future.