A lot of work went into this one. Admitably, I picked this story because I figured that it would be easier to cover a story within walking distance of my editing chair. The memory of navigating Kingshighway traffic was still fresh in my mind, and I opted for something less challenging. But was I so wrong.

When I went to interview Ms. Goldstien, the brains behind the Mr. Ladue operation, i committed my first mistake. The shot was woefully overexposed. Irreconcilably so; a century's worth of film technology was simply no match for this blunder. Goldstien would have to air looking as though she'd fallen asleep in a tanning booth. Oh well, at least the SD card was in the camera this time.


The night of the event came, and I was optimistic that I could easily patch together a good short story. However, I was ill-prepared for the reality of the situation. The lighting in the auditorium was nothing short of treacherous. Well lit areas were immediately juxtaposed to areas with no light. This made it necessary to manually adjust the apature of my camera every time I got a new shot. My thumb was soon sore from adjustment knob.

I was able, after much trial and error, to become proficient at apature adjustment. But this was just half of the battle. Figuring out where to set the camera, and where to point it, is difficult when so much is going on. Between dance numbers, speeches, talents, improvised scenes, and crowd reactions, capturing everything with one lens proved to be a challenge. However, this lead to a fun scenario in which I was able to walk around the stage at my discretion. I suppose everyone just assumed that I had the authority to do so, and no one questioned me. The power quickly went to my head. I felt like a god, answering to no man (except mr. Goble), able to transcend space and time to 

The biggest challenge of the entire ordeal, however, was editing. By the end of the night, I had enough B-roll to feed a small horse for a month. It all needed to be clipped, sequenced, and color corrected. Once again, it was a race against time to meet the deadline. The editing room became my shrine, the Apple computer my alter, and Final Cut Pro my deity. I poured the time in, and I was satisfied with the result. Even if mr. Goble feels that it's only worth an A-.

Man, this one was a complete pain to film! At first I was rather excited at the prospect of getting to go out and capture a story that didn't seem to have a lot of "fluff"; that's to say I felt actually interested in the topic. It was also pretty cool of my  manager, Mr. Goble, to let me drive to South City during school with no questions asks. But I digress.

On the first day of shooting, me and my reporter, Keith, readied all of our equipment and made the 30-minute drive through midday traffic all the way to the Hill. We were there for all of 5 minutes before we realized that we'd forgotten our SD card & would be unable to record anything. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU!

So we drove all the way back to the school, empty handed.

Round 2. The next week, we made extra-special-super-sure that we had an SD card. We skipped out on lunch, and left right after noon for Onesto. In an attempt to reach our destination quicker, we disregarded the advice of my GPS and took the back streets in an attempt to avoid the congested Kinshighway. It didn't help, and we arrived at around 12:50. We were able to quickly get the interviews, and Craig Stenson, the owner, gave us a free pizza for our efforts. Let me tell you, he wasn't full of hot air when he talked about the lengths that he goes to in order to have the freshest pizza. That stuff is delicious. We got back to base with our pockets full of usable clips.


We'd have 3 periods to edit everything, and we figured that'd give us just enough time. But we'd forgotten about Murphy's law. All of our videos were on one SD card, and this one SD card happened to be out on a school-sponsored field trip. We'd have no access to it that day, meaning we'd have to do 3 days of editing in 2 days. Oh boy.

Using our free period and after school, me and Keith had the video edited 3 hours before the 6pm deadline. The only problem was that both of us had some place to be at 4, so we couldn't turn the video in. I had the delegate the job to one of my friends, and just hope that it would get done.

Fortunately, it did. The video was put in the correct folder before 6, and Mr. Goble was none the wiser. Unless he reads this... Here's hoping that it was too long and he skimmed it.

This video was depressing to make. I had to research childhood cancer statistics & attempt to sounds somber in the voiceover. Usually, our short for LadueView are light-hearted and fun, but this one took on a more morbid tone.  A teacher at my scholl had a son recently diagnosed with leukemia, and we decided to make this to show him a little support.

However, this PSA was an excellent opportunity to reopen communications with my old 4th grade teacher. We were able to chat for 5 or 10 minutes after the filming. I got to skip out on class to film kids at the elementary school, which was actually pretty hilarious. They were all nervous to go in front of the camera. We ended up with around 20 5-second long shots of these kids telling us what they wanted to be when they grew up. We had to scrap most of them though, because most of the kids were too shift, or not cute enough. All in a day's work, though.