Before I began my job at Arizona State University, people had begun asking about what kinds of things I could do for them. In July 2014, I was made aware of a project within the College of Letters of Sciences' Science, Technology, and Society degree program.
I was told that the group had already produced a video within the past year, but were hoping to pick up where the previous project coordinator left off and further revise the piece to more accurately reflect their mission. A few issues cropped up: the leaders of this project were stationed at one of ASU's furthest campuses; our own technical resources in the way of cameras and the like were inadequate to match the other source materials (meaning I couldn't add to the pool of usable content); I didn't actually have access to that raw content yet, let alone know what it was.
As I'm certain many of you know, taking up the proverbial mantle of someone else's work can be difficult. Nevertheless, like always, it was a good opportunity to work within a pre-defined raw content bubble.
Below is the original video I was given.
As you can see from the video, it's not awful. In fact, it's very well produced. The shots are sound and there's a wide variety of them. Unfortunately it takes a turn for the campy with some of the "futuristic" graphic overlays and the somewhat poor choice of music.
Upon closer inspection, we find that a few of the interview snippets utilized don't actually make grammatical sense if you're paying attention--not exactly the best situation for an academic institution. There's some work to be done.
This was a nice slow tracking shot sliding from right to left. I was lucky the videographer was good at his job.
Since the folks at the STS program were on a different campus, we held a video conference meeting to discuss just what they wanted out of this project. The major points were that it needed to be simpler, cleaner, and more focused on "what the program can do for you." That all made sense to me, but before I could get cracking, there was a very important intermediary step to be completed: getting the source materials and getting cozy with them.
After some clerical back and forth with the original videographer/editor of the project, I managed to get a hard drive with all of the raw materials. Searching through all the folders and taking a few notes yielded a reference of all the paths to the relevant video clips etc.
There were 6 interviews in total. And what do you do when you have unfamiliar interview footage and need to communicate everything with people far away? You transcribe them. You sit there, pause the video every 5 seconds, and type everything you hear, compile it into a document, sift through for graphically/content-sound bytes, and send the modified transcripts along to your client with all your notes and suggestions on how to proceed.
My composite opening shot for the piece when all was said and done.
Communication at ASU is always something to scratch your head about. Sometimes you hear back from people right away. Sometimes it takes literally a week of radio silence before the information you need to proceed finds its way to you.
The back-and-forth for this project was pretty miserable, but on my end, doggedly dutiful. It's obviously important to keep your clients abreast of what you're doing for them--even when they prefer to take more of a back seat (driver's) role in it all.
The problem was...slow communication and a hard deadline for when they needed a project draft do not mix well. After much waiting for stalled participation, I took the reins, used my best judgment, and gave them my best guess as to a product that they wanted.
This was a draft though. There was definitely finetuning to be done on many fronts. But after their meeting, I got no commentary whatsoever as to how to proceed.
For 3 weeks, I reminded them (at reasonable intervals) that I'd be happy to help them refine and finish up their project. After a month, I got the feedback I'd asked for. It was underwhelming. There were no internal edits, just a suggestion for a GHASTLY-corny introduction and some information at the end.
As of 10/6/14, I'm still waiting to hear what they thought of my suggestions as to how I might implement their feedback. Maybe next month!
