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Multimedia post mortems
Behind the scenes of Honduras and the Hidden Hunger
Last March, I blogged about an inspirational seminar by past grant recipients with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Little did I know that six months later I would be blogging as one of those grant recipients! After months of research, reporting and post production, I was able to take a vague idea to explore malnutrition issues and turn it into a full-fledged multimedia site.
On-site production was extremely difficult during this project. Due to the Honduran political coup that unfolded during my stay, the government shut off power across the entire country on almost a daily basis, many times for hours or days at time. While my still camera held a strong charge, my laptop and video camera were out of commission for days at a time.
I also learned a valuable lesson to test my equipment before taking it overseas. Silly, I know, but I didn’t have the chance to produce a story with my Canon HV 30 video camera, Sennheiser lavalier mics, or Canon 40D still camera. I took back-up gear just in case, but the quality difference was so extreme that I never used it.
Low and behold, the audio feedback on my camera was somehow broken, so I couldn’t listen to the incoming audio while it was recording. Even worse, I couldn’t change the frequency settings on the mics (I know it’s easy to do in the menu settings, but it didn’t work for some reason on these …) so my first two interviews were recorded at an almost inaudible level. After raising the levels in Final Cut and removing the hum in Audacity, it still wasn’t perfect.
Put that all together, and I knew my video potential was extremely limited. Therefore, I decided to invest the majority of my remaining time in the field strengthening my still photo story, Living with Nothing.
Learning how to tell my first documentary-style slide show was a major feat. I have only taken Pat Davison’s “Intro to Photography” course, and I wasn’t comfortable with my gear. I blogged about my struggles initially documenting this family, but in the end I grew extremely close to them as they opened up their lives to me.
It was also my first time writing a long-form narrative, so a lot of work went into the Fighting malnutrition ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ story.
I have always built my multimedia projects within Flash, simply because that was the only language I knew. However, I decided to break out this time and attempt my first site blending HTML, CSS, and Javascript for the shell. I then embedded my Flash files within each html page.
Rather than spending an unnecessary amount of time designing the site and building it from scratch, Mike Schmidt encouraged me to find a customizable template on Theme Forest. An hour and $12 later, I had a complete set of HTML, CSS, Javascript and XML files.
I customized the site a lot, and then added a navigation menu for the different stories. I customized a video player built by Flash expert Lee Brimelow, utilized a Flash photo gallery I built with some other students in Donny Lofland’s programming course three years ago, and re-used a graphic template from an interactive map I used at The Roanoke Times for the Age of Uncertainty series.
At the last minute, I set up a MySQL database on my GoDaddy account and used a PHP comment script from GentleSource to add a comment form feature on the site. This was definitely a lot harder than I had originally thought, so if you are ever interested in doing something similar I would recommend giving yourself more than one day to decipher the confusing directions.
This project taught me how much easier it is to produce a multimedia site outside of Flash. In all future projects, I will take advantage of HTML/CSS templates, WordPress themes, or other pre-built sources and customize them to my liking. It cuts post production time in half, and cuts the file size down by even more.
Last but not least, I learned to reach out to my sources for help in weak areas. I know design isn’t my forte, so I asked Tribune designer Joey Kirk to design a header treatment for the site. DTH editor Andrew Dunn helped me edit the print copy, and hopefully all of my other multimedia contacts out there will help give me feedback to utilize during my next project. *hint hint!*
Overall, I spent roughly 40 hours each week for five weeks in Honduras for in-field production and one 40-hour week in post-production. If anyone has any questions I didn’t answer here, please feel free to ask in the comments below!
Other posts that might interest you:
- Behind the scenes of Roanoke.com’s "Running on empty"
- Behind the scenes of “One Week in Iraq”
- Behind the scenes of “Facing Deportation”
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6 comments for “Behind the scenes of Honduras and the Hidden Hunger”
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That all sounds pretty familiar to me!! I guess the mark of a good multimedia journalist isn’t how perfect a shoot/edit you can do, but how well you deal with all the hiccups that inevitably present themselves..
Thanks for the honest account
[...] a read of her “behind the scenes” debrief of how the project went: it is an honest and familiar tale of the ups and downs of producing [...]
Great stuff. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the process!
Thanks everyone! I’m glad my struggles can inspire others!
Fantastic job on this project, Tracy! And thanks to your behind-the-scenes look at how it was made, I have a greater appreciation of what it takes to put together a multi-faceted project — especially when working in another country.
[...] The behind-the-scenes story Tracy tells about producing the piece is just as interesting. On-site production was extremely difficult during this project. Due to the Honduran political coup that unfolded during my stay, the government shut off power across the entire country on almost a daily basis, many times for hours or days at time. While my still camera held a strong charge, my laptop and video camera were out of commission for days at a time. [...]