The Bloody Friday the 13th

Scope of the project

Last Friday Olathe Northwest hosted it's semi-annual blood drive and I got a first look of the school's blood drive by getting footage of what goes on inside and take that footage and make a project out of it. The main idea of this project was to cover the blood drive and to see how it all works and to see how many take part in their school spirit.

Process

My process was first I had to plan out what my angle was going to be (Ex: Teacher/student that was giving blood, STUCO member or a phlebotomist) and then I would come up with questions to ask the person I'm planning on using for story. When I got inside to where the blood drive was held, right from the start is very difficult because of so many people into one room with a lot of tables and machines so it was very hard to film great shots as well as keep the camera steady because we didn't have tripods to use and I only had 10 minutes to get what I wanted including interviews. When I was all done filming what I got, which wasn't very much at all, I started writing my script and doing voice overs, and then after I finished writing, it was time to put it all together to edit. For editing this time, the project had to be either EXACTLY 45 seconds, 1 minute or 90 seconds long. But it was very hard because not many people had enough shots so some of us combined footage to make it for us to have more footage to choose from.

What did I learn?

What I learned along the way was it was very hard to do a story about something that is live and you only have one shot, so if you don't have a plan, you're not going to get amazing shots. Also I learned how to sequence the shots that I kept better, and I made a few minor tweaks in Final Cut Pro and
it looked a whole lot more intriguing to viewer's standpoint.

What I would do differently/same

What I would do differently next time is plan more ahead if I did something like this again even though it was my first time doing it. So I would make sure I have back-up plans as well because you cannot expect your plan to be perfect, so you have to be ready for anything. What I would do the same is keep writing my scripts the way they are because they seem to be flowing very smoothly with all of my videos and they make you wonder what's coming next.

Conclusions

This experience was a good one because it's like a news story, you only have one shot to get it right and this will help with other news stories in the future. Overall this was a fun video to do and I hope I keep learning as much as I can to master my skills.