Our next assignment was to interview a faculty, staff, or any employee of Roger Williams University, and to do it a lot better than the last interview we posted. Below is the final video of head baseball coach at Roger Williams University, Derek Carlson, followed by the long story of how long it took to make this video happen. I'd first just like to thank Coach Carlson for taking the time to participate. Enjoy.
Let me first start by saying that this assignment took much longer than it ever should have. The first step was finding someone to interview, that was the easy part. I chose Derek Carlson, the head baseball coach here at Roger Williams University. I played baseball for Coach Carlson as a Freshman and I have been doing work study for him ever since. I chose him because I felt comfortable talking with him and knew he would go out of his way to let me do this project. The tough part was having to deal with him giving me a hard time about video taping it and putting it online, although I knew he would ultimately come through for me. We scheduled an interview for Wednesday afternoon, and this is where the difficulties began.
After setting up a time to interview him and film some of his teams practice, we received an e-mail from professor Scully asking us to not do the interviews before Thursdays class because he wanted to go over some interviewing skills, since our last batch of videos turned out to be nothing but amateur first time garbage. I had to tell Carlson that we would have to reschedule. Then, Wednesday afternoon I saw Carlson at 3:30 about 30 min after our previously scheduled interview, where he gave me a hard time and said he never got my e-mail about canceling and asked why I never showed up. After feeling bad and expecting him not to do the interview anymore, he admitted he was joking and just likes to give me a hard time. Thanks Coach.
In Thursdays class, Professor Scully gave us some great tips on conducting an interview, but said we now how to have our interviews due on Tuesday. Little did we all know that there would be a huge snow storm on Friday, canceling classes and causing students and teachers alike, to fled campus early. Not knowing if practices were canceled for the weekend I e-mailed Carlson to do the interview on Monday, and to my surprise, he does not come in on Mondays. This put me in a tough predicament because I now had no way of getting an interview done by Tuesday. Then, Scully came to the rescue yet again. Realizing everyone would have problems with the snow day and the weekend, he pushed the due date back until Thursday. He says it was for us, but I think it was because he wanted a reason not to have class on Tuesday. (He claims he had the flu, I don't by it)
Finally, I got to do the interview with Carlson on Wednesday. When I showed up to his office, he was so impressed with the Flip Video Ultra Camera, that he spent the first 15-20 minutes talking about it, asking questions, and wondering if he should buy one.
The next problem to me was pretty funny, because it involved Carlson becoming slightly nervous about being on camera. He tried on three different jackets and windbreakers, and four different hats before deciding he looked appropriate for the taping. After telling him the hat would cause a shadow on his face with the light, he slanted it upwards but gave me the look of "I'm not taking it off". Knowing he is a very hard man to change or convince of something, I decided to just leave it alone, as he was already doing me what seemed to be a very uncomfortable favor.
The interview lasted about 5 minutes as I asked questions ranging from where he has played and coach, to who is favorite MLB player is and what the outlook of this season for RWU is. He answered every question extremely well, however it was difficult to get him to say "My favorite player is...." or "I think the biggest challenge is....", instead he just answered the questions as you normally would for a print interview. Although Scully would have like to see the final video include these entire sentences, I believe it actually came out very good. After the interview Carlson asked me to come down and film a a few seconds of their practice, because he wanted to see the quality of the camera and see how close you had to be to tape hitters in the batting cage. I did and he appreciated the power of the Flip Ultra Video Camera. I told him I would send him the video of the hitters the next day
Just as I thought everything was going great, I hit the biggest wall ever. When I went to upload the video, the computer kept saying error. This happened to me once before and I lost all my videos. This time I tried the update on the camera. Not knowing if this would be a huge waste of time or a miracle I decided to wait the hour to update the camera. It actually worked and all my video saved perfectly, and my camera now works better than ever. The drawback to this was that this took up the entire class time on Thursday and I lost all hopes for editing before the weekend.
Scully informed us he wanted the final video on line by Sunday night. This posed a huge problem because I was planning on going home Thursday night for my internship in Hartford until Sunday night. Scully, realizing the importance of my internship and understanding that I had no edditing tools at home, gave me an extension until Monday at 5pm.
So for the past hour I have walked all over campus looking for an open Mac Computer with final cut pro on it. I went to North Campus, (there was a class) The school of business (another class) and the library (all Mac computers taken). So I sat down and waited until the first available Mac computer opened.
Then about an hour or two of editing and I'm finally done. The longest story and the longest assignment is finally over. This is my first real editing of an interview with Final Cut Pro on the Flip Video Ultra camera. I want to thank Derek Carlson for being such a good sport and doing this with me, and also professor Scully for giving me an extra day under the circumstances.
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