Aaron Paul Vogel

For the first, and at the moment my favorite, audio post I'd like to offer the sounds of a drunk southerner telling a very funny joke. This was recorded at Benchwarmers in Ventura, Calif., one Friday evening while my friends and I were out have a few drinks. The guy just walked up (he saw all the cameras) and started talking to us. I believe his beginning statement was, "You know what you all ought to do with those cameras? You ought to head over to Iraq... blah, blah, blah." Well, since it was Ryan, Dan and me, I look at the guy and said, "Funny you should say that, we have ALL been there already." That started a half-hour long conversation (well, he talked, we listen and laughed mostly) and I managed to get about 13 minutes of it on my M-Audio Microtrack. This was, by far, the funniest part. Enjoy. That's Nice...

THE VIDEO IS DOWN TEMPORARILY. IT WILL RETURN SHORTLY

This is my first editing assignment in Final Cut Pro for my MPV161 Video for Photojournalists class at Brooks. The class was given a demo on how to use Final Cut Pro to log, capture, edit and cut together video. Afterwards the assignment was to take MiniDV tapes (all identical) and use the footage to create a 1 minute long edit of the footage. A title slide and fade in at the beginning and a fade out at the end were the only other requirements. The idea was just to practice logging and capturing and placing clips on the timeline without gaps in between them. Since the only transition we could use was a quick cut I thought I'd take advantage of it by creating quick little segments that jumped a half second or a second ahead with each cut. I found some music that fit the idea well and this is what came out. Warning: language is a bit foul in the music.

Thought I'd share these test shots I did with my friend Alissa, who just happens to look great in a bathing suit. I used my Ewa-Marine underwater bag for these. I think they turned out pretty cool for being in a freezing cold pool that was only between 3 and 8 feet deep. The bag worked very well, though I think goggles will be in order for the next time I do this; I couldn't see anything underwater so I had to guess of the composition. Fortunately I'm getting good at doing that with my 16-35mm lens. Next job for the bag will probably be in a practice pool at a local dive shop where my future roommate works. Then, once I figure out where my fins and wetsuit are, it's out to the open water for some surf shots....bbbbrrrrrr..

Multimedia is the new hot topic in the news industry, and newspapers, network television stations and everyday shmoes are posting up audio and video to their websites. Besides being a fascinating and fairly novel pursuit multimedia in journalism seems to be the interest for a number of people I know. My new friend Joe Hollak has also taken up the pursuit of collecting not only photographs while on a story, but audio as well. While the two of us are fairly green in the field, the seeds for what we're doing has already been sown by many people; bloggers, podcasters and documentarians using MiniDV cameras and portable sound equipment. The fruit of their labor can be seen all over the Internet and is falling onto desktops on personal computers as software such as iTunes which has, since version 5, incorporated Podcasts into their music store. Newspapers such as the Ventura County Star are now posting video of major events such as the recent wildfire. While rough, this addition to their web-page shows that while newspapers are still a viable option for the dissemination of daily events, there ways to leverage the information capital that they have at their disposal.

Now it's up to people like Joe and I to learn from those who've made the first steps to pioneer the technology, figure out how we can best use it to tell stories and hone our skills in incorporating it all together to share the stories with the world. At this point there are so many possible directions to take things that I'm still testing the waters to see which pool(s) I want to swim in. Right now I'm really fascinated with putting audio with still photography. I'm in awe of programs like This American Life which routinely brings me to tears or puts a painfully large smile on my face with their compelling mix of narrative and first-person accounts. I don't know yet if adding photographs to the mix would add to or distract from the recipe, but soon I'll be finding out. Perhaps there are stories that are best told with audio only, or photos only, or video only. But I have a feeling that mixing them could create a concoction so powerful that one media alone would pale in comparison. Time to hit the kitchen to see what we can cook up.

FOR THE MOMENT THE VIDEO IS DOWN, BUT WILL RETURN SHORTLY

Telekenisis is a cover band that my friends all love. They play every Tuesday night at Dargan's in Ventura, Calif., and their acoustic guitar and keyboard-based medleys are hilarious. My favorite is the Eminem medley. For last Tuesday the duo - which is normally a trio - put on a wedding dress and tux and started the show off with a little White Wedding by Billy Idol.

When I first found out that my friends knew the guys well I immediately thought of recording their live show. I thought it would be a good excersize in using my Microtrack at a live event to record off a sound board. I also brought along a shotgun mic that I'd borrowed from checkout at Brooks so I could record the ambient bar noise. I had the master output of the mixing board recording on the L track and the mic on the R track. This way I could record two sources, adjust the levels on each independantly and mix them together later as I saw fit. Well, it's a good thing I got a lot of the band coming through the shotgun mic because the soundboard track was HORRIBLE; everytime the singers were louder than a whisper they peaked and you could hardly hear the keyboard. I asked their friend who was running the mixer to adjust things a bit, but I'm not so sure he really knew what he was doing. I tried to adjust the levels way down on my Microtrack, but the signal was clipping before it even got to me, so there wasn't anything I could do. None the less I got a fairly decent mix of ambient (a bit too loud) and music from the shotgun mic and was able to use that track to create a little slide show.

The photographs were done with my friend's Canon 10D, which works very well for situations like this; on-camera, pop-up flash, small profile so you don't look like a papparazzi, and good file quality. If it weren't for the horrible conversion factor for the lens focal length which renders super wide angle lenses useless I'd pick one up. Instead I think I'll invest in a nice wide angle like a 14mm, or perhaps the Sigma 8mm, and a very small flash unit since my 580 towers above my camera and is more than a little conspicuous.

The slide show was created with Final Cut Pro, and I hope to soon have a copy of Soundtrack Pro so I can futz with the sound a bit more. I'll also probably be adding in additional pictures from a house party the boys did, but for now all I have are my photos from Tuesday night. Lesson one: it takes a lot of photos to cover a single song!

I want to share with my initial readers - so, Joe, this is basically for you - some of the websites I'm drawing inspiration and know-how from. I spend an inordinate amount of time online or at my computer and thus I tend to surf around a lot just clicking links, doing Google searches and reading things I come across. I also spend a lot of time listening to NPR in my car and I'll often voice memo web addresses I hear during interesting stories, which I then later take a look at. Here's a brief list of the places I've been surfing lately:

The Spokesman Review

Colin Mulvany over at the Spokesman Review has been doing multimedia (Sound Slides and video) since May and his work is really inspiring.

The Mercury News

The Mercury News in San Jose, Calif., has a ton of Sound Slide shows up on their website. It's fairly well done as far as layout goes and the photos are terrific, as is most of the audio

Multimedia Journalism: Joe Weiss

Joe Weiss' blog has lots of links to multimedia on the web that I wouldn't find on my own, so I check his blog at least once a week to see what I've missed.

Unembedded

Unembedded isn't a multimedia presentation, but the images are terrific, and the Flash-based website is very well done. I'm more interested

Transom

Transom.org has kind of a mess of interesting audio stories and helpful articles for those interested in creating audio for radio or the web.

Third Coast Festival

The Third Coast Festival is an annual radio industry gathering in Chicago, Ill. It includes awards for the year's best radio documentaries, which are then featured on the website. This is truly amazing audio. I've been inspired a lot by radio programs lately, particularly This American Life and All Things Considered.