Friday, October 28, 2011

Savannah Appears on Best Downtown List

Thought you'd like to know: The 912 made it onto a Forbes list detailing the country's top 10 cities with the best downtowns. Click here to see the entire article, posted on Yahoo.

As usual, Paula Deen and her restaurant Lady and Sons was pegged in the blurb, but it's nice that the city's architecture gets a nod. To the author's mention of "unabashed tourists" seeing the city by horse and carriage, I would have added a warning to avoid this mode of transportation in summer.  Can you imagine the smell, the lack of air conditioning, and the inability to escape clouds of gnats?

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

More than words

So one of the other things I do as a student worker for the marketing department is to create videos.  Not high end movies with explosions and cool effects, just simple vids using my point & shoot camera, a tripod, and iMovie.  Here's the latest one I did with the help of Krystal Huertas, who interviewed Janet McGarity while I did my tech-y thing.  



I kind of knew how I wanted the piece to come out, so I had a plan when going into the interview with Krystal.  I started with the interview first.  Afterwards, Janet played her instrument for about 10 minutes to ensure that I'd have enough background audio, and the lighting in the music auditorium was perfect.  The whole process took no more than 30 minutes.

Yet, one of the hardest things about doing this kind of video is the post-production.  I Googled how to use iMovie '08, which it turns out is one of the hardest years of that software to use because of hidden editing capabilities.  The best site was actually another blog - another reason why blogging is useful. ;)

In the end, sound was the biggest problem.  I had to find a volume balance between her voice and the background music of her playing the marimba, which caused me to have to go back to the editing process about 3 times.  Audio tends to vary between hearing it on headphones and hearing it on normal computer speakers.

I'm very happy with the results, and can't wait to do my next "profile" using video.  If you want to see Janet McGarity's page on Armstrong Experience, go here.