alright, friday was good for us. we all met at 5am and got some b-roll footage at mcdaniel farms and also set up for a few interviews for next week. The weather was great and there seemed to be a pretty good turnout which was good for our shot of all the cars showing up adn filling the parking lot. Thad has been sick and his voice is all raspy so we decided to hold off on his interview and Dr Bennett is also very busy this week so we will be fitting him in next week as well. luckily we have not had any real trouble with checking out equipment so far which is very good considering what i keep hearing from other people running into problems. we have already got a few shoots lined up for next week and the equipment is already requested so now all we have to do is hope everyone remains healthy enthusiastic. travis has been busting his butt lately and with all of these interviews coming up i hope to be more help to him than i feel like i have been. he has kept contact with a lot of people and has been quick on his feet when problems present themselves and is doing a wonderful job of keeping the entire project on track, which is amazing to me considering all the other things he has going on outside of this project. luckily all of our schedules are still holding up though it is pretty hard to get together at just the right time and work around other people's schedules as well. beyond this i think we just need to concentrate on the interviews and getting some time with Dr Bennett. i feel like we are on the right track and this coming week should be both busy and very helpful to us.

As far as the B-Roll reading goes I did pick up on a few things that seem pretty elementary though I didn’t really think about. One tip was to “Never leave a talking head without hand shots.” We did talk about this in class but it really is a great help to the editing proccess. I also think that Lexi’s group’s interview looked really good and the fact that we could see the subject’s hands lent a lot to it.

The BBC Pre-Interview technique is also not a bad idea. Even though the video we are shooting is nowhere near as expensive as 16mm, the idea of concentrating on sound seams very helpful. Though we most likely would have video to accompany the audio we would still have good audio if the footage was badly lit, shaky or any other possible problem arose. In this case, we could still use the audio with reenactments or other footage. This kind of eases my mind when thinking about messing up a shot. The stock footage could be very helpful as well and I will definitely keep this in mind when we begin to shoot the interviews.

The interviews are something we are currently working on. As we found in class on Wednesday a lot of people that Travis approached tended to answer the questions in a similar, very vague fashion. I think it was very helpful to actually sit down and watch this with the class because it certainly pointed out several areas which we need to concentrate on including sound, interview setting/background and especially encouraging/leading the interviewee to answer questions with more detailed and personal responses. I know a lot of this will have to do with our initial questions but I also think we will need to develop an ear for these “safe answers” and figure out a way to get the responses we need.