The Passion Behind the Music

Cheering others up through Music

3 weeks ago, our school was shocked with the tragic loss of two beautiful Junior girls, Ciara Webb and Cady Housh.  The raven family was broken.  In the middle of the sadness, I was searching for comfort when I stumbled upon a tweet from Ragan Kinkade. Her tweet said that an ONW student, Keaton Conrad, put a song up on
Soundcloud and dedicated it to Ciara and Cady.  I looked up his song, and I found out that he had a lot of other original songs up as well.  I thought it would be interesting to do a story over him and discover where he finds his inspiration and how he produces his own songs.

The piano, guitar, mandolin, ukulele, and base drums Man 

Savannah Plumlee and I pulled Keaton out of his first hour to ask him if we could do a story over him.  He happily accepted and told us he had a home studio where he produces his music and he said we could record him in there.  We set up a time and went over to his house to record.  We came prepared with questions and first did an interview with him.  Unfortunately, the only tripod left when I went to check out equipment was broken, so while we were doing the interview, it was challenging to make the shot completely stable the entire time.  While we were interviewing Keaton, we discovered that he is very musically talented.  Not only does he write songs, he also plays the piano, ukelele, base drums, and the mandolin.  We were able to get shots of him playing for us on all of those instruments for b-roll.

However, the first two songs Keaton played and sang for us, I wasn't able to capture audio.  I forgot to switch the audio inputs I had set for mic after the interview was over.  Luckily, I caught it soon enough and the remainder of our clips had audio.  It still provided a problem during the editing process.

The first song that he sang for us was "Don't Cry," the song he dedicated to Ciara

and Cady, and Savannah and I thought this song was very important to include in the package.  So I texted Keaton and asked him to email me the audio file of the song, and he did.  Because this package was about music, I thought it was important that the clips we included of Keaton singing matched up with the audio. It made editing a long process, by the end of it I got really good at lip reading and I learned all of the words to "Don't Cry."  In the end, I was able to match up the clips pretty well and the final product looked good.  

Steps towards Improvement

Every package I produce, I learn something new.  If I were to redo this package I would've shot Keaton playing his songs with two cameras.  I did not anticipate the fact that in order to play his songs continuously, I needed to have one stable shot that I could jump back to.  While he was playing, I kept the camera rolling the entire time so I could detach the audio in the editing process and place the clips over it.  However, because I only had one camera, when I was moving the camera to change the shot, I couldn't include that shot of b-roll with the audio.  As a result, the editing process took much longer than normal, because I had to try to match up Keaton's singing with the audio as well as cut out the shots of movement.  If Savannah and I would've thought to bring two cameras, we could've had one standard medium shot and another camera to get a variety of shots.  This way we could jump back to the stationary shot while the other camera was moving to get a different angle.  

Although the editing process was complex because of this mistake, Savannah and I were able to make a solid package out of it.  In fact, I think this is one of my best packages I've made so far.  The nat noise of Keaton singing with the clips of him playing over it made the story entertaining and it really enhanced the overall quality of the package.  I also started the package and ended the package with nat noise of Keaton singing which I thought was a good way to introduce and conclude the story.  I thought the voice over I wrote helped drive the story, and Keaton's sound bites from the interview created the package's beginning, middle, and end.  I also think that I used the six shot system well because we ended with a large variety of shots in the package.  

Overall, I think I improve with every package I produce.  I will apply the things I learned to my next package and continue learning from my mistakes and successes.