Week Eleven

On Sunday, I spent a half hour continually replying to people via email and text message to schedule interviews. So far, I have 12 people who have agreed to help out, 5 of whom have set up times with me. I'm still negotiating scheduling the other 7, and I anticipate that I will hear back from several more people as they get back to campus. I am planning on meeting with some of the Seegers Union custodians that I know tomorrow to ask them if they're comfortable being filmed. I will also be asking a couple of the ladies who work in the GQ and a couple members of the Plant Ops crew, also. I also spent an hour and a half trying to upload videos to this blog. First off, I started by uploading them to my Youtube account, as you suggested, so that I could go on to embed them. The device kept on "removing" itself during the uploading process which grew a little frustrating as I was nowhere near the cords. Eventually, one of the videos uploaded but only the sound could be heard as the video itself appeared as a blur. I will try again and see if re-formatting the videos as different file types will help the upload. I checked that the file sizes and lengths were not too large, and they weren't, so I'm not too sure what the matter could be, so I will try all angles and see if I can sort it.

Also, that evening, I spent another half hour between emailing interviewees and adding some pictures on the Facebook page which I had forgotten that I had access to play around with it. I also spent an hour and a half between interviews of Rianna Sommers on Prosser, Danielle Luszczyk on Prosser also, and Jacob Abrams on East Hall. It was slightly more difficult getting website-appropriate nice things to say about some of the dorms than I anticipated but I think more of the footage is useful. I'm also still working on ways to make people more comfortable in front of a camera as they (understandably) get camera shy.

On Monday, I spent about 20 minutes interviewing John Pasquerello on Dining on Campus. He was a very easy speaker but wanted to know more about the project and what I wanted of him before we actually started filming which was nice as he seemed eager to help out. I also spent about a half hour in the morning scheduling more interviews with people and fine-tuning my list of people to ask.

I also spent 15 minutes interviewing Seth Markin, 20 minutes interviewing Caitlin Harper, 20 minutes interviewing Kadeem Alston-Roman, 15 minutes interviewing Andrew Porter, 20 minutes interviewing Ariel Messeca, 15 minutes interviewing Christine Lake, 30 minutes interviewing Tori Ahrens and 20 minutes interviewing Rachel Jakubowitz.

On Tuesday, I spent about a half hour between tallying up hours from yesterday, updating my blog and continuing to schedule interview times with those that have gotten back to me. I would estimate that I have heard back from just under half of the people I have contacted but I will check more thoroughly later today.

I spent a half hour filming Liz Fonseca who got super giggly but was also really interested in the project. I also spent a half hour waiting for an interviewee who had forgotten and didn't show.

On Wednesday, I spent an hour and a half emailing people that I had already emailed to schedule times and I emailed a few more people who had said they were interested in helping out.

On Thursday, I spent about fifteen minutes emailing people to schedule and another half hour writing down an alternate list for the same groups as some people haven't responded to me. I spent a half hour emailing Caleb Jardel and one of his brothers and another half hour emailing Greg Wurzel. In interviewing both male and female Greeks on campus I think I am going to have them say the name of their organisation just because the boys keep doing so, so I want to have some degree of uniformity to at least the into portion of each video. I spent fifteen minutes interviewing Tom Garlick about his housing and a half hour interviewing Frank Cabrera on both of his majors. I am about to work on sending the other half of my long list from last week to get started on those interviews over the weekend and early next week.

I also plan on working on my resume throughout the weekend and the essay I need to do for the internship also. I have some more pictures to work on and all of my editing which will make up a solid chunk of editing. I had the idea to take a picture or two of each the locations that I am interviewing people about to accompany the videos in whatever format they are used, let me know if you think this is a good idea!

On Friday, I spent an hour and a half reaching out to other groups and organisations on campus who may (hopefully) be interested in allowing me to interview them. Some of these groups are the Residential Services Pro-staff, more people in Dining, Plant Ops, the Mailroom, other Greeks and I'm starting to work through people from different disciplines.

I also spent two hours trying to upload a video to the blog. The main room with the version of FinalCut that I've been using was in use so I tried to export it from an older version of the programme but it wouldn't even open it. I tried this a couple of times with two older versions of the programme and then I tried re-uploading the original .mov file to Youtube so that I could go on to embed it. The video at first would not process well, but the second time through it did show the preview images, however it wouldn't show anything and the visuals were the same as last time. I also spent another hour between meeting with Bill and updating my blog, and another half hour trying to schedule more interviews.

Total hours this week: 17

Total hours so far: 103.5