Jacqueline Hlavenka's Production Notes

By Jacqueline Hlavenka

I finished shooting the video and photos two weeks ago during the “reporting” period. I gathered audio from Kat Slevin at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign over the phone, since her office is in Manhattan. I interviewed John Michno over the web via YouTube messaging. He also responded to me on a message board on the NYC Straphanger’s Campaign.

Shooting the stills and video footage was somewhat difficult. I was warned by the MTA Police to stop taking pictures at the Hempstead Transit Center. Fearing that I would loose my camera, I was very discrete with my handy FlipCam.

On the bus, I tried to remain discrete with my camera. There’s a fine line between being a journalist and respecting people’s personal space, especially considering how crowded it was. Eventually, I found a happy medium.

After I finished the reporting, putting everything together was the hard part. I uploaded my videos to Blip.TV, my photos to Flickr and imported the media into iMovie. The audio from the voice recorder caused a problem. My USB cord wouldn’t recognize the files. I then decided to import the sound into Apple Garage Band to cut-up the audio.

After importing all the video, I used a microphone to record my voiceover (vo) audio track. As I began to speak, I needed to re-record certain things because I realized my writing was too long! Broadcast needs to be quick, clean and to the point.

For John Michno’s text, I wanted to create a graphic. Using Photoshop, I placed the text inside an image that resembles an ordinary piece of paper. My boyfriend, Dave Beede, helped me animate the graphic in iMovie, since I didn’t know how.

Two coffees and six hours later, I uploaded the video to blip.tv, clocking in at one minute and fifty seconds. I am very pleased with the piece, and now have a better understanding of making a video project -- not just writing a news story.