HPHS & Northwestern University Marching Bands - ID# 390
Highland Park
Natural Audio News Package
Entry Description
Northwestern University honored the HPHS Marching Band during a halftime performance. HPTV takes a look at the performance and its impact on the HPHS Marching Band, in the context of the tragedy on July 4th.
Copyright Info
Recent Teacher Comments
- 4/18 12:50 pm - Give me a little more b roll at the start you just jumped right in with your interviews. The music in the first half seemed more like a soundtrack than natural audio, amazing grace at the end had more purpose and intentionality. I would have liked more natural sounds throughout your piece (a conductor yelling, a drum beating, people getting ready to start, drum majors whistling etc.) Not as much camera work to judge, because you used so many stills, I thought the shot of the band director interview could have been better, to much headroom, background didn’t really say “marching band” It looked more like a messy office that could be anywhere. Interviews seemed to move a little fast I think that is because you never gave your audience a chance to digest what they were hearing you just jumped in and out of interviews without short little B-Roll clips in between. Your sound levels jumped around for example Neils Interview at 34 seconds comes in really hot. I think one thing that was missing from this story would be to have someone from the college to talk as well. I feel like this story was put together after the fact as opposed to document the event. When you plan it out you make sure you get those key shots, key interviews in the moment and don’t have to rely on stills from the event. You had a great topic, but minimal pre-planning made your post-production phase (and final product) harder to put together.
- 4/16 1:27 pm - While I get that the music in the background is probably the band, music beds are not allowed in this category and that’s what you had with the music playing over still images. We should be hearing the band when we see video of the band playing. The natural audio comes from the natural audio that is recorded with your b-roll. Still images have no audio, so no audio should be superimposed over those images. In a category like this, you should be having more b-roll instead of still images as it's the natural audio from that b-roll that is supposed to help tell the story. The clip at :51 was repeated which caused a jump cut.
- 3/6 2:14 pm - This was such a unique experience to cover for your high school band program. However, I wanted to see more video b-roll to help illustrate this story. If you are limited to photos, one thing you could try is using key frames to add movement to them. At the beginning of the story, I would also establish where the natural audio is coming from. Was this a recording from rehearsal or on the field? Without showing it, your viewer doesn't know what this music is from. For your interviews, I would zoom in on your band director so he has a little bit less headroom. Overall, this was a great start and I loved how many student and teacher perspectives were offered in the interviews!
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