Recycling at Roger Williams University

The only direction we were given for this assignment was to find a story related to Roger Williams University and produce a video on it. My team decided to do a video on the recyclemania initiative that took place during the spring semester. Overall, the program was successful and I think our video about the program came out very well.



I only have a few self criticisms for this project. The first is the fact that the introduction is lit differently than the rest of the video. This flaw is the result of a botched first attempt at the standup during the afternoon that did not come out as well as we thought it did. Since we didn't notice how bad the first standup was until the evening we had no other option besides re-shooting the scene as the sun was setting.

Even with this flaw, I i am extremely pleased with how this project turned out. It was not an easy project to film and I think my team did a great job of finding b-roll to cover our voiceover. The only other criticism that I can think of for this project is the fact that our interview with Chelsea Fitzsimons-Diaz had some pretty bad ambient noise in the background. This noise when combined with the fact that Fitzsimons-Diaze tended to babble made her interview very difficult to understand.

Women's Sports at Roger Williams

The assignment here was to find an issue or broad trend on campus and then try to find an individual that either represented the situation or was being impacted by it. My team decided to look at women's sports and the unique sense of community the create among female athletes at Roger Williams University.



We chose to focus on senior tennis player Haley McCraven, who has played tennis for four years at Roger Williams, as the individual representing our story. We also interviewed two experts on the subject, namely athletic director George Kolb and women's sports coordinator Kristen Raffa.

Overall I am happy with how the project came out; however, it does have some shortcomings. During the editing process we decided that we would put in pictures of every women's team that was mentioned during the voice over, which worked well until we realized there was no picture online for the women's swim team. As a result, we frantically looked through team-member's Facebook pages trying to find a team photograph and had no luck.

After about an hour of searching I found the only picture of the team, hanging in the Campus Recreation Center. I had no other option than to film the picture in the poorly lit hallway. Due to this last minute fix, I am not as happy with that section of the video as I would have been had I been able to get a better picture of the women's swim team.

Besides this flaw, I am, again, very pleased with how the project turned out. The only other criticism I have of myself here is that when my partner did her sign-off, I forgot to remind her that we were standing on first base and not third.

Senior Video

The assignment this time was to produce a story that had something to do with the senior class of 2008. One of my group members knew Courtney Fraser, a rider on the Roger Williams University Equestrian Team, who is planning on joining the Peace Corps. this spring after her graduation.

We agreed as a group that Fraser would be an interesting subject for our second news package. Overall I am pleased with how this project came out. I have to admit that I did not realize at first how hard getting b-roll for this story would be.

At our initial production meeting, I figured that the b-roll would be easy because I could just film Fraser riding her horse and insert the voice over. However, once we had tracked the script and started looking at the footage we had I realized we needed more. Luckily the Peace Corps. was on campus, which presented us with an excellent opportunity to get more b-roll and to do an interesting interview with Peace Corps. representative January Zuk.

Another lesson that I learned during this project was how difficult it can be to film around animals, namely the horses at the barn. My team's reporter tried to do his standup in front of Fraser's horse, but he kept hitting him and nibbling on his jacket. So we decided to try and film in front of a different horse that kept doing the same thing.

We eventually got a good standup, but it took a while. If you want to see a video of these outtakes check out the bloopers video, which is posted above.

Interview With Professor Bob Blackburn

Professor Bob Blackburn is a member of the philosophy department at Roger Williams University. Blackburn has been a professor at Roger Williams for just over 40 years, he joined the university in 1968 after finishing graduate school at Brown University. He attended Brown for his undergraduate work as well.

Blackburn said he was attracted to teaching by the professors he had while in college. He said that while he had some great teachers as a student, he also had some bad ones. Blackburn said he was attracted to teaching by the ineffective teachers, because he felt that he could teach the material better than they could. Reaching this goal has been Blackburn's primary objective over his 40-year teaching career at Roger Williams.

Blackburn said his favorite part of teaching is how the classes are always different, even if he is teaching the same material he has already taught to hundreds of students over the years. He said he greatly enjoys the challenges presented by having different students every semester.

In this video, Blackburn discusses why he was attracted to Roger Williams after graduating from Brown University and he explains why he has remained a member of the faculty for so long.