Recap

Mary Elizabeth Medawar, NBC5 Next

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

After the dietary supplement story I realized that when beginning something new the first story is always going to be the worst. That was a difficult lesson for me, being a perfectionist, but I learned a lot during that first week that helped me there after. You know the saying, “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong”? Well it’s true. I didn’t acquire the pictures I needed for proper b-roll because the person I interviewed was out of state. So I had to go with what I had- as Marcus always says. I also had countless difficulties with Final Cut and couldn’t figure out how to export the final piece. This experience taught me not to use software you’re unfamiliar with when on deadline. Then I had a nightmarish time with Aaron (the aide at school) inserting titles and exporting it as an AVI file (it took us like 5 hours for a 30 minute job). That taught me to be satisfied with what I have, especially when the one helping me wasn’t familiar with technicalities on Avid. To top it all off my external hard drive wouldn’t transfer the files onto the computers at NBC. Looking back I am thankful those things happened in the beginning because I was able to learn and grow from them.

My next story about the new iPhone thankfully went much better. I taped during the week of torrential rainfall and heavy storms, so finding a day to shoot outside was a tad difficult. I taped my stand-up on the side of the Apple store right in front of display windows, which I later realized was stupid because they cast a bright light behind me and I turned into a talking silhouette. I walked away from that story with an understanding that you shoot with the light in front of you, not behind you.

My Clinton/Obama story was not the norm for me. I have never reported on politics and am not an avid follower of them either. So piecing this story together was challenging with a foreign language of terms to learn and a bunch of important events to catch up on. I was glad to broaden my horizons and step outside my comfort zone. I learned a great deal about loyalty and the inner workings of the human mind from the psychologist I interviewed. I also have a new understanding of politics from hours of research and televised videos. Marcus even taught me a brilliant way to acquire b-roll – YouTube.

The latest package I completed was about Chicago SummerDance. It was by far the most fun I’ve had working on a story. It was truly a sea of diversity- people were there from all over the world. The only real problem I encountered (aside from getting eaten alive by mosquitoes) was my voice became hoarse and kept cracking during my voice-overs. So my tracks sound unenthusiastic and monotonous- which I suppose is better than sounding like a boy during puberty. I also faced some more lighting problems because the once-present sun disappeared halfway through the night and my ending shots are darker.

Amid all the bad things that can happen it’s important to not become discouraged, but to keep persisting. Look at it as an opportunity to expand your knowledge. These experiences will only make you stronger, as they did for me.