Yesterday was the grand final of the blogging competition Th!nk About It. The competition started in February and ended with the elections for the European Parliament last week. The meeting in Rotterdam was all about the awards and about celebrating the end of the competition. It was a lovely day with pleasant conversations and a perfect boatride to breath some fresh air and catch some daylight, which was lacking inside the walls of the Maassilo. Due to my busy schedule this week, I had to skip the dinner and party, but I guess the rest of the crowd had lots of fun.
So the EU-blogging adventure has ended for me. Gladly, I have to say. For me signing up for Th!nk About It back in November was accepting a challenge. I’m not into politics and certainly don’t like writing about it. The competition would be a perfect incentive for me to write more and discover more about the EU along the road. Now it’s about seven months later and I made it to the end of the competition. To be honest with you, I didn’t think I would make it. Even considered that writing once a month is not that much of an effort for participating, there were several moments I seriously doubted to keep contributing.
The competition didn’t grab me. I had a hard time tuning into the writing of other competitors. Many were young journalists and their writing style was accordingly. As a long-time blogger I missed heart in a lot of postings. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t read all the posts (appr. 600) that were written during the four months.
Even though I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to write more, I didn’t write as much. Instead I made an effort of creating visual material. Going back to basics with my movie explaining the power of the European Parliament pleased my family and friends. It made some of the basic decision making structures clear to them. During the party I got a lot of compliments on the other video I created, my visual letter to MEP’s.
I feel flattered so many people complimented me with my contribution. I guess I stood out of the crowd with my movies. People actually liking them is added bonus to the things I learned along the way creating them, skills that will be of use for future projects.
The EJC has plans for an extension of the Th!nk platform, they’re planning something around climate change. Even though it’s way more up my alley than the European Parliament, I don’t think I can be tempted to sign up for another competition. Not even when I know beforehand that I’ll win another gadget (I’ll keep you posted, though, in case you want to join).
1. I did a first interview with Lilia;
2. I worked further on the project plan;
3. I wrote an article for Smart People Magazine, which should be published in the next issue;
PLUS
(And this is the VERY exciting part)
4. I have a name for the project: In Full Flow; (yay!)
5. I worked really hard on creating a webspace, where I can collect all material relevant to the project;
6. Created a new video-update announcing all this:
As you can see, this video is a summary of the event, as I experienced it. It is not a piece of social reporting, as I promised earlier. Let me explain how that happened.
From the communication around NEXT09 I made two assumptions about the event: one - the theme of the conference is sharing economy, two - this is an English conference.
About Sharing Economy
What an interesting theme it sounds. And what an interesting topic in context of the current financial crisis. Yes, it would be an excellent idea to talk about different angles for our disrupted economy. Applying as a blogger (very formal), I was even asked to point to posts in which I write about the theme. My whole mindset was tuned into the topic, before going to the conference.
I guess you feel it coming: BUT. In the end the whole conference was yet another conference with speakers talking about their own topics. Here and there they managed to squeeze in the odd sentence about the theme, like “…and that’s so interesting about this whole idea of sharing economy.” Lots of speakers and panel moderators didn’t even bother.
So there I was, at this conference in Hamburg, with my prepared question about ’sharing’. The question didn’t fit in at all with what was going on during the conference.
I could have come up with a different idea to involve the participants and see what they’re thinking (instead of yet another interview with the speakers). The reason that I didn’t has everything to do with my second assumption about the conference.
An English Conference
I was only vaguely aware of the existence of NEXT before a lot of my friends applied for a blogger ticket to the event. Nicole Simon was the cause of this and at first I was a bit sad that I would miss out on the party. Luckily, I was able to attain a last-minute blogger ticket.
The communication around NEXT was all in English, and Nicole explicitly pushed for an international group of bloggers coming to the conference. That’s how my mindset got geared towards an English conference.
I should have known better. Why did Nicole push for her international network to apply for a blogger ticket? Right, because she wanted to spark the conference with an international touch (hey, I would push for a vibrant international conference on my home turf as well if I had the opportunity ;-)). That means that it wasn’t too internationally oriented previous times. NEXT, an English-speaking conference? Wrong assumption!
I have to give some credit to the organisers, most of the talks were in English, about 80% as claimed at the beginning of the conference, whereas last year it was a mere 20%. Fair enough. A large number of English speakers and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to address German topics and issues in German. But when you as a conference organiser communicate beforehand in English and then open the conference in German, I’m confused.
What reinforced my “ok, let’s not to this social reporting”-decision was my false assumption that people coming to this conference would be able to have a conversation with me in English. I forgot that on the conferences I usually attend, only Germans show up that are travelling a lot around Europe and therefore feel comfortable talking in English. The average German is still SO NOT INTO English. To me it felt awkward to pose the visitors of the conference a question in English and asking for a coherent answer back. If I would have felt comfortable enough in German I could have switched myself, but unfortunately, that’s where I feel awkward (with hindsight, I probably could have managed it, but I guess I’m sometimes a little bit too shy).
So that’s the story of how I went to Hamburg to gain insight in what the participants were thinking about sharing as a professional and came back with a tape of visual observations. I liked putting the film together and my visual summary was well received, so all in all I had my practice, even though on something different than I anticipated.
Next Tuesday and Wednesday the Next09 Conference will take place in Hamburg and I’ll be there in my role as a blogger. My intention is to do less of the text thing and more of the video thing. How that will work out, I have no idea. My video gear is not very practical for on the spot editing and uploading, but I did pack my ‘old’ N95 next to my tape-based camera. My question to the audience will be:
To document how I did it and as a reality check for myself how much time I actually spent on it, I thought it would be a good idea to share the production process of this video.
Stage 1: from idea to footage
For the blogging competition I take part in I wanted to create some kind of video. When we were going to London for a few days, knowing that I would talk to a lot of people, I thought it would be cool to do mini-interviews with them on the EU, the EP and the elections. Only during the conversations I had with Mark on the first night it felt right to do it. During the rest of the conversations it just didn’t feel right to actually film on this particular topic. Most of the people I spoke to don’t have politics or the EU on their radar and the reason for us to catch up was on completely different (professional) topics, so why ‘waste’ time on it.
So I ended up with footage of one mini-interview. I had to repurpose this material. Hey, didn’t Mark ask a question at the end of the interview?
Time spent: not much. I was in London anyway, was meeting Mark anyway, needed to play with my new camera & mic anyway. Let’s say 10 minutes for the interview and 10 minutes for transferring the footage to my harddisk.
Stage 2: researching
So I took Mark’s question seriously and started digging several websites on information how the European Parliament works, and how it fits in with the different bodies within the EU. I spent a lot of time searching, fact checking, reading and thinking. It is not easy to unravel a topic like this. My knowledge on the EP was practically zero, and surprisingly enough, my network’s knowledge as well. Thanks Twitter buddies! Of course I could have asked for help from fellow competition-bloggers, who obviously know more on the topic, but by just using the information I could find online, I actually mimicked the kind of information search the average person has to do to get to the facts.
Time spent: this is a rough estimate, but I guess about 4 hours on searching and reading.
Stage 3: combining the material into a story
I collected a lot of single line facts during my search. I combined those into a story that sounded sort of comprehensible, with beginning and end, cause and effect. Now I could have stopped right there. I produced a written document that I could have published as a blogpost. Maybe make the text a little bit more vivid, but is was pretty much bloggable (and I almost did!)
Time spent: 2 hours
Stage 4: recording talking head (= myself)
I didn’t feel comfortable at all using myself as the storyteller, but I guess all of us hate their own voices when hearing them back on tape ;-). Since this was a one-woman show I had to read my story in front of the camera myself. I set up my camera and microphone in the spare bedroom (lot’s of books there, so less sound-reflection) and started recording (and re-recording). I didn’t take the time to learn the text by heart, therefore you see me looking up and down from the paper (the reason why proper studio’s use autocue). Now it’s not an ideal situation, having to combine three roles in one: cameraman, sound producer and storyteller.
Time spent: one evening, 3 hours. (If I spent a little bit more, especially reviewing the material I shot, I could have avoided some not so pretty shots and slips of the tongue.)
Stage 5: importing material, creating animations and editing
This is the most time consuming stage of the production process. This is where it all happens! I had the story(line) on tape: the text that I wrote and read out loud. What I did was take it one paragraph at a time.
First, I imported the best audio bits of the first two or three paragraphs into iMovie. I then started to think how to mix that with material from Mark’s interview. I selected some parts of the interview and inserted that as a ‘cutaway’ (a new feature in iMovie ‘09). The intro was the easy part.
After that came the actual explanation how the EU and the EP work. Bit for bit I imported the story and then figured out how I could visualize the explanation. Keynote to the rescue. It’s possible to create a slide with animations and then export it through Quicktime as a .mov. I imported the exported files from Keynote into iMovie and they were ready to use for editing. This was my first attempt creating animations so it took some extra time to figure out how it worked. I just took the simplest forms to create the figures. I’m not a proper graphic designer
After lot’s of hours I ended up with the rough cut of my video. It then needed music, titles and a good review on its flow. I cut out, reordered and added some parts. I searched Jamendo for music that would fit in, but ended up using a short jingle from the iLife library (that came with iMovie ‘06).
And then it seemed finished!
Time spent: about 24 hours.
Stage 6: exporting and publishing
Exporting movies from iMovie (or any other editing programme) to a format that you can redistribute can be a time-consuming process, especially when you’re exporting movies longer than a minute. I have played around with the exporting settings enough now to know what the proper settings are for using it on YouTube/Vimeo/Viddler/Blip. And since I’m in the possession of a brand new Canon HV30 HD camera, the exporting times trippled compared to my old Sony TVR-20E
I hit the export button in iMovie and went to do something else, because the computer would be busy for hours (even the MacbookPro)(and the heat!).
Once exported, I had to upload it to YouTube (I chose this one for the potential exposure). It took another hour or so (depends heavily on how busy YouTube’s servers are). During this time it’s not possible to do any other intensive things on the internet. Loading webpages seems to take forever (fibre optics are coming soon to our neighbourhood!).
The final stage was to write a blog post accompanying the video and publish it on both my blog as the competition blog.
Time spent: let’s say 3 hours (making everything in order, checking progress, adding the correct info on YouTube, writing blogpost and checking the comments on the competition site).
Summary:
I spent nearly a full ’standard’ working week (36 hours) on this video. That’s a lot for working on something without any real reward (I might win something in the competition, but probably not).
The reason I did it was that it fits in with: 1. what I like doing – researching and editing (the topic not so much), 2. what I need to learn/or want to get better at – practicing with filming/using audio/editing, 3. the competition I signed up for – I’m not in it to win it, but thought it would be a good incentive to gain more knowledge on the EU etc. For me this was practice.
Now that I realize how much time my ‘amateur-plus’ (or does this qualify as pro-am?) video actually costs to create, I know that I’ll treasure the quality stuff I come across the Web even more (more hours = more quality)!
Yesterday was the grand final of the blogging competition Th!nk About It. The competition started in February and ended with the elections for the European Parliament last week. The meeting in Rotterdam was all about the awards and about celebrating the end of the competition. It was a lovely day with pleasant conversations and a perfect boatride to breath some fresh air and catch some daylight, which was lacking inside the walls of the Maassilo. Due to my busy schedule this week, I had to skip the dinner and party, but I guess the rest of the crowd had lots of fun.
Even though I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to write more, I didn’t write as much. Instead I made an effort of creating visual material. Going back to basics with my movie explaining the power of the European Parliament pleased my family and friends. It made some of the basic decision making structures clear to them. During the party I got a lot of compliments on the other video I created, my visual letter to MEP’s.
The EJC has plans for an extension of the Th!nk platform, they’re planning something around climate change. Even though it’s way more up my alley than the European Parliament, I don’t think I can be tempted to sign up for another competition. Not even when I know beforehand that I’ll win another gadget 
(I’ll keep you posted, though, in case you want to join).
Next Tuesday and Wednesday the 
