A Little G in a Big D

Of course I normally think of back to school as the end of summer, but the temperature here has been m-i-s-e-r-a-b-l-e … yesterday, in fact, was the hottest day of the year in Dallas so far. And it was the start of school for many north Texas kids. Which leads me to my next point.

Back to school. Always a massive staff effort here in Dallas. Several shooters, videographers and reporters are scattered throughout our coverage area working on all different kinds of stories; just about anything you can think of relating to the first day of school, we do.

My beat yesterday was Frisco Independent School District, which opened an area-most six schools to welcome some 3,000 new students. Suburban sprawl is alive and well in north Texas.

In the early morning I hung out at Sonntag Elementary, one of the new schools. I was specifically there to photograph new teacher Kayla McAfee (fourth photo), but I just shot a little of everything. After that, I headed over to another new school — Lone Star HS — for what has become an FISD tradition for new high schools: a massive group picture with all the students and staff. Those are the last two photos. They tried to make almost 600 people form a large lone star on the practice football field. Sorta worked.

One thing new this year for us was the iPhone 4. Our photo staff and some “mobile reporters” have been issued these phones so we can better and more quickly cover breaking news with still pictures and video … and so we can all become horribly addicted to Words With Friends. (kidding … sorta)

Was an interesting challenge. The stills from the phone are actually really nice. Video’s not bad either, but hard to control (shaky camera work). There’s still some bugs to work out, but we proved yesterday that we can make it happen — the picture desk had a good selection of mobile photos and video before a lot of these kids were done digesting breakfast.

The first two photos in the below selection are iPhone images. They have been given some Photoshop loving (crops and minor toning), but otherwise, the files are about what they were out of camera. Also, click here to see a short video I shot with the iPhone at the aforementioned group photo.

Some folks back at the desk thought I edited this with iMovie on the iPhone, which we can do. Nope — Final Cut Pro. But still, I was happy enough to make something out of what I expected to be nothing.

Not bad, Steve Jobs. Not bad. I just wish the phone part worked better, but whatevs.

Thanks for looking …

- gerry -

Hi all:

So here at the DMN, we’re in the middle of a huge migration of multimedia data from an old service we used for our site to a new and much improved one. Suffice to say, as I’ve been told by a lot of people, it’s gonna make things a whole, whole lot better for finding and viewing video and such on our site.

To help with the transition, we’ve all been asked to look through the video archive and decide which pieces, if any, we’d like to migrate over to the new system. For the folks who’ve been shooting video here for years, or are current or former members of the permanent video team, this is a big task — poring over video after video to see what’s up to snuff.

For me, it was pretty easy. I’ve only shot and/or produced about a dozen pieces in my time here. As I was only trained on Final Cut Pro and our video workflow back in late 2008, most of what I’ve done here has been in the last year and-a-half.

Video is one of the things that brought me to the DMN. The staff aggressively pursued the medium well ahead of a lot of other papers in the country, and the work produced here is at a really high bar for newspaper videography. It’s an honor to be a small part of that mix.

So anyway, on the eve of yet another work anniversary for me here in Dallas (three years as of tomorrow), I offer you a handful of my favorite videos. I put titles and blurbs where I could so you knew what they heck was going on. They’re roughly in chronological order. The first piece was the first piece I produced after FCP training (fall 2008). Last couple are from this year. Also, I’d suggest holding on for another minute to let all the videos load fully.

Thanks for your time,

- gerry -

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