Beyond Alaska Photo
Multimedia journalism in the Last Frontier

Last Tuesday, just as the Ted Stevens indictment story was breaking, a woman called the newsroom saying she had video of a bear attacking a moose calf in her front yard. I didn’t make it out to Jennifer’s house until Wednesday morning, but by then she had shot more footage, this time of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game responding to the area.

Technically the footage could be better — the camera work is shaky, lots of panning and zooming, poor audio — but what an amazing moment to get on camera! It’s a rare event to see, let alone capture, and it was obvious immediately that she had a great story to tell.

After copying the files, I asked Jennifer to describe what happened in an audio piece (one take, two minutes. She totally nailed it) and then shot some b-roll of the area. The finished product took about four hours to produce, in large part because of file conversion problems (VOB to AVI to MOV), but in three days it’s received nearly 30,000 views on adn.com, making it one of our most popular videos of the year.

I frequently hear newsroom staffers (to be honest, usually photographers) ask why we have to shoot video when the views don’t justify the effort. I think this experience provides an answer: By producing video we redefine people’s understanding of the newspaper to include video. When we own online video in our local market users look to us (and not just TV) to distribute their content and, more importantly, they’ll visit our site first to see news video.

An aside: like many long-time Alaskans I’d gotten a little blase about bears. Not stupid, but I certainly didn’t understand what a bear attack looked like. The bear in the video throws that moose around like it’s nothing at all — which is all that’s left at the end.

UPDATE: CNN called the office today looking to run the video. I got this information second hand, so I don’t know if it’s just the website or for broadcast (quality seems suspect for broadcast).

UPDATE 2: The video is now posted to CNN’s homepage. I’m a little disappointed they gave the Daily News a “courtesy” credit instead of a “produced by” credit.

Fans line up to buy the seventh Harry Potter book last year.

It was a year ago that the final Harry Potter book came out and a number of stores in downtown Palmer celebrated with a release party. Over the weekend I dug out my audio slide show from the event and realized just how unlikely it is that we’ll ever see a literary event like that again.

I used my full compliment of multimedia gear while covering the Xterra Hammerman Triathlon this morning:

I ended up spending too much time on the finished project trying to balance the audio levels between the tape and the M-Audio but I prefer that to shooting a lame stand up (probably a habit I should break — but not yet!).

Here’s the final video:

A multimedia project this week finally had me digging through the G9’s menu screens to get a better handle on audio recording (it’s only taken six months).

First up: mic location. You’ll find it on top of the camera, right next to the mode dial. The big thing on the left side of the camera is the speaker.

There are two recording modes with the G9:

This is the quickest way. Shoot a picture, switch to playback mode and hit the microphone button. This will allow you to record up to a minute of audio per picture. To record more you need to switch to a different image. I ran into trouble as I tried to capture multiple tracks of ambient sound — once I reached my minute the camera only gave me the option to play the selected sound memo, not record.

The record button is on the camera back, in the upper right corner. The screen shows the microphone settings. I’ve been using auto levels exclusively — I find there’s too much going on for me to set the levels manually. And auto seems to work pretty well.

Getting to this feature requires slightly more button pushing. In playback mode, hit menu then scroll to ‘Sound Recorder.’

The controls are about the same as they are for the sound memo, and you don’t have to worry about a time limit.

Be careful about bumping the sample rate when you’re on this screen!
I suspect I’ll continue to use the sound memo function when collecting ambient sound simply because it’s (slightly!) easier to use but will transition over to the sound recorder for voice overs.

Zayk and Mavis, the Alaska Zoo’s resident black bears, helped the Alaska Department of Fish and Game try out one of the new garbage cans now in use in the city. Urban bears are a problem all summer and the biologists hosting this demonstration were called away to dart a black bear prowling downtown.