It’s week 3 of this project and I dove head first into planning, scheduling, more research and officially writing out the episodes. The process is always one of the hardest for me. My mind has a thousand ideas all flowing at the same time, but actually putting my fingers to the keyboard or pen to paper is becomes a challenge when the ideas are never in chronological order. The EasyBib blog describes exactly what I feel before I sit down for almost every writing assignment. “Students often find that organizing their thoughts can be one of the toughest parts of the writing process. They can find the information, jot down ideas, and even take good notes, but they struggle to arrange their thoughts into a cohesive structure that helps them communicate their ideas.” (Harding)
With that in mind, I decided to write the two most important things in each script down first… the intro and the outro. I knew from the beginning I wanted each episode to be high energy and so my language is very upbeat and conversational. Nothing sounds stiff or overly scripted. Plus, I can already picture myself sitting at my anchor desk on the little boy band breakdown set that I create starting next week.
After completing each intro and outro for each episode, I went on and continued to write the entire script for the 3rd episode. My personal favorite video is going to be the third one because the boy bands that I talk about are the ones that I’m actually huge fans of. So this script was the easiest to write about.
Because I struggle to write my 800 ideas in a single stream script I always start each project with a rough written out order of things and ideas. The list is always hand written because I need to physically see myself cross things out and draw arrows around things to connect ideas and add additional sub thoughts.
After planning each episode and getting all the scripts at least started I shifted tasks and worked on the interview aspect of each episode. I contact my episode 2 and 3 interviewees, Kevin and Shannon, they were both kind enough to say yes and I have them scheduled for interviews for next week. My episode 1 interviewee is actually my mother. There is no one else I know who is a bigger fan of the Monkees. I then went and created unique questions for each interview and have a list of constant questions that I’m going to ask each interview to see their differing opinions.
I also have an extra set of questions for an extra interview for episode 3 if I think I need it with a 15 year-old and 16 year-old. I’m holding off on conducting the interview in the first place because both girls are very uncomfortable on camera and talking in completed sentences so I don’t think it will add anything significant. But right now after writing out the episode and planning all the visuals it looks like I’ll have plenty of content.
Planning ahead for next week is extremely important right now. In order to stay ahead of my plan that I created on Asana, I’m going to finish writing the first two episode scripts, interview my 3 interviewees and film my intro and outros for all 3 episodes. This way by the end of next week I’ll have all the pre-production and almost all of the production done, which will give me ample time to collect and organize all the stock and footage and photos I need and plan out how I’m going to create all the graphics I’ll need for each episode.
The final two things I did this week were, I went to Amazon and did my research to find a good condenser to use for my intro and outros and to use for my episode 1 interview since it will be in person and the rhode mic on top of my camera isn’t the best. After looking around for about 20 minutes, I went with one of Amazon’s top rated and best selling mics, Fifine mic that connects to both mac and windows. It has a great sound quality and is easily manipulatable in Adobe Audition. I also made the choice to get it in pink to match the entire aesthetic of the show.
I also create my first production journal documenting what I needed to get done this week verses what I actually got done. The journal also documents how long each task took and keeps me honest about dedicating enough to this project. If you want to check out this weeks production journals click the document below.
taylorsniffen.com 