1 in 2,000 - Drew Swiecicki

Story and Process

My group decided pretty early on that we wanted to do someone in band so our options were Katie and Drew. Eventually we decided on doing ours on Drew since he was in this years front line of front ensemble. We wanted to kind of guide the viewer through a snippet of Drew's marching band expierience  so we decided that along with his interview we would interview Mr. Carter, the percussion instructor. 

When we had everything figured out I started writing the interview questions for both Drew and Mr. Carter. I had a pretty good idea of what information I for sure wanted to get from both of them. I wanted to know some of what front ensemble does and what Mr. Carter thought of Drew so, I made sure I wrote enough questions that would help to dig deeper into all of what I wanted to know. I interviewed Mr. Carter when we did that and both Drew and Maleah interviewed Drew. Throughout both the interviews Ava did the majority of making sure the camera was set up and stuff like that.

After the interviews were filmed I started piecing together the "official" story or whatever you want to call it. I took time outside of class to think about which answers I would be using to help shape the story I would be telling and I started figuring out an order for the clips that worked in favor of the story. When I had a general order I started on my voice overs which were really annoying to write mostly because I wasn't sure if ay of them would en up working how I wanted them to. 

The editing process was kind of a mess for me. I'd love to blame premier for the mess that was my editing but I know all of the fault is on my for being a disaster. I was stressed about it mostly because I didn't know if I was going to have enough clips to make anything remotely worth looking at and I was super concerned about whether or not I would have this done in time to present. Even with all of that I finally completed editing the piece. I didn't want to look for music on the internet so I decided to use the music from this years marching show to go behind everything just to tie it all together more.

My Role and What Was Learned

I didn't really have a role that was set in stone or anything. I did the planning for the interviews and sequencing, I did an interview, and I wrote on of the two voice overs we had. So I guess I was just a writer and planner overall. I don't really know if there's a term for the part I played in my group.

I learned a lot about the kings of a feature piece even though this one wasn't the most serious thing. Doing the planning and writing the questions for this gave me a chance to learn more of what has to go into the pre-production work. I liked the work that I did after we were done filming more than the pre-production work because I like storytelling and organizing so being able to take time and plan my sequencing was nice. The experience of writing out the voice over was interesting in the way that they all had to give just the right amount of information to both intro the next clip and transition from clip to clip.

I definitely learned about premier, just like I do with every project as they get more difficult and need more editing. I learned how to change the position and scale of my clips which was great because I wanted to cry when all of my clips ended up being different sizes when I put them into my sequence. I kind of played with different way of layering my audio and changing the levels of the different things I had going on. I ended up using music form the marching show to go behind my voiceovers and I would have it kind of fade out as the different interviews played just to attempt to make it a bit more cohesive.

Next time

For next time I'd like to stick to the way I planned for things before we went out and recorded anything. I liked how when filming the interviews we knew what information we wanted to get from the subject and how we were going to go about asking the right questions to gain that key information. I didn't always like writing the questions because around question 15 ti starts feeling pretty redundant. What I don't want next time is a group that doesn't split up the work fairly. It sucked having to do the jobs of a couple team members when they were off talking to other groups and not doing anything pertaining to what goal we had set for that hour.