shot{b}log

"monstrous" coverage

so this is the project that i was so excited about :)
jeff, the sports writer that is primarily responsible for carroll, and i have been talking about doing something fun for halloween for a couple of weeks now ... maybe two months ... and we maybe got a bit carried away with our own cleverness on this one.  :)
the idea was to take the senior linebacker who kind of anchors carroll's defense and make a sort of horror feature out of the carnage he wreaks on the field.
our victim, linebacker owen koeppen, was a total good sport about the whole story, and let us do the photo shoot that led to the cover image to the right.  and jeff's story?  made of awesome.
the last piece of the coverage puzzle was a five-minute feature video of basically the biggest hits of carroll's defense this season laid over audio from an interview with four guys from the team talking about the season so far.
check it out:

jacked for the weekend ...

ok, so i can't post any of this stuff yet because a) it's not all done, and b) it probly shouldn't go online before it's even been printed, but our pre-carroll vs. tech gameday issue is going to be disgustingly awesome this saturday.
yup, disgustingly awesome.
the cover of gameday (and lead feature story subject) is owen koeppen, one of carroll's senior linebackers. 
and in honor of halloween, he let us turn him into a monster :)
will post the cover photo, link to the story, and embed the video late friday/saturday morning ...

Frontier Conference Champions

Saints trounce Bears 59-13

Carroll defeats Western 24-21

Saturday's game probably the most exciting Carroll game so far this season -- and it was the first really cold game of the season, so it was a great opportunity to see how the guys (and, uh, the camera-girl) would perform in the cold.
The guys kicked butt.
The camera-girl whined.
But it was a crazy good game - Carroll lead for the entire first half and most of the third quarter, despite some blatantly weird calls by the refs.  I got video of the first one -- Western's first touchdown that wasn't actually a touchdown, but the Carroll defender's body blocked the ref's view of the fumble.  The KTVH camera caught the second really bad call -- a Carroll interception that was ruled a simultaneous catch and given back to Western's offense. 
Western rallied in a big way during the second half of the game and tied up the score 2 minutes from the end of the fourth. Carroll got possession after the PAT and kickoff and ground their way back up the field to within about 30 yards, where Zach Thiry's field goal sealed the deal 24-21.
Still not sure if Lisa, Jeff and I will be heading to Billings for the Rocky game, but I hope so. :)

live debate recap

ok, i know i promised to post this the day after the debate, but my week(s) got insane ... as they tend to do.
anyway.
the debate went pretty swimmingly: much more swimmingly than i guess i had any right to hope it would have, considering the fact that live video streams were something we'd pretty much written off as impossible until about 10 days before the debate.
those 10 days were filled with lots (LOTS) of tech troubleshooting and test streams of the newsroom until we had all of our toys together and synching issues worked out and were as positive as we could be that our audio and video feeds would flow uninterruptedly ...
and then it was the afternoon of the debate and everything was crazy hectic and we had to get the stage set up and the podiums and a curtain hung behind the speakers and the lights set up and the PA working and ...
everything was miraculously a "go" about 45 minutes before the candidates were set to go on stage -- we had video, we had audio, we had lights and cameras and action.
and then tv showed up 5 minutes before going live and somehow completely munted the soundboard and i lost audio.  everybody lost audio - radio, everybody.  i think what happened was they just started unplugging stuff looking for room to plug in their cables, and everybody who had been plugged in prior to their arrival got unplugged or replugged into the wrong jacks.  grr.
but luckily the laptop's inboard microphone decided to behave itself and sound through that was audible and as uninterrupted as our external soundcard-plugged-into-a-soundboard had been ... so crisis basically averted.
the streaming service we used (mogulus) was really cool and kept track of viewers and total minutes watched: 113 viewers was our peak, although we hit that pretty early on, and numbers fluctuated a bit but never fell below 88, and 7300 minutes was our total watch time.  our webmaster is still wrangling with our stats tracker to figure out how many unique visitors comprised those viewers and minutes, but i think it was a pretty huge step for us here. :)
check out the purty screencap:

pre-debate testing

witness the mess in my "office" trying to figure out all this live stuff :)

the gear you're seeing here:

sony hvr-v1u vidcam
several different mics
laptop
mixing board
external soundcard
more cables than i know the names of

Carroll over Eastern 48-10