Carroll College Fighting Saints 2009 Season
The last Saturday in August has become my favorite day of the year. Why? Because it means I get to spend the next 10-15 Saturdays outside with a video camera on the sidelines of Nelson Stadium, listening to several thousand Helenans cheer on their Fighting Saints.
The site I built to house stories, photos, brackets, videos and more from Carroll's 2009 season is available at helenair.com/carroll.
LIVE BROADCAST: Demolition of Asarco smokestacks
On Friday, August 14, 2009, the three iconic smokestacks of the East Helena Asarco lead smelter greeted their last sunrise. Two hours later, at 7 a.m., they were demolished.
We broadcast the event live (connecting the Sony HVR-V1U to a Gateway laptop via firewire, connecting to the internet with a Verizon broadband PC card, broadcasting through the free service Livestream) - with the video embedded on the front of the Independent Record home page. It was by far the most successful of our live broadcasts, with viewers tuning in from Oklahoma, California, all over the place. Our viewership stats for the morning were definitely worth my 3 a.m. wake up call! Here's the video, produced after the event (we also posted a raw clip within the hour after the stacks were down and our broadcast ended):
Continuum of Care
In February of 2008, when we sat down to brainstorm possible special section/feature stories for the coming year, the topic of mental health care kept coming up again and again - but we knew it was a topic that was too big to devote a mere week or month to ... so we spent 18 months on it. Research took up most of that spring, and reportage began in earnest in October. We finally launched in July of 2009.
This project is definitely "mile-wide/mile-deep" in scope and includes interviews with officials and survivors and family members and caregivers - we really tried to wrap our coverage around the entire scope of mental health care and awareness of mental illness in the state of Montana and presented the finished product as a resource to the community.
My role was to create a feature-length documentary (500 GBs of video was shot!), which was broken into 11 chapters in order to run online, and construct the web site which would house all content.
To view the entire project, visit helenair.com.
The trailer I produced to promote the series is viewable here:
Carroll College DVD
Helena is home to Carroll College - a small, relatively well-known, private Catholic university whose football team, the Fighting Saints, has won five NAIA national championships in the past six years. 2007 was the fifth, and the Independent Record was along for the ride.
After the season ended with their win in Savannah, Tennessee, in December, I took a little more than a month to go through roughly 80 hours of film from games, practices and interviews throughout the season, plus our photographer's archive of photos from the games, and produced a commemorative DVD.
More information and the trailer can be viewed at helenair.com.
Edited to add: This documentary received first place in the Online Innovation category of the 2009 Montana Newspaper Association journalism competition. The documentary (and the web site that was created to house Carroll content) also received 2nd place in Best Use of the Medium (and Best Web Site) categories of the 2009 Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism competition.
The Art of Sprawl (& other Poynter projects)
This stop-motion video was the first and probably the most fun of my assignments down in Florida at the Poynter Institute. Click here to watch the video.
The rest of the work completed by Team Gulfport (Fellows are divided into teams upon arrival, and stories are completed as a team) can be browsed and viewed at the 2007 Fellows Web site,
PointsSouth.
Montana Journalism Review
The Montana Journalism Review is a student-run magazine that publishes once a year. Each year the staff or faculty advisors pick a theme around which to develop content. For the Spring 2007 edition, the theme was: "Overcoming the Challenges of Rural Journalism." I worked as the Design Editor for the magazine.
To view the 2007 edition online, visit umt.edu/journalism.
