Portland: Radio Milestone
Posted: July 16th, 2010 | Author: Rachel | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Our radio documentaries are finally done! We haven’t even had a full two weeks of classes in Portland yet and already we’ve completed our first big project. As Emily mentioned yesterday, we did our radio documentary on the Community Energy Project which is a program in Portland that provides free workshops and kits to low income families so that they can weatherize their homes to save money on their utility bills and also conserve energy.
The hardest part of the documentary was cutting out important parts of the program to stay within our time constraints. After all the interviews and chats with the directors and volunteers in the program, I wanted to include everything. Everything the program does is so important and makes such a difference to people in the community- I just wanted to include all of it. The directors of the program shared many personal stories and experiences about working at the Community Energy Project and when we first began editing I wasn’t willing to cut out any of these stories. Emily and I had so much trouble “killing our babies” -basically cutting parts of the documentary to which we had become attached. Many of our conversations went like this,
“Well I just killed my favorite baby, so it’s your turn to kill one.”
“But this isn’t a baby. It’s integral to our story.”
“It’s a baby- kill it!”
We did manage to trim the documentary down enough but it wasn’t easy. I also really valued working with a partner on the project. I’ve learned that group members often see important aspects of the project that I might overlook. I’ve also learned to work through the frustration of my partner not seeing my “brilliant” idea for the piece that in a few hours doesn’t really seem so amazing.
My highlight of the week was taking a bus out to the Home Depot in Beaverton, OR to record sound for our radio piece. We wanted hammering and construction noise so we walked around Home Depot for half an hour with a hammer banging on surfaces. The whole project was really fun and I really did learn a lot about the process. Now when I listen to radio pieces on NPR I will really appreciate all the time they spend on them.
-Rachel
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