Monday, April 14, 2008

Project Memo

April 15, 2008
JRNL 80-B
Mo Krochmal
Green Levittown: Project Memo
By Amanda Brody (amandaeva27@gmail.com)

When I first started doing research for this project, I began to think more about doing an environmental story about going green. Green has been everywhere, in supermarkets, clothing stores and some furniture stores too. It seemed as if everywhere I turned there was something new about green. So why not take it to the local level? I had read about Levittown becoming the Nation’s first green suburb but I didn’t know too much about it until I began my research and I found out a lot of people I knew who are from Long Island, didn’t even know about Green Levittown.

So what I wanted to do a story on was, what Green Levittown was about, but when I started doing interviews and I realized that green affects the economy just like everything else. Most of the green initiatives ask people to spend money they don’t have so the plans are not as effective as one may think at this time.

After having my research done, it came to interviewing time. Luckily, I didn’t really have that much trouble reaching my contacts, although there were a few people I wanted to talk to that never got back to me. The one thing about interviewing people that I learned is that their busy and so are you and it’s hard to find a time that fits into everyone’s schedule. Some re-scheduling had to be done but by Tuesday, April 7, 2008 all my interviews were complete.

Then came the hardest and most time-consuming part of the project: putting it all together. It took quite a while for me to figure out which bytes I wanted to use and cutting them down to two minutes was quite another challenge. I did my stand ups in the beginning before I actually got any of the interviews and looking back on it, I think they would have worked better if they had been done afterwards.

Transcribing the videos was a very tedious mission but it had to be done. It actually helped me figure out what clips to use for the main video and the quotes to write my story.

I also decided to do two photo essays to correspond with the Green Levittown story. The first was taken at Alure Home Improvements, where they have a green kitchen on display. In the captions I included what everything was made of and put a link to the photo slide show in the additional links part of the project. I also did another one on recycling; more so as a visual piece other than anything else.

I also decided to create a website for the project on synthasite to better organize all my materials and also provide a nice, clean presentation for the future.

I put a lot of work and effort into this project and am very happy with the results, even though it took over my life for two weeks. I am actually very excited to have something like this in my portfolio because it really shows the convergence of journalism and how I can actually be a converged journalist; doing video, photography, a website and of course the written article.

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