Dail: Life Unbarred
December 9th, 2007 | Published in Home | 14 Comments
In late August, Dwayne Dail , 39, was exonerated after serving 18 years for a crime he didn’t commit. A 12-year-old Goldsboro girl pointed to him as the man who raped her; a jury believed her. Dail spent half his life behind bars until the N.C. Center for Actual Innocence uncovered evidence containing DNA that authorities thought had been destroyed after Dail’s trial.
Colleague Shawn Rocco and I got a call from a picture editor late in the evening Aug. 27. We were to drive to Goldsboro, NC the next morning where Dail was expected to be exonerated. Shawn shot stills and I shot video. Our reports had to be filed to newsobserver.com from the courthouse. This is the video I cut in the courthouse lobby.
Shawn hustled his butt off that day and stuck with Dail while all the other photographers and news crews packed it in to file their stories. That’s him in the last few seconds of my news video running ahead of Dail while the rest of the photographers stopped at the curb. It payed off, as Shawn and rock star reporter Mandy Locke developed a relationship with Dail and his family that allowed them to continue with this story.
A few weeks ago Shawn and Mandy traveled to Lehigh Acres, Fla to find out how Dail was coping with life out of prison.
Shawn was in Florida for 2 1/2 days. He was responsible for shooting photos that would carry a Sunday page one display as well as video. This was Shawn’s first foray into video (aside from a few daily breaking news videos he shot on a Canon S3). Before he left, I showed him how to hook a lav up to a Canon HV20 and off he went.
Shawn came back with amazing interview, b-roll and photos. After Shawn struggled in vain with iMovie, we decided to team up and hit the studio last Sunday. We started by writing sound bytes onto stickies that we organized into clusters on the window and door of the studio. This is how we story boarded the five minute video.
photo by Shawn Rocco
On Monday, multimedia producer and all-around ninja, Rob Roberts, envisioned a DVD-like piece that featured a main video with “extras” including video interview out takes, audio, photo galleries, and documents. The main video would be prominent and if folks were compelled after watching it, they could explore all the additional content Shawn and Mandy gathered. We would also debut FULL SCREEN video. It was going to take everything we had to get it live by Sunday.
Rob farmed out parts of the project while Shawn and I cut the main video. Rob went to work programming the shell based on the back end of our State Fair multimedia.
We were aiming for a 4 to 5 minute video with three distinct parts: Prison, Exoneration and New Life. We used Shawn’s new footage as well as the news video I shot in August. We had to recapture the news video since the POS hard drive it lived on cratered a few months back. Shawn drove out to Nash Correctional facility Monday to shoot some b-roll and get sound to fill out the Prison section.
On Thursday Shawn and I had the main video roughed out. We were asked to show it during the 4 p.m. editors’ meeting. They liked what they saw (maybe too much). We were asked to get it on the site by noon on Friday to promote the Sunday story.
Panic set in. Shawn and I were at least another day from having the video ready to go live and the multimedia components weren’t ready either. We came to a compromise. We would put up a trailer by noon Friday. I whipped up a few text slides Friday morning at the breakfast table and tacked them on the end of the first 30 seconds of our rough cut.
Friday night, Rob tightened the screws, color corrected and put a sweet encode brew on the video.
In the end I think we came up with something that served our readers pretty well. Now if I could just catch up on sleep.
December 10th, 2007at 5:26 pm(#)
Fantastic job on this!
December 10th, 2007at 10:56 pm(#)
What a great effort with stunning results.
December 11th, 2007at 4:01 am(#)
[...] story behind the story by Rocco’s colleague, Travis Long, is a must read. Here are just a few of the lessons he [...]
December 12th, 2007at 3:33 am(#)
[...] Long, one of the team involved, has posted a bit of background to the process on his blog. One bit that was nice to see was the way they planned the package: [...]
December 12th, 2007at 5:18 am(#)
I really enjoyed seeing how all these pieces came together. A wonderful effort. Do you have any information about the media player or software used for the piece and throughout the News and Observer Web site?
December 12th, 2007at 7:43 am(#)
[...] was produced by The News & Observer out of North Carolina. Photojournalist Travis Long shared the background of how this segment was created on his blog: “Colleague Shawn Rocco and I got a call from a picture editor late in the [...]
December 12th, 2007at 9:54 am(#)
Doug-
I’m a multimedia producer at N&O who worked with Travis and Shawn on the piece.
The site was done with Flash and the video utilized the FLVPlayback component in Flash. We did some tweaking to take advantage of full-screen mode and used Actionscript to control and load video.
For the N&O site, we use an installation of vMix (http://vmix.com/). Our videos page is at videos.newsobserver.com.
Rob
December 12th, 2007at 11:17 pm(#)
[...] Everything comes together in this: story, subject and the work of talented journalists Shawn Rocco, Travis Long, Mandy Locke and others. Astonishingly, perhaps, this is the first bit of video storytelling that Rocco as done. As Chuck Fadely wrote in the Newspaper Video group forum, “Awesome. We should all strive to end up where they’re starting out.” (Details on how the project came together and was carried out are at Travis Long’s blog.) [...]
December 13th, 2007at 6:35 am(#)
[...] Dail: Life Unbarred-Dropped Frames [...]
December 14th, 2007at 3:28 pm(#)
Really exceptional work here guys. I’d love to get some insights into how you produced this.
1. Did you shoot this in HD?
2. What kind of mic (lav? boom? shotgun?).
3. Did you do any lighting?
4. And what were your export settings out of FCP, and did you then put a Quicktime into the Flash Encoder?
Any of your thoughts would be much appreciated.
Mark
Chicago
businessPOV.com
December 14th, 2007at 4:18 pm(#)
Mark,
The courthouse footage was shot in HD on a Canon XH-A1.
The courthouse sound came from a wireless lav placed on the DA’s desk. The courtroom reaction sound “Let’s get the hell out of here.” was from an Audio Technica shotgun mic on camera.
The rest was shot in standard DV on a Canon HV20.
The interview sound came from a wireless lav hooked to the HV20 via an XLR converter.
All natural sound came from the HV20’s on board stereo mic.
All light was available.
I’m pretty sure Shawn’s stills were from a Nikon D2H.
The project was edited and color corrected in Final Cut Pro in DV NTSC 48 khz Anamorphic.
I’ll ask Rob to provide details on encode.
Travis
December 17th, 2007at 3:48 pm(#)
Mark, I used the Flash Video Encoder for the flv encoding. If I remember right, I think it was a 1100k video bit rate and a 64k mono audio bit rate with the On2 codec. Given the video was driven with a lot of talking heads and more static images, it held up pretty well at full-screen.
Rob
December 17th, 2007at 9:09 pm(#)
[...] An idea of how to storyboard a major video package: [...]
December 19th, 2007at 10:00 am(#)
Dig the blog a LOT!
Nice style and I like the way you discuss the problems . I’m going to book mark it.