Week 2

This week, I was back and forth between two different stories, because neither was coming together well.

My original story idea was to visit a small scrapbooking store in Mexico, Missouri. I was originally supposed to meet with the owner to talk about how her business is doing in light of the bad economy and competition from online outlets. However, our original meeting date and time became a conflict and there was no other time to do it this week. So, I moved on to staying in Columbia for the story.

I started making phone calls and set up a meeting at Hobby Lobby, where I was to meet with the store manager and hoped to find shoppers who were in to scrapbooking. I did manage to find both, but my next challenge was to find someone who would let me come into their home to shoot video of them scrapbooking. I talked to about ten people, got phone numbers from one woman who scrapbooks in a group and still had no success. With our stories, we try to find sources to humanize our story, to make it easier for viewers to relate. I was at a dead end. I tried the phone book "dart game," basically stalked people around Hobby Lobby and gave up. I decided to try for my backup plan.

The backup - a quick story on a bill that would remove "red light" cameras at intersections. I thought this would be a visually strong story and somewhat easy, but again ran into dead end's when trying to find a CCC.

Because of my deadline, I decided to go ahead with the scrapbooking story. Considering I don't have a solid CCC, filmed in one location, and one with poor lighting to boot, I think I managed well. A few colleagues looked over my script and were surprised at what I had come up in having so few material.

My biggest challenge was keeping an open mind. Originally, I went into the story with an idea of what I wanted it to be - in terms of content. But, when I actually started talking to people and researching, I discovered it would take on an entirely different angel. This is one of the things we learn. We must let the people tell the story, and not structure interviews in a way to the the story that WE want. That is not our duty.