For our live coverage project, I reported from a Prospect Heights block party. I arrived early to shoot my stand up which was difficult to do without a tripod, especially shooting with my iPhone. Because of the weather, there were far fewer people in attendance than I expected and good sound was also more difficult than I anticipated. I went with a plan to make a short video about the changing neighborhood and ended up creating just a one minute ambient short to give a feel of the event.
I spent most of my first hour time recruiting people to participate in the five minute live video coverage, taking photos and shooting video. I was a little unclear about when I could start tweeting but quickly cleared that up with Channon. It was challenging to find a quiet space to conduct the live interview and so despite the fact that I found a handful of longtime neighborhood residents (combined they had almost 150 years in Prospect Heights), folks watching couldn’t hear them over the music. In the future, I think that having the image stabilizer and an audio filter for the phone will make outdoor live coverage with music a much more viable option.
Next time I think I would save any maps for post-event coverage. I created an animated gif to show the changes in the neighborhood that didn’t work in Cover It Live. I think focusing on pics, video and audio for live coverage and saving maps or other data for pre or post-event coverage would work better. Overall, I think that our coverage idea was solid and executed pretty well even with the hiccups.
