Blogpocolypse With Steve Tanner

Ever since I first discovered E3 at the age of 15, the opening day has rivaled Christmas in terms of the sheer excitement and giddiness it causes me. Seriously, it’s sickening at how joy-filled I am right now. Why so excited? Well, let me give you a run down of what’s possibly in the works for Tomorrow.

First, we’ll look at what we can expect from Nintendo’s press conference on Tuesday. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo has essentially laid their cards on the table. With the Japanese company’s new console, the Wii U announced at last year’s E3 we can expect this year’s announcements to be more game-centric. 

 When you think of Nintendo, Characters like Mario, Donkey Kong and Link all come to mind, and that’s no coincidence. Nintendo knows that their strength comes from their massive stable of first-party franchises, and that’s likely what we’ll see on Tuesday. Back in April Nintendo announced that they will be showing Mario’s first venture onto the Wii U at this year’s conference, so there’s a good chance we’ll be seeing our favourite Italian plumber on Tuesday Morning.

The Wii U isn’t the only the only piece of hardware that Nintendo will be supporting at E3 this year. After a rocky launch, the Nintendo 3DS has finally picked up some steam with consumers. While games like Super Mario Land 3D and Kid Icarus: Uprising have been strong new titles, success for this hand-held isn’t yet assured. While many gamers gripe over the weak third-party support of the 3DS, ultimately it will be the first-party games that make or break it…and when I say first-party games, I’m really only talking about the 3DS version of Super Smash Brothers.

Nintendo has a lot riding on their showing at this year’s E3. Nintendo’s press conference is set to begin on June 5th at 9am PST.

Tomorrow all eyes are going to be on both Sony and Microsoft, and more specifically their new consoles. While both companies have gone on record saying that they have no plan to unveil a new console at this year’s E3, the facts point to both consoles being VERY far along in development. As a matter of fact some developers have been working on next-gen games for a while now. There’s no doubt that wheels are in motion and that we’ll be getting news on these new consoles in the not to distant future, whether it be at E3 or another tech trade-show.

Will 2012 see a next-gen Playstation or Xbox? Probably not. It’s unlikely that Microsoft would launch a new console against Halo 4 and a new Gear of War. Will 2013 be the year of the Playstation 4 and the “Xbox 720”? Given the time developers have already had with next-gen dev kits, its looking very possible.

Microsoft’s press conference is set to begin at 9:30 am PST tomorrow morning and Sony’s will begin at 1:00 pm PST.

This is it folks! The summation of my final year at Conestoga College. I found myself drawing heavily from my more recent shoots because I feel like my newer stuff is my best work yet. It’s a shame school is almost over because I feel like I’m on the verge of a greater grander grasp of craft. 

My future works will only get better, but here it is in all of it’s glory. My first demo reel.

One of the main differences from my first semester’s Newsroom class was the role I played each week. Unlike first semester where I found myself gathering news stories every couple of weeks, I now find myself doing a weekly tech segment with Brent Swance.

I love tech and gaming so naturally I love doing tech talk. It has taught me a lot about in studio production and how to write light and snappy scripts that appeal to a niche market.   Each week Brent and myself will meet in the morning and go over possible stories for the segment. 

For the first couple fo weeks it was just Brent and myself talking over a background with pong on it, but then we figured out that it would be much easier to watch with visuals (who’d have thought right?”) And then tech talk evolved into into the separate head shots for our respective stories, and I think that is when it started to look it’s best. 

There was one week where we decided to do something very different from what we had done in the past. The day the Mass Effect 3 demo came out, Brent and myself decided to do a Mass Effect 3 demo edition of tech talk where we played the demo and gave our impressions. While it didn’t work with the news format, I still feel it was done fairly well, and I’m glad we tried it at least.

It has been months since I’ve even thought about blogging, yet here I am. Blogging. I’ve been up to some pretty cool stuff since I last took the time to halfheartedly spit-up 200 words or so. 

I started an internship with a cool dude by the name of Danny Bailey. He’s a freelance photographer and videographer, and even though I’ve only spent 20ish hours with him I can tell that I’m going to learn a lot. You can check out his website here.

My first shoot with him took me to Hamilton to do some photography and time lapses at a massive motorcycle convention in Hamilton. At this shoot I learned about the concept of photography and videography being lifestyles rather than being careers. Danny is always shooting something and as a result has been able to make freelancing work for him. He has had several photo books published, and has worked on several tv shows.

Spending time with Danny at that shoot exposed me to some new tech that I hadn’t yet come acros before. The GoPro is a tiny little camera that can be mounted just about anywhere and used to get full HD footage. Danny, however, was using the GoPro to get time lapse shots of the convention. This is how it turned out.

Once again I’ll be commenting on Metal Evolution because I think it’s the best TV doc series ever…you think you know better than me? Fine don’t watch it!

I especially enjoyed this episode because it shows the dedication that Sam Dunn and his team have to doing their research. While they made sure to mention bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, they also took nearly 30 minutes to talk about deep purple, and to me Deep Purple is a band that is far too often overlooked.

Not only did then examine deep purple but they also followed Richie Blackmore’s career, who was the original guitar player for Deep Purple. They explored his band Rainbow and even made mention to Rainbow’s iconic front man Ronnie James Dio, who will no doubt be featured in their 80’s era episodes.

All in all I love this show, and how its content isn’t motivated by top 200 hits.

This ladies and gentlemen is my feature. It focuses on the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra and their survival story.

This was an adventure for me! It was the first story that I’ve done, where every part of the production was overseen by myself. While it was more work, I defintely feel like it was worth it because I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell, the way I wanted to to tell it.

When the media relations person at the KWSO gave me the OK to slip into one of the symphony’s rehearsal I started to think about what sorts of things I would need. One of the first things that popped into my head was that would need to capture the audio in a way that would make it sound unreal, because I knew that good audio would be a deal breaker on this feature. So I used my Zoom H2 mic and just set it in the corner of the room at the start of my shoot, and grabbed it at the end.  Looking back on it, I would say that using the zoom was probably the best decision I made.

The story I had intended to tell was very different from the story I ended up telling. At first I made the assumption that the symphony was struggling. I was very wrong. As it would turn out that since 2007 when Edwin Outwater came on as music director for the KWSO things had really turned around. So I changed the angle of my story to tell a success story. 

In the end I think it turned out pretty well, and I’m looking forward to improving my skills to make a story even better than this one!

Brent Swance... shhh don't talk just listen: Unexpected news story

brentswance:

Hello,

So today I ended up doing an unexpected story. We went to the up stairs hallway and there was something going on.

I was studio cam today but when I was waiting around to film the host I went and filmed this.

We went in with a camera and there were a bunch of girls from the interior…

I agree that we totally fell into this story! The best part about it was how little work we actually had to do to get the story. That Squirrell lady was more than pumped to talk to us about those fancy chairs.

I also feel like I should mention how crazy awesome some of those chairs were! I mean I would gladly buy one of them to be my designated “scotch chair.” Wouldn’t you?

This past Tuesday was a slow one for me. Instead of the standard hustle and insanity that comes with being a reporter I found myself in a much more relaxed setting. Why? Well the honor of doing a behind the scenes look at what goes into an episode of 519Online News fell to me!

I spent my day shooting people shooting…and shooting people shooting people. It was totally meta. 

I started off the day by filming our news meeting that we have at the start of every Tuesday. I think I captured the group dynamic that goes into organizing a newscast and deciding which stories fit where in a news cast.

My story also saw me follow Brent and OJ to the E wing where we stumbled upon a story about fancy chairs. I got some killer shots of brent lining up shots, and OJ doing some interviews.

All I really need now for my story is t get a shot of someone doing a VO and editing and I can throw this story together for next Tuesday! 

Metal Evolution: An anthropological look at the history of metal.

This past Friday I got a chance to check out the new documentary series “Metal Evolution,” which is done by Sam Dunn and Banger Films who have done some of my favourite documentaries. Needless to say I was a fan.

Sam Dunn is a metal fan turned anthropologist who made a documentary back in 2005 called “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey.” Much like “Metal Evolution” the doc examined the history and development of rock and metal. The main difference between “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” and “Metal Evolution” is that the documentary series takes more time to examine each individual genre of music.

I caught the first episode of the series which was entitled “Pre-Metal,” and it was an in-depth look at early rock and roll and how it slowly evolved into metal. I love any documentary that is done by Banger Films for a couple of reasons that ever apparent in “Metal Evolution.” The first reason is the documentary is littered with great interviews with old rock legends who provide some insightful information on the topic at hand. The second reason is you can tell that Sam Dunn is totally passonate about what he is doing. His love for what he does comes through in the form of a crazy informative and entertaining episode that makes you care about what you’re watching and gives you a hunger to learn more.

The show isn’t just about old rock stars and the cultural significance the music has had over the past six or seven decades. At one point Dunn goes to McMaster University to speak with a specialist about what listening to metal does to a person brain. As it turns out listening to metal turns off a person’s conscious thought and turns off a person’s inhibitions. 

I can’t wait to catch the next 10 episodes in this series because I’m learning a lot and having a blast while doing it!

Olive's Branch: 11.2 Woops, we're on live tv

olivia-rutt:

How a feel about LIVE…

Can I just say, that after election night, I thought I would be ready for anything as that night was a perfect storm of fails. But the thought of going live again for our shows is causing me some serious butterflies.

There is the potential of serious problems, mix ups,…

The feeling of going live is a crazy one Olivia! Stressing about it totally natural, but with time and practice you can train yourself to clam down. As a matter of fact I’m going to say that the worst thing you can do before going live is get stressed about it.

I find it’s best to accept your mortality and have the knowledge that things could wrong and there won’t be a lot you can do about it. With that being said, I feel like being able to ad-lib will save your ass when things go wrong, so do your research. Also trying to memorize something word for word will be infinitely more stressful and difficult than memorizing basic points and ideas you want to mention.

Stress also leads to an early grave, so just keep that in the back of your mind.