Digital Arts Service Corps - audio

Month 11: Final Workshops and Facility Recommendations

Stephen Fonzo — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:12:05 +0000

In May/June, I offered several training workshops, likely the last round of dedicated sessions as my year of VISTA service comes to a close. The remainder of my year will be devoted to compiling the training materials I've written, and writing the manuals I haven't had time to compose yet.

Of the three video production workshops I led, one was an interactive session with students from the READY School in Champaign, IL. After an initial tour of our facilities and those of Urbana Public Television, the students checked out free camcorders and videotaped a day at their school, with interviews and shots of classrooms, art, bulletin boards, and the building itself. Our training session covered the fundamentals of cutting, arranging, and editing scenes, using Adobe Premiere Pro. The students, whose school year is finished, now have two local resources for continued learning where they can finish this and other films if they would like.

Many of the training sessions were about A/V data backup, transfer, and duplication, as members of the IMC get ready to work more independently after I have finished my service. Beyond these and other basic recording and editing tips, two of the audio workshops addressed key issues for citizen journalists - 1) posting to the web and 2) understanding the principles of digital audio and their application. Finally, I have been working with our community radio station WRFU, to ensure that members are knowledgeable about making PSAs, news stories, and updating their Drupal site. In the last month, I will compile and share these resources; for now, I have been revising the manuals as I go, and sharing with smaller working groups.

Though we often use commercial software like Premiere at the IMC, the only real expenses that any artists or journalists should ever have to face are time and hardware (cameras, mics, computers, a/v equipment, etc.). I encourage everyone I train to use and tell others about free and open source software (FOSS), and this month I continued my research into these tools. Specifically, FOSS operating systems can be installed (easily and for free) and used to keep older and slower computers running quickly and efficiently - especially important for organizations with small budgets. Operating systems I recommend are Ubuntu (which has many variants, including one with media production applications called Ubuntu Studio), Puppy Linux, Dyne:bolic, and Pure:dyne. There are others, but these systems have familiar desktop and window environments, can be expanded to include office productivity and media software, and some even run off of live CDs, so no installation is necessary. We received a donated laptop that was quite slow, running Windows 98 - now with the most recent version of Xubuntu, it is much faster and is available for IMC members to use for on-location recording, broadcast, and web publishing.

A critical component of documentation is not just manuals or progress reports, but recommendations. The final aspect of capacity building requires communicating to your organization what they can do to grow after the absence of VISTA staff. At the IMC I am in the process of troubleshooting and listing improvements that could be made to the production facilities - via hardware that will need to be purchased, and software that is free. Luckily for us, we just hired some summer youth employees through the Champaign Consortium, and each individual has his/her own project to use as a learning experience and as a service to the IMC - adding to the continuity and capacity built so far with VISTAs.

Month 6: Training, Event Planning, and More

Stephen Fonzo — Sat, 09 May 2009 04:22:08 +0000

I feel pretty bad that keeping up with these field reports has been so difficult - and because I have the flu... but that gives me some time to catch up and explain what kinds of things I've been doing at the IMC, one month at a time:

The IMC is in a college town (Champaign-Urbana), and a lot of our volunteers are students, grad students, and professors. Even though Dec-Jan was quiet, with many out of town, I had plenty to do.

The month started with an interview. To clarify, I was the one being interviewed, by two DJs whom I had trained, and whose semester project - as interns at our community radio station - had just ended. Maggie and Alex, AKA "The Amplified Librarians," asked me about all aspects of CTC VISTA, AmeriCorps service, and the Independent Media Center. It provided a great opportunity to reflect on my work and to share my observations with our listeners.

With a target date of the first IMC Film Festival looming in the near future (early February), this month was largely devoted to the intricacies of event planning. The Film Festival was something that fellow VISTA Nicole and I brainstormed earlier in the winter, and with help from our VISTA Supervisor, we solicited film submissions, arranged scheduling, format, promotion, sponsors, and a web site all in the course of a couple months. This gave me the opportunity to utilize and better acquaint myself with Drupal, as we developed the IMC Production Group and IMC Film Festival web site.

Despite the cold, empty climate, there was considerably demand for training, and I ended up delivering nine sessions to individuals or small groups, on audio editing for radio (in Audacity and Reaper); live radio broadcast; digital photo editing; field audio recording; and mastering. As much as I have wanted to stick to the goals of "training trainers," this is in part dependent on the attitudes and goals of those being trained. In our organization, in which everyone is volunteering whatever free time he or she has, most people just want to quickly be empowered with the knowledge and tools to accomplish some aspect of media or technology. They do not often have the time to train others after I have trained them. I suspect that other VISTAs in training positions have observed this scenario in their workplaces. It's not necessarily bad or good, but just the reality of working with busy and ambitious colleagues.

By the end of this period, we welcomed a new Program Development Intern to the IMC, and oriented him. I also continued to coordinate volunteers who produced IMC Video News for Urbana Public Access Television, and updated radio training materials, including a draft plan to revive IMC Radio News, which had been a successful project several years before I began my service.

Month 5: Independence + Collaboration = Success

Stephen Fonzo — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:54:12 +0000

The past month was probably the most successful for my VISTA project so far. While this was due in no small part to the groundwork of the previous months, over the course of only the last few weeks I trained (trainers and students), recruited volunteers, made new community contacts, and produced media. I credit this productivity with a) working independently and b) communicating frequently about my work to others to involve them and get their feedback.

Mid-November started slowly, as I helped the Shows group (books concerts and events for the IMC) assume their own responsibilities, by helping to draft a new contract with the IMC Finance group, updating their Drupal site and web calendar, and training a volunteer on meeting facilitation, sound, and web/calendar administration. Having that particular group grow to be more independent and capable frees me from a lot of extra, small tasks, and saves the rest of the IMC time and effort, as well. With more time to focus on the broader goals of my assignment, I have been gradually giving closer attention to the Production group that I helped start in the summer. The Production group (site in development) manages the IMC’s media production room, loans equipment to community projects, produces original content, and offers training on multimedia. Along with Production volunteers, Nicole Pion and I started planning an IMC Film Festival for February 6-8, 2009, which will last three days and showcase a variety of genres, especially work by local/regional filmmakers, and will also include art, music, and food from local sponsoring restaurants.

Other accomplishments of the Production group, which now contains a core of six independent journalist/producers, were four new videos (a total of 3.5 hours) that we have shared with Urbana Public Television and which will also be available online at our site and YouTube channel. Coverage ranged from stories about a local activist, IMC concert footage, People’s Potluck Thanksgiving, and a Proposition 8 protest. A group of 3 volunteers filmed performances and interviews at a benefit concert for our radio station. I have also started helping the IMC’s Books to Prisoners program with a video project that they will begin shooting and editing in the New Year to highlight their presence in town, their training, and the prison libraries that they staff.

In the course of recruiting volunteers to produce new media, I did quite a bit of editing myself, especially audio, and it turns out that this is a modest source of extra income for the host organization, which makes it worthwhile. More valuable, however, is the opportunity to instruct others on how to edit. Between Shows, Production, and Books to Prisoners members, I trained three individuals who will now be ready to train others on the basics of production and got them to think about how they can utilize media technology to further their groups’ goals. Over the next few months, I will be compiling my tutorials (and other online sources) for a wiki that our VISTA supervisor Josh King is developing for the IMC (Josh has chosen Twiki, as it has revision control and is used by the global Indymedia network).

There was quite a bit of interest in learning audio recording and editing this past month, with IMC members attending a variety of public lectures, discussions, or wanting to produce their own interviews or radio commentaries. I offered a series of three one-on-one tutorials on recording field audio (using a Zoom H2); compiling a musical set list (ala the quickly arcane term, “mix tape”) for radio; and recording and editing speech for use on radio or film. I chose the free and easy Audacity for the training, and even though I know a lot of people are familiar with how to use it, I’ll attach my quick guide here just in case anyone is interested. There are many more tips and tutorials here.

The final area in which I feel I made great progress was at the IMC’s community radio station, WRFU. First, I revived the station’s Tech group, which had been inactive since before I started as a VISTA. The Tech group maintains studio equipment, updates and repairs software and Internet connectivity, and offers technical guidance for membership training. After a few e-mails about the lack of tech support, a core group of 4-6 of us decided to set up a new computer at the DJ desk, fix and label cables and mixer inputs, and begin a construction plan for more shelves, storage, and a patchbay. In September I had been responsible for training dozens of airshifters, but in the process of bringing back the Tech group, we realized that we were training more trainers (and training ourselves to be better experts and instructors at the station). Two University of Illinois graduate students in the Library Sciences department finished their radio automation and music library training manual, which I had been supervising since the fall. This manual, now available in our office next to the studio, gives DJs and tech support step-by-step instructions on how to add local music, PSAs, and other pre-produced shows to our non-live rotation, how to classify content as clean, and how to edit it if it is not clean. The system is based on ZaraRadio, iTunes, and the Juice podcast player, and the volunteers used Karen’s Directory Printer to generate a station inventory. Nicole and I visited the Library Science department for presentations on their projects and to represent the IMC, and while there we learned about other great community engagement/technology instruction programs that are going on in our town. Earlier this week the librarians even thanked me by having me on their final show of the semester for an interview about my role as a CTC VISTA.