I viewed the New York Times piece “Military Bases as Wildlife Havens” by Leslie Kaufman and Emily B. Hager for this assignment. The project considered how the sweeping acreage of large military bases is becoming a refuge for endangered animals.
The first thing that struck me about the project was the opener- the bird squawking seemed a bit loud, but it certainly got my attention. The New York Times opener overtop the squawking for the first three seconds was rather confusing. When the title slide came up after that I suddenly understood what the sound was. The fact that the sound was followed up by a medium shot of the bird suited the audio very well, though I would have like to see more of the woodpecker and less of the handler in order to focus on the source of the sound more tightly.
The piece included several pans and zooms, some of which I appreciated and many that I thought awkward. In one case the frame starts at two airmen’s feet and pans up to their faces. I would have much rather seen a wide shot and then a tight shot or even stills of the boots if that’s what the journalist wished to emphasize. One pan that I didn’t mind was when a scuba diver was emerging from the water. The frame started tight on the diver in the water and zoomed out as he stood up to handle the darters he trapped in his net. While there is unnecessary zooming on either side of this clip that could have easily been avoided with a tighter edit, the motion of the diver getting out of the water makes it impossible for a single videographer to capture that transition in one take. If they want to be purely documentary and avoid asking the diver to get up out of the water again, there is no way to get that clip without either zooming or framing the entire sequence wide. The wide shot would not have been nearly as compelling, in my opinion.
This piece made good use of Flash to present the video and audio within a user-controlled format. I could fast forward, rewind, pause, and adjust the volume within the player. I also had the option to switch in to the full screen mode, but the resolution of the project was too low to effectively facilitate that feature. While I appreciate the option, I would rather people view the project in good quality than in a large spread. I suppose that might have been a decision made by website managers rather than the journalists though.
