Multimedia is the way to go when going back in time

I am working on a project this year where I am interviewing graduates of the IMPACT 360 gap year program located in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

The audience for these videos are high school graduates who have not gone to college or have only one year of college completed as well as their parents.

While there are many questions that this audience will have depending on their individual situations, there are a couple of questions which most all will have for a person who completed the program.

I think the best question for just about anything you are doing is WHY? This is the question that gets to the heart of most any story. Why should the audience care?

So my first question I asked of Nathan McFarland was why did he choose IMPACT 360 gap year program.

The second question was how did IMPACT 360 help him in his ultimate purpose for college--getting a job.

The last question I wanted him to address was how did this impact his college plans? Did this one year gap program add more time to his college years?

I wrote to Nathan and gave him the over all questions and asked him if he could try and answer these questions in two or three minutes.

The first take was great, except for people walking by and talking over him. The only reason I needed to do more takes was so I could get my assistant to help keep people quiet for the three minute interview. Take a look and see what we did for this interview.


Thank goodness for the Ken Burns effect. While this technique was not invented by Ken Burns it is he who made it famous with his documentaries like the one he did on the Civil War.

This is a screen grab from Final Cut Pro X where I edited a still image into the video. The great thing about this technique is you can find photos of people from before you talked with them. We asked Nathan for photos of himself at Florida State University that we put into the package and IMPACT 360 had some photos of Nathan in the program that we also included.

The effect of moving around a still image helps create a motion that helps move the story along. You do not need to use this and sometimes it works against you. I think sometimes we over use this technique, but it is helpful.