Advanced Feature News Story-Brady Slavens

Overview

Our group found Brady Slavens, who is a senior at Olathe Northwest High School and has played baseball his whole life. He is graduating in December, and is headed to Wichita State to play baseball in college. First, we wrote our interview questions, and then picked through them to see which questions would create the most cohesive story and show the most important pieces of Brady's story. When it came time to film our interview, we had a camera that wasn't operating properly, so we had to postpone our filming time. What we didn't expect however, was that the next week, our subject wasn't available to be interviewed, further complicating the filming process. In the meantime, we decided to do as much as possible before getting the interview, such as writing potential voiceover scripts for different questions we might use. Once we were able to get the interview footage, I had a few minor technical difficulties like the frame not fitting the screen but these were easily fixable.

Role

For this particular project, we didn't have very specific roles that affected the process that 
much so we all just worked together to get done what needed to be done. Once I finally 
started editing, there weren't that many technical errors so the main issue was getting the 
project finished in time after the problems we had experienced with the filming process. The project management probably could have been better just from the perspective that I 
finished the assignment late, but considering our camera difficulties, we did fairly well for 
time. Something that could have been improved for the future would be communication 
skills, because another major issue we had that negatively affected our time schedule was 
that our interview subject wasn't available for about a week after our first filming

attempt, and we had to reschedule which we didn't plan for.

Conclusion

I approached this story differently than the last one by considering the principles of feature 
news, incorporating a delayed lead, as well as being more conscious of how the story 
affected the viewer and what I wanted the main concepts to be. Next time, I will make sure 
that everyone communicated and was on the same page. I also want to be able to adapt to certain situations more easily and not let an obstacle throw off the whole project so much. 
In general, I am proud of how this project turned out, and I liked that I felt more prepared 
going into this project, regarding the expectations and understanding what

a feature story is supposed to be like.