Week 3 Update

Research:

This week I have pretty much dedicated myself to research. I want my videos to be full of well sourced information. I found an amazing resource in a site called the The First World War Centenary. It is a site run by the Imperial War Museum in Great Britain, to commemorate WWI. The site has podcasts with staged readings of first hand accounts of events of the war. One that has been particularly helpful for my first video has been the podcast The First Day on the Somme.  When reporting on historical events it is important to have first hand accounts, so this site was a great find. I have emailed the Imperial War Museum to see if I can use some of the audio from this podcast in my video.

The Imperial War Museum also has a lot of their on video resources. I have found hours of video from the Somme and the other areas with a large British presence during the war. This is a video of British mining activity. It is a dramatization for propaganda purposes, but it still explains the process of mining. At the 13 minute mark there is video of many mine explosions. The video was taken at the Hohenzollern Redoubt. 

Progress:

I am still working on my scrip for my first video. I expect to have the first video done next week. I am having some trouble figuring out what of my process to include in this blog, because I don't really want to put my script drafts and such out for the entire internet to see. I think this is just a journalistic hang up that I have, because publishing something that is not a 100% fully fact checked all ducks in a row final draft is not ok in most news media schools of thought. 

Upcoming issues:

I think when I move on to my other videos I will have more trouble finding video sources. The British records of the war are outstanding and I don't think I'm going to find similar resources form the French.

Also:

Podcast about Air warfare.

Podcast about animals in war.

Footage about pidgeons in WWI.

This is a trench club made of wire and nails. It came from the First World War Centenary podcast on Trench Raids.

Week 2 Progress Report

I started working with Google Tour Builder. I like this program more than I like Story Maps. For me it is more user friendly and intuitive. If I had greater GIS knowledge I would maybe like Story Maps better, but for my purposes I think I will be using Tour Builder. Here is the tour I made. I have not gone back to edit my story map because I don't think that I am going to use that program.

This week I cataloged and labeled my files on my hard drive and began to transcribe dialogue from the video. The dialogue transcription has been slow going. Some of the information that Remi (y?) and Christina Holstein said is providing good jumping off points for further research.

In addition to transcribing I have been researching some scholarly articles from the libraries online databases. For the next week I would like to work more in Tour Builder to make the program look prettier and more like some of the examples, I would also like to finish my transcription and start writing some pieces of my first script.

Snapshots from France

Here are some sample photos from my trip to France. More photos can be found in this Story Map that I made. Most of these photos were taken with my GoPro, and I'm really pleased with the way they turned out. 

I am starting to put together footage for my first of several videos about my trip. My first video is going to focus on the Hawthorn Mine explosion. Above is the propaganda footage of the mine exploding. In my video I will be using old and new footage to explore the Hawthorn Mine explosion.