Moving on out

Hello all readers! The time has come for me to move on and out. Blogger has done a lot for me, but I have moved on to my own website. You can check out all my further content at www.cassigallagher.com. See you all there!

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First Multimedia Project.

So I have just created my first ever multimedia project. Ok, so it's not my first persay, but it's my first full one. Despite all my time around cinematographers I found out (all over again) the hard way that even the simplest of seven minute projects can be a lot of work.

Yes I made a lot of rookie mistakes, many of which you'll probably pick up within the first minute of video. However, you've got to start somewhere...right? Also when there are only two of us trying to follow a guy around on a farm, you learn how to compensate and move quickly.

Maybe I'll hire a film crew next time to carry around my mike :)

Besides all that, this project was a lot of fun. I didn't know that much about Biodynamic farming before this. Mike Long was a good guy to explain in detail how it all worked and we had the fun task of trying to work it all out in the news room later. So check out the story we did as a compliment on www.westernfrontonline.net.

Biodynamic Farming from Cassandra Gallagher on Vimeo.

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The Senate

For once my subjects were living this time...

I have a friend doing a music video for a local Seattle band: The Senate. This has been a good way for me to practice my production shots (And even better because they bring that lighting equipment that I lack).





This was a good shoot to test my persistence however. Again it was a fairly dark shoot, and I was lacking a tripod...again. I had to shoot several shots I liked 20, 30, or more times to get it bracketed just right...to eliminate blurriness and all that jazz.

However, with a little determination and mostly a lot of luck we mustered through!







The shoot was a lot of fun. But it wasn't all work and no play....



Check out the rest of the pics here

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More Undead

Last quarter a couple of my friends gave me another opportunity to shoot the undead. My second one in a row...not that I'm complaining. It gave me a chance to play with some new Photoshop techniques.



The concept behind this one was all those old-tyme horror movies. You know Frankenstein, Dracula, all those fun guys. I took pictures for their Senior performance as Theatre majors. The piece was conceived, written and put together by the cast. The title: Frankenstein Unstitched.



This was a hard one to shoot. Being a student, my equipment is rather make-shift and my lighting equipment is even more lacking. Like I said though, I'm not complaining. It gave me a chance to try some new things. So how did I compensate for that rough lighting? Monopod to steady my shots, and a hot shoe light wrapped with a coffee filter to diffuse the light. It wasn't much but it helped.



I had the added benefit of being able to Photoshop the heck out of them. We were going for an old movie feel so I played with contrast, noise and color to acheive that. (And of course a lens vignette here and there).

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Shooting zombies

So, one of my friends did what many college students have trouble doing: getting the job of his dreams right out of college. He's going to be a music video director down in Seattle, which is pretty awesome if I do say so myself. I got the chance to help him out on a music video shoot for the Whisky Wailers. The concept: zombie band. Always acceptable.
A couple of my friends were the only people doing the make up for this event. 5 hours of zombie make up can get to you after a while. Kudos to them!
The way they had everything set up was really cool: dramatic lighting, fog machine, lots of reds. It made it as much fun for me as it was for them. Oh yea, and the room we were in was too small to set up a dolly for panning shots. The solution? Shopping cart. This is why I like filmmakers. They're resourceful.




Until next time dear reader

// Cassibean

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Hey guys!! Check out more a Capella pics here

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Always carry around a camera

As a photographer they say it's always a good rule of thumb to always be carrying around your camera. I hadn't been following this rule for the past few weeks and as a result I've been going through quite the photography withdrawl. So I took it would with me one day and just like that I got pictures of an accapella group just performing in the courtyard of our campus. And zombies. 

You can never go wrong if you just carry the thing around.

I have yet to edit the zombie pics I was talking about, but they'll be up soon. Until next time

// Cassi Bean

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Early Observations

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As I mentioned in my last post, I just got hired for my school's online editor position. A very good suggestion was made to keep up a blog on my experience, as a guide to help others unsure of how to go about being a journalist in the online realm, and to help me work out my ideas, frustrations, things that worked and those that didn't, etc.

Eventually I'll move it onto it's own platform/my website (as of right now, it's the very bare bones minimum of what it could be). But until then I'll keep my experiences here.

Spring quarter doesn't start for another two weeks yet, so I have some time before I take on westernfrontonline.net. However, just as some early research I began looking at some other college websites. A quick search on top online college websites brought me a top 10 list I began searching through. Very quickly I noticed several trends that all these websites had that ours lacks:

1. Some sort of poll/quiz widget, or some other short, interactive element.
2. A blog listing
3. A box with an updated list of job opportunities/forums
4. Twitter (In fact I looked at the Daily Texan's twitter, and I noticed they talked to their followers in addition to just posting updates)
5. A (visible) RSS feed. (I mention that because we have one, but it took me a second to be able to find it. However, with these other sites, they made the button very visible, easy for a reader to spot upon initial glance of the page. If I can figure out a way to test this it would be interesting to find out if we made a more visible RSS button, would more people subscribe...?)
6. More video and a spot for videos on the front page.

I would have to do more research into how I could get these things going for our site, however it would be interesting to see if these few things would increase the readership on our site. Like I said, this was just initial research/observation, but very interesting indeed.

If you have any other ideas/observations/thoughts about what might work help out a small college newspaper let me know!

Next task: Figure out how on earth previous editors promoted our paper without people thinking we were some sort of war magazine.

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Shameless Plug

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Look at these boys. They look so serious, so stoic, and so professional.

And sometimes they wear cat ears and mustaches.

This is Backflip Wilson, Bellingham’s new sketch comedy group. The group started last year as a collaboration between five friends with some crazy ideas. They’ll make you laugh, they’ll tickle your soul, and sometimes they’ll dance around in their underroos. (But you have to pay extra for that).

Between them they have acting, writing, filming, improve, and stand-up comedy skills (and even martial arts knowledge, but don’t worry, that only comes out when absolutely necessary).

As their photographer I thought it’d be only fair to give them the obligatory plug. Check out their rehearsal photos here.

And now the important stuff:

WHO: Backflip Wilson

WHEN: Tonight (Thursday Feb. 26) from 7:30-8:45pm

WHERE: Firehouse Café/1314 Harris Ave./Bellingham, WA

HOW MUCH?? : $4 (less than a movie and more entertaining than that same TV program you’ve watched 500 times.)

For more info you can e-mail me or check out their Facebook page.

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Need a gift for V-Day?

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Yes, I know that is only a *slightly* ridiculous suggestion considering the day of pink is but three days away. Then again, if you're anything like me...I still haven't given my dad and brothers their Christmas presents.

(No. Seriously.)

I warn you, dear reader, I realized as I was typing up this post I get rather wordy. This one's a longer-than-normal, so I apologize in advance, but this was a pretty amazing story:

Recently we had the author/journalist Jack Hamann speak on campus about his book "On American Soil" . To be perfectly frank with you, dear reader, despite the fact that I was interested in going I

1. Had no idea who this guy was or what it was about
2. Had a sneaking suspicion that I might fall asleep during the presentation (nothing against the speaker of course, it had just been a very long day);

Hamann quickly turned that around, though, when he proved to be compelling in both speech and story. It was a story of investigative journalism--at it's best. I don't want to give too much of his book away, and there is plenty of information on his website, but here is at least a rough overview of what he told us.

When Hamann was a young budding journalist he got an assignment to cover a story about the expansion of a sewage treatment plant in Seattle. Exciting, no? But as some stories go, while he was in the area he discovered a what, at the time, seemed like the most amazing story never told.

A lynching of an italian prisoner of war by African American soldiers during WWII.

Well, according to Hamann, his reaction was much like yours and mine was. Prisoner of War? Lynching?? By African American Soldiers?? In Seattle???

Hamann went on to tell us how the story was published, but as you might imagine something about this story didn't sit well with many people. So, with some very classic and old school techniques Hamann and his wife proceeded to spend days at the national archives searching through document after document (thank goodness for Wikipedia...right? right? ...ok fine.) until they discovered what they had suspected.

It wasn't true.

I won't go to much further, I wouldn't want to give away the all of the book after all. But, just like the first part of the story it didn't end after it was published. Hamann went on to tell us that shortly after he published the book he got a call from a Seattle congressman at the time asking Hammon what congress could do.

These simple paragraphs couldn't even begin to describe the process of tracking down every man from the 28 convicted (or family members), compensating them and changing their dishonorable discharges to honorable. And in a final act, the Army held at ceremony at Discovery Park in Seattle for these men. At the ceremony, the Army didn't beat around the bush--they just came out and said exaclty what happened, and that they were wrong, Hamann said.

Again I don't want to get into more of the details. You'll just have to check it out, dear reader.

Us being the journalists that we are we were able to throw in a short Q and A in the end:

Q: Have you tracked down all the men or their families yet?
A: We're still trying to track them all down. So many of them had such common last names it's hard to find all the right people.

Q: Have you kept in close contact with many of the families?
A: Yes. It's generally not a journalistic practice. There is a comfort in our distance, but with many of these families there needed to be more. They were telling me things they haven't told anyone, sometimes even their family members. You get value from a perfect stranger from this. Sometimes telling strangers can cost them, but in this case we got the feeling that we were giving something back too.

(Hey, I told you it was short. We were busy getting our books signed.)

Hamann concluded with "The first draft of history is written by those in power. Real history is changing because it happens to everyone. Real history is richer and far more interesting. You can be sitting at a presentation about a sewer treatment plant and come across history."

That's my recommendation for the day. Buy it....borrow it from the library....e-mail me and maybe I'll let you borrow it. I guess I'm still reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas after all. But an amazing story nonetheless.

Until Next Time.

//CassiBean

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A Garden...of News

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Between the PI announcing the newspaper is either going under or online only and the Times cutting jobs and sections out of the newspaper, people often ask us if being a journalism major right now is really such a good idea.

Thankfully the answer is still yes. Because despite everything, at the very least people will always need news.

Also with some photo skills, a little video knowledge, some techno-savvy lingo, one might still do all right in this business. It pays having a few (lots of) geeky friends. So at least we can jump head first into all newspapers who are transferring online-branching out to a global market.

Let's stop for a minute though. What if we tried something different? What if we took the idea of taking the market online but instead of marketing out, we marketed in? Taking online news and making it local instead of global--or even better, making it hyperlocal.

Really? Can you make the internet local, much less hyperlocal?

You can if 1. you begin targeting your news to a very specific audience, such as a neighborhood or city section and 2. if you incorporate community journalism. That's the idea behind the very new company: Serra Media. Mark Briggs and Glenn Thomas have started a new section of very experimental journalism that is being tested by three local Washington newspapers and various (vary willing) schools of journalism around the state. (What can I say? With every speaker who comes to our school ending their presentations with "hey all our jobs are frozen right now...but good luck when you get out there!"...it's not exactly an era to turn down new opportunities).

The idea is that the page will have section that is divided by neighborhood. Anyone can post information, journalists and neighbors alike. Stories that come up on the news feed pertain only to the area. So things that might not be breaking news but it still important can make the feed. So community members can read what important to them, and journalists can still get closer to their community by reporting in it.

© Copyright 2009 Serra Media, LLC
"The more that people [that] collaborate to build this information resource, the better it will be," Briggs said. "What it means to a news company is here's a platform to build hyperlocal publications in each of the communities they want to cover in a way that is networked together."

Briggs also said a big appeal is it would be a "one-stop-shop" of news pertaining to the reader.

So no pessimism or skepticism, dear reader. This looks like an amazing opportunity and one I look forward to working with. And if that doesn't work out I still have my nerd skills to fall back on.

//Cassi Bean

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Mt. Baker Part the second

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Want to check out more Mt. Baker pics? Go here

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The many faces of Mt. Baker

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Saturday, January 31st:

The first time ever I've gone to Mt. Baker after living less than an hour away from it for three years. Of course, the reason I make my epic journey up is not to ski or snowboard. Oh no, it's to go to a photo shoot.

Ah well.


KVIK, the campus TV station at WWU is making a musical. Yay! Trust me, it's not as bad as it sounds. The crew was filming a scene where an emo girl runs away to the mountains to escape (it's a spoof).

So to get an early start we left at 5 a.m. (oh boy...). We proceeded to spend the next 12 hours on a very large patch of white snow. There wasn't much in the way of anything on the patch of snow we were on.



However the background was breathtaking. Being on a mountain we proceeded to experience about 7 different weather changes throughout the day.

7 a.m. We get to the mountain after an epic coffee trip. It's cold and extremely foggy. Snow proceeded to fall on and off in varying degrees throughout the day.

11 am. After convincing ourselves that we were going to have a miserable shoot and that we would never be warm again, the sun begins to break through the foggy trees, slowly washing itself over the snow drifts. Our cold foggy morning has suddenly turned very, very, bright. We weren't complaining though. We instead worked hard at taking advantage of the time we had.


2 p.m. Sky sighting! It's a miracle, we hadn't seen sky in eight hours. This was amazing. Filming in the snow is proving to be a lot more exhausting than one might think. No we're not doing as much physical activity as we would if we were up there skiing or snowboarding, but it was that lack of activity that was actually our downfall. No movement equals no blood flow, and in cold, snowy weathers our bodies weren't too happy with us. We actaually had to take an extended lodge break at one point to keep one of our actors from passing out, as he was getting pretty purple in the cheeks. Oh dear...

(After a chili dog and a hot beverage though, he was as good as new)

Now as a small campus film crew, we don't have much in the way of a budget. And when I say not much in the way of I really mean none.The fun part is the director is a big fan of dolly shots (for those who might not know, and believe I never want to assume a dolly shot is when the camera "is mounted on a wheeled platform that is pushed on rails while the picture is being taken" -- Nation Master Encyclopedia. However, we managed to make due. Thanks board and PCV pipe!


But hey, it was well worth it.



// CassiBean

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