http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/ACS-Commissioner-Ron-Richter-NYC-Child-Welfare-135882813.html

“The new commissioner of the city’s child welfare system has a tough job ahead of him — the agency receives some 60,000 calls a year reporting child abuse or neglect, and like all city agencies, the department has to manage with a tight budget.”

Behind the Scenes:

Stories that talk generally about victims are often very difficult to put together for TV. We have to have some sort of visual to help carry the narrative, but at the same time, we have to be careful not to associate innocent unrelated people to the actual victims. It’s a struggle. I was lucky with this story, in that I had a chance to shoot nondescript b-roll at a local day care center.

When I don’t have this kind of luxury, I resort to an old standby – the face blur. Andy’s Region Blur is a fantastic (free!) tool for Final Cut Pro. I’ve found it very fast and versatile. It’s very easy to apply a blur to a face and add keyframes to compensate for motion in the shot.

The interview with the ACS Commissioner was shot on a Panasonic HPX-170. The lighting setup was pretty simple, just a Lowel Pro Light (softened down with a white umbrella), a small LED inside the table lamp, and another small LED (daylight balanced) kicking up the stone fireplace in the background.

“Some of New York City’s angriest teens are learning the way to a more peaceful path with a little help from the Buddha.

NBC New York recently was given access to the Crossroads Juvenile Detention Center in Brownsville, where there was a stark contrast between the kids in their orange detention suits and the monks in their brown robes.”

“The mandatory evacuation of Zuccotti Park overnight seemed to come out of nowhere — but the story actually starts on Sunday. Here’s a timeline of the surprise sweep.”

For weeks you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing “Occupy Wall Street.” The NYPD had orders to sweep the OWS encampment in Lower Manhattan, and a lot happened over the passing hours. I was asked to compile a timeline of events, as a recap for our 5pm newscast. The goal here was to use the amazing video we were able to gather  and show the steady progression through the night.

Behind the scenes:

The piece was cut with a combination of Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion. Essentially, it was edited in Motion, but the graphics program isn’t really built to be an NLE. Once I had the voiceover track I basically edited a straight cuts video package in FCP. This helped me organize the footage and time it to the key points in the story.

Once I had that timeline laid out, I dragged the ENTIRE sequence into Motion. There, I built a skeleton of the timeline graphic that frames the piece and placed the video in the appropriate “time windows” (well, what else would you call them?). With everything in the right spot I used Motion’s 3d camera tools to move in and out of the timeline graphic. A couple of hundred keyframes later…