“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…