Stream – Page 3

On Missouri and Oklahoma

June 14, 2010 by Nabil Leave a Comment

As I reflect on my stay in Missouri and Oklahoma, four memories come to mind:
– Learning about intentional communities, and the impact of a passionate life on parenting, via my conversations with Tom and Sabrina in St Louis, Missouri.
– Eating well, sleeping better, and receiving great care and love from my extended family in Springfield, Missouri.
– Taking a first stab at wrapping my thoughts on passion into a lecture, and delivering it to a group of ten 7-9th graders at a community center in Springfield. (three of them fell asleep — clearly I’ve got some work to do)
– Spending several hours with Pastor Calvin Battle and members of his congregation as we did a deep-dive into Calvin’s foray into being pastor (after a successful career as an engineer).

As I enter the last third of my trip, I see New Mexico, Arizona, and California before me and three stories that need telling. Here we go-

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12 Tips for Shooting an Interview

June 9, 2010 by Nabil Leave a Comment

In some ways my trip has been a crash course in interviewing and video editing. I feel like I’m becoming increasingly conscious of the right way of doing things, and I know that I’m still making plenty of mistakes. You can imagine my joy when yesterday I received a phone call from Josh Weinstein, founder of Inside Cinema. Inside Cinema is a company that uses video “as a transformative tool for individuals and organizations,” and has done very innovative work on framing issues such as women’s leadership in Saudi Arabia.

Here is the advice that Josh had for me:

Conduct The Interview
– Given that my film is focused on conversation, make sure my audio quality is as good as possible
– Don’t touch the camera while the subject is speaking: reframe the shot between questions, and it’s not as important to zoom in during moments of emotional intensity as some guides suggest
– If an important thought is not coherently stated in one contiguous sentence, re-ask a variant of the same question
– To liven up the clip, intersplice action-oriented footage (B-roll)
– At the end of my interviews, while it is still fresh in my mind, jot down notes on powerful moments

Find the Good Stuff
– View the footage in its entirety and take copious notes. If possible, transcribe the interview, print it out, and highlight important passages as I rewatch a clip
– Note thoughts that will make powerful openers and closers
– Stick to what is compelling in the video, which may be very different than what I experienced live. Let the footage guide me.

Create the Final Product
– Before I begin, articulate my agenda: e.g. is it to encourage people to take risks and lead more passionate lives?
– Search for existing narratives that appeal to me and explore using them as a framework.
– One way to organize my interviews is by theme: for example, beginner’s luck. I could then find the interviews that fall into that theme and bring two or three people together for a 5 minute clip.
– Overlaying footage from two different periods of time can have a powerful effect: for example, combining a clip with someone’s reaction to said clip. I can also experiment with having people respond to each other.

I’m super grateful for Josh’s guidance and I look forward to tracking the impact that he makes through his unique narrative style.

A Windy City Whirlwind

June 9, 2010 by Nabil Leave a Comment

As I wrap up two and a half days in Chicago, I can see my project starting to take shape.

First, as I carry around an increasingly large number of MiniDV tapes (14 and counting) and think about how to put all of this content together, I’m realizing that quality is more important than quantity. Over the last couple days, I’ve conducted fewer interviews per day, however I’ve also spent more time with each interview, especially with respect to capturing B-roll, or footage of the interviewee’s environment. I think this is really important for my understanding of the person’s context, and eventually for my audience’s understanding of the same.

Second, I feel increasingly confident in my theme: interviewing people who took a risk to follow a passion. Ever since I reframed my project around this question, my interviews have becoming more intimate, insightful, and inspiring. I’m excited to see where this question leads me over the rest of my journey.

Third, I’ve found a rhythm that works for me. Travel days are for just that — travel and refocusing. Interview days are solely for interviewing. While I’ve made a couple of exceptions, I think this delineation is important in helping me to stay focused and have perspective on my work.

I have had a few neat experiences over the last few days, specifically:
– Sue O’Halloran organized a delicious dinner at her place for me and professional storytellers in the Chicago area. The night ended with quite possibly the most intricate edition of two-truths and a lie that has ever been played.
– I interviewed my good friend Matt, who gave up the creature comforts of a successful career and strong network in New York City to start a nonprofit in Mumbai, India.
– I interviewed my good friend Jesse, who balances her work as an economist and TV commentator with running a dance company.
– I interviewed Bogna Solak, a Polish immigrant who, after getting stuck in the US when Poland declared martial law, decided to follow her passion and started a bakery. Today she owns five bakeries under the Oak Mill brand, and her own large-scale production facility.

With that, goodbye Windy City, thanks to the Polish American Association for being incredibly helpful in connecting me with Bogna, and off to Missouri (where I spend my first day camping).

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A Day in Motor City

June 5, 2010 by Nabil 3 Comments

Yesterday was an absolutely incredible day in Detroit, thanks in large part to Tyree, founder of the Heidelberg project and incredible ambassador to his neighborhood. Besides a very moving interview with Tyree himself, I was lucky to be able to interview:
– John and Magnola, retired auto workers who moved to Detroit after growing up in the South
– Tishan, a highschool grad (as of yesterday) who is following his passion of culinary arts
– Lisa, a Native American and successful optician who traded it all in for a career in fine arts, with a focus on metal smithing

On my drive from Buffalo to Detroit I thought a lot about the focus of my project, and I’ve decided to shift it from stories of American values, to stories of people who have taken big risks to follow their passions. I like this subject better because it’s inherently personal, and it’s relevant to my own journey. My day in Detroit was a field test of this topic and I’m very happy with the results.

Now, on to South Haven MI for a little R&R with my good friend Matt, and on Sunday off to Chicago. Here we go-

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36 Hours in Buffalo

June 2, 2010 by Nabil 2 Comments

First full day of interviewing / story-gathering is complete. I feel encouraged, anxious, ecstatic, and exhausted. Encouraged because I feel that I was able to access a super diverse cross-section of a new-to-me city. This bodes well for my remaining stops. Anxious because I feel that given my lack of training I may be (okay, am) making super basic and easily correctable mistakes (e.g. framing faces incorrectly in shots). Ecstatic because hey even if I’m making mistakes I’m finally actually doing it. Exhausted because, well it’s been a long day.

My interviews today included:
– Nookie, a grandfather, carpenter, and hilarious rapper
– Chris, a new manager of one of the most important stores in East Buffalo — a covered market that is at the heart of urban entrepreneurship (and will soon host a rooftop garden)
– Chris II, a Cornell-educated white collar consultant who went against the grain and left Washington DC for Buffalo
– Gary, a man who supplies Hollywood with some of the best custom-made hats money can buy
– Albert (below), a 76 year old father of 14 boys who told me a great story about stealing a whistle as a child (and his mother’s retribution)

I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to edit and upload the video (likely once I arrive in LA), however to put a face to a name, I’ve upload some snapshots into the Photo album (see toolbar above).

Tomorrow: Detroit (via Canada).

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My Itinerary

May 28, 2010 by Nabil 2 Comments

I’ve pulled together an itinerary that I feel will take me through a good cross-section of America, while also getting me to my final destination (Los Angeles) relatively efficiently.

Regions visited include: the “Rust Belt” (Buffalo, New York; Detroit, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois); the Midwest (St Louis and Springfield Missouri); the “Bible Belt” (Tulsa, Oklahoma; Amarillo, Texas); and America’s great Southwest (Santa Fe, New Mexico; Phoenix, Arizona).

I set off in four days.

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The Stories We Tell Ourselves

May 25, 2010 by Nabil 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me, “the most powerful stories are those that you tell to yourself.” Shane Murphy, a tech entrepreneur based in London, has taken this premise and built diarydoo, a microblogging diary platform. This platform combines the publishing facility of Twitter with the privacy of a personal journal.

My conversation with Shane sparked a question: why do some of us write down our embarrassing stories? My guess is that act of writing down a story is cathartic. The more we get them out of our heads and in front of our eyes (a journal), or into the ears of others (a performance), the less they weigh us down. Case in point: yesterday on The Moth Radio Hour a guy recounted an incredibly embarrassing story about the first and only time he served as a prostitute (spoiler: they ended up cuddling). I can only imagine that the mix of fear and embarrassment that he felt from telling the story must have been outstripped by the relief of getting it off his chest. Otherwise, why would he have done it?

Which leads me to the next question: if externalizing a story is necessarily cathartic, is there value to keeping a story secret, for secret’s sake? And, in our current culture, where privacy is increasingly opt-out (e.g. Facebook photos, Blippy, etc), is it natural to assume that the private story is an endangered species?

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