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Set for Titanic: Trial and Tragedy

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In this news story, we (Sarina, Noah, Stephen and I) tried our best to capture the work that goes into building a set for one of the Riley Center productions.  In actuality, we could have made at least three different news stories with the footage we had, one about the play itself, one about the progress so far, and one about the inspiration for the design.  We filmed three interviews, one with Jim Raposa, one with Paul Molinelli, and one with Casey Mara.  Jim talked for about three minutes every time we asked him a question, so we ended up cutting most of his interview out because it would take up too much of the time.  Paul talked a long time about why the set looked the way it did, what artistic styles inspired him, what was going on in the world at that time, why the current events inspired the art of the time, and a lot of the research he put in behind the design.  I thought that was one of the most interesting parts of the entire story but we ended up cutting it out because we didn't have time to fit it in.  Also, we cut out Casey's entire interview because we already couldn't fit Paul and Jim's interviews under 2 minutes.  

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During the actual filming, everything went really well.  Jim's interview had really good lighting and Paul's interview had the set design in the background, so that was an added bonus.  Casey's interview had a weird bar going through the background that was not straight and made the horizon line look odd, but we cut her interview, so that didn't really matter too much.  

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When we put everything we deemed important into the story, it came out to be about 5 minutes long.  We spent a couple days just trying to decide what to cut out and what to focus on.  We ended up focusing more on the progress of the set rather than the inspiration behind it, which is probably more interesting at a glance, but I for one really liked hearing about the inspiration behind the design.  We also tried to make the interview comedic, with cuts between Paul and Jim saying contradicting things just to keep the audience interested and the piece fun rather than boring.  

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Overall, I really like the end product of the news story, and I learned a lot of things about composition of a shot, lighting, editing, and working with people who aren't used to being interviewed or aren't around cameras that much.  

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