Columbia and I on Recovery Path!

Doing my third package was a quite new experience in terms of the topic I was covering: housing situation in Columbia. I had little familiarity with all the complexities that have caused the current so-called housing crisis in the country. And terms like “mortgage” and “foreclosure” and other housing jargons were not the type of things I was most familiar with in my life. So, I had to spend quite some good bit of time researching and educating myself about all these little but crucial details. That was my homework part. After reading different sorts of stuff and talking to some people, I came up with a good understanding of those terms and housing situation in America.

During the research phase, I called various people to set up interviews. Some were unwilling to talk at all. Others, when learned my story was for a class project, declined to talk. I was highly interested to get hold of one or two persons or families who had lost their homes in order to humanize the story, so to speak. Besides humanizing my story, I believed such people might well provide for great soundbites and visuals as well. I managed to contact two people through a realtor in the town, but they declined to give interviews after they found out that it was not going to be aired on television. The reason: well, because they said my story could not help their situation. I understood that very well and respected their choice.

I then had to find foreclosed homes to get some B-roll. After talking to several realtors finally one did agree to provide me some addresses. I went to two houses and shoot some video. I did my stand-up in front of one of those houses as well.

Then it came to writing the script and editing the video. I had talked to my friend Angela about iNews format and got to make sense of how to do it. Having not taken Broadcast one class, I had little knowledge of how to do the iNews. But Angela was quite helpful in teaching me the things I needed to know. So, I was expecting to be able to do a much better job on iNews scripting which I did. Story-telling is for some reason the hardest part of the job. Especially, I find it a bit tougher to tell a story in broadcast medium! I have kind of realized that I am much more comfortable with words and doing print stories! My angle was that, as realtors and others told me, it was now a “perfect” time for people who wanted to buy homes due to falling prices and that Columbia is apparently on a recovery path in terms of foreclosures.

I had a strong feeling that I did a much better job with this story than my previous two ones. Although the final outcome was not still what I wished for, the improvement that I achieved and the amount of work I did for this one, made me hopeful that I am on a recovery path from my B2 shock as well!