Robert Lopez: Shooting and editing video - on deadline

I had covered many rallies and protest marches in my 15 years as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. But my assignment on May Day was a first - both for the newspaper and me.

I arrived at MacArthur Park, where several thousand people would gather for a march to City Hall, with a video camera and laptop computer. My job was to shoot video interviews of marchers, edit the footage and turn it into movie files that would be posted on LA Now, the breaking-news blog for the California section of latimes.com.

For years, the newspaper's Web page had featured news videos produced by a staff of professionals in the multimedia unit. Many were produced over a period of days to complement longer-range enterprise and investigative articles on the Web. This time, however, a relatively inexperienced video shooter - me - would produce the footage in the field on deadline. It was a bold experiment.

I assured my editors that I could do the job. I was one of the early multimedia converts in the newsroom. A colleague and I had shot gripping footage in El Salvador and elsewhere in 2005 for a series on a transnational street gang that formed in Los Angeles but had spread across the U.S. and into Mexico and Central America. And in January, I had received excellent training at the Knight Multimedia Digital Workshop at UC-Berkeley.

I decided to try and produce as many videos as we could of marchers. I would ask each three questions: name, job and reason for taking part in the rally. To complete each one as quickly as possible, I suggested we keep the movies to about 30 seconds apiece and mix in the interviews with scene-setting footage from the park, which would give a sense of place to each piece. I had to be very economical with my shooting - there simply was no time to pore over and edit lengthy segments of footage.

My first interview was a good one - a Los Angeles schoolteacher. Under a shady tree at the park, I edited the footage with Final Cut Express 4 on my MacBook Pro. I compressed it into an MP-4 file and then loaded everything into my backpack and drove my bike several blocks to a Starbucks, where I had wireless Internet access. I uploaded the video there. It worked! I repeated that process several times.

In the end, I produced five movies - four of marchers and one of the procession as it moved through the street toward downtown. The movies helped humanize and give voice to the four people and showed how the Los Angeles Times could enhance its news blog with breaking video footage. I can't wait to do it again.

Robert J. Lopez is a graduate on the 1989 Summer Program for Minority Journalists.