Hey, I’m Alex Leigh and am an anchor for 2017s WACs News season. Next year I will be a senior taking Chem and once again this class as a WACs News Veteran. I wanted to start with multimedia production because I heard it was a great class to take. Involving our own stories posted to the public and video stories involving editing and filming, all things I was interested in. It was a good class to have every other day and made it easy to make up work when there is a day in between to catch up. I felt this class would offer me the skills of having deadlines and getting jobs done by them. Multimedia Production essentially is an in school job, your teachers and students count on you to get your work done by certain times before episodes are posted.

Through out this year I worked an a few stories to post to our page. Mainly I opened a chain of Sensational Students to let the school district know the amazing students we have within our classrooms. I let all of these students know how amazing their individual abilities are and how they need to keep there inspiring work going. It was really great seeing the skill level in our school district form seventh grades being published authors to fifth graders that can code computers. I also was the news anchor for every new episode. At the beginning of the year I was physically incapable of reading. It would take more than a block for me and Carly Hopcia to get through and record an episode, and I cant even imagine having to edit our all of our bloopers. As the year went on I was able to clam down read slower and without sounding like I’m depressed about my life. Now at the end of the year Carly and I are much more confident with recording episodes and matured as news anchors. It took about half the year to be able to record great episodes deserving of great grades. Learning where to place the camera on a persons face, recording relative background scenes, and giving good informational introductions to my videos. It just took some time and practice to making a video look professional but I as well as the rest of the class god better at this as the year went on. Along with my writing it become easier to read and less choppy.

One of the other skills needed for this class is learning how to use iMovie to edit our videos. With the help of the other students and teachers this actually became an easy thing to do every day. Once you learn where you need to cut a video so it doesn’t sound choppy and cover bad video with good B-role, its really a quick thing to do in class and make look good. The hard part is making sure our videos make sense and flow well with an episode. Learning the basics is the only hard part and you figure that out everything else comes naturally.

For anyone thinking about taking this class I would highly recommend it to anyone that actually will do their work. This class offers a real life work experience where consequences will follow for bad or late work. With good work put on the table good grades and results will follow. Mr. Currin and Mr. Masci want to let us all learn on our own and learn through experience and time. If you are looking for the best fun environment in a class involving video filming editing and story creating for your school this is the class you should look into. The challenges I personally faced were mostly in my episode filming. Mostly because I physically could not read. As the year went on I had to learn to slow down while reading from the screen and giving some emotion to my words. If I could do anything better throughout this year, it would be my script writing. If I kept up with my writing I feel my reading during episodes would be more fluent as I would be more familiar with the words.

Over the course of the year my video quality greatly increased. From cutting parts out and keeping them fluent, to making sure all information was covered and B-Roll was relevant. WACS news lets the school know about everything Alden and lets the community know about big upcoming events. Overall my year was great with WACS news and I am taking it again next year. The class was fun and gives you actual work to do and pays off to get work done early. I learned that putting forward full effort will pay off in the end every time.