How We Shot School Plays

[MarkBarbieri]

For the last several years, my wife and I recorded the school plays for our local elementary school. Earlier this month, our youngest son "graduated" to junior high school, so with no children at the school anymore, we decided to retire from recording the plays. Much to our surprise, another crazy parent stepped in and volunteered to start recording them.

The new parent has young children there, so he may be around for quite a while. He's also an avid videographer, so he's got a lot of the software and hardware required to do something like this. In order to help him understand what we did and why, I put together a document covering the history of our shooting plays and the process we go through to prepare, record, edit, and created discs for the plays. You can see the document here:

http://kathybarbieri.com/HowWeShotSchoolPlays.pdf

I'm posting this for several purposes. Others interested in learning from our experience may find it useful. People not familiar with our process reading it may give me feedback on how to improvement document (fixing typos, providing better explanations for things that aren't clear, etc). Finally, some of you may have suggestions for alternative approaches.

 

[PrincessInOz]

Page 9 - Under Closing Thoughts, second sentence.

"A lot of this stuff is insane."

I would recommend that you change it to...
"A lot of this stuff has evolved over time as we've wanted to continuously improve our outcome."



No point in confirming the "insanity" of it all to another parent.





Seriously - Kudos to you and your wife. That's some commitment that you've invested over the years. Thanks for sharing.



Me?
I'm taking stills of kids in plays and concerts and I've resolutely stayed clear of recording video. After reading your insights, I think I might stick with that resolution.



And I still think you have the best toys!