Peter Huoppi - Multimedia Journalist

Making a short film with the Nikon D7000

Peter Huoppi — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:41:02 +0000

The Whaling City Film Project is a competition in its third year in New London, CT. The challenge, create a short film in four days with a set of parameters provided to you at the kick-off event. After failing to get our act together in time to enter last year, I was determined to get organized this year. I teamed up with Rick Koster, a reporter at The Day, and our friend Lee Elci, a talk radio host at WXLM who also has acting experience.

Our randomly assigned genre, drawn Friday night, was mockumentary. Other teams got sci-fi, musical, period piece, and comedy. At least 30 seconds had to be filmed in New London, and all seven teams had to include the following:

-characters named Ruby and Morris Turner

-a campaign sign

-the line “Where is the Mayor’s secret office?”

The final film had to be four to seven minutes long. Here’s our final product:

We came up with an rough plot on Friday night, but then scrapped that first idea when we met again on Saturday. Lee came up with the basic plot for “Until the Bell Rings,” and then set off to secure actors and locations. Rick and his wife Eileen Jenkins worked with me on writing lines for the interview segments over lunch, and then we jumped right into filming without a finished script.

Going in, I had insisted on having a script and storyboard done before we started shooting, but the schedule wasn’t going to allow that. We technically had four days, from Friday night to Tuesday night, but all of had to go to work on Monday and Tuesday, so we needed to be done shooting on Sunday.

We shot the weight lifting sequence first on Saturday, and then shot the punching bag sequence, and the first two competition sequences. The last scene on Saturday evening was the radio interview, which we were scripting right up until the shoot. We wrote the host’s lines, and then left some room for improvisation for the responses.

We shot the running scenes early Sunday morning, and had the rest done by mid-afternoon. This left me Sunday night and Monday night to edit and output to DVD. I shot the film on a new Nikon D7000, my first experience with an HDSLR. I started my career shooting exclusively stills, before moving to several Sony cameras – the A1U, Z1U, and EX-1R. I’ve often envisioned a video shot as a photograph, and then had to figure out how to work around the limitations of the video camera to get what I was looking for. With the D7000 this was no longer an issue. I could once again work with the lenses I was used to.

This was great for visuals, but I had to give up some of the ease I was used to when working with a video camera. Shots had to be planned out and pre-focused. Audio for the most part had to be captured separately with a Zoom audio recorder. There were hardly any camera moves and no follow focus. To edit in Final Cut I had to transcode to ProRes, which took quite a bit of time, and then syncing the audio took even more time, even with PluralEyes.

It was a little daunting to sit down and edit without a script, but the editing workflow was similar to what I would have done on a traditional news or documentary story. I started with the interviews and then matched up the b-roll sequences. The finishing touch was music from Rick’s old bandmates Stephen Powell and Ernie Myers.

How to survive a helicopter crash: Survival Systems USA

Peter Huoppi — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:14:03 +0000

I had the opportunity recently to do a story on Survival Systems USA, a business across the river in Groton that trains students to do things like escape from a submerged helicopter and survive at sea in a life raft. To add a first person perspective, we used a GoPro camera on one of the students in the life raft, and had reporter Rick Koster go through the underwater egress training.

Song Spinner: Raina Mullen

Peter Huoppi — Sat, 28 May 2011 18:17:02 +0000

130-day time lapse: winter barn construction

Peter Huoppi — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 12:16:18 +0000

Back in the fall, my colleague Jenna Cho wanted to do a video story about the crew from Erik Block Design-Build. They were going to be building a post-and-beam barn in Lyme. Problem was, construction had barely started, and we needed the story for the paper sooner rather than later. In brainstorming ideas for the video, we thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if we could film the entire construction process and present it as a time lapse.?”

These types of conversations are how a lot of good ideas get started. After thinking over the logistics for a bit, I figured “why not?” It took a bit of figuring with the builders and the homeowners, but we found a spot on the lawn for a Nikon D2hs on a tripod. I put on a rain cover, fortified it with a trash bag and gaffers tape, ran an extension cord over to the house, and set the camera to capture a frame every 20 minutes.

The wind knocked the camera over once, so we had to add wooden stakes to hold it down, but the rig survived all the rain and snow we had this winter. Builders Erik and Haldan Block came in to provide some commentary, and Rick Koster wrote a score on guitar.

What I had originally envisioned as a quick video of a barn going up turned into a longer project. What goes on around the barn: the changing leaves, the piling snow and eventual thaw, the passing of the sun, the moon and stars, ends up being as interesting as the barn itself.

Zach Hurd at UConn’s Pro Day

Peter Huoppi — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:01:28 +0000

I spent Wednesday afternoon at UConn’s football complex for their Pro Day. I can’t imagine the pressure these guys must be under, having one or two chances to perform a physical task that is being recorded by representatives from NFL teams. If that’s not enough, the scouts and coaches get to measure players’ bodies and direct them through drills, some of which the players had never done.

Redemption for Waterford’s Matt Irvine

Peter Huoppi — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:44:15 +0000

As journalists, we’re not supposed to route for the teams we cover. We’re meant to be objective observers who report and analyze events without playing favorites. But when you cover a group of athletes for long enough, one can’t help but grow a little fond of them. This fall, I covered several Waterford High School football games, and got to know coach Mike Ellis and senior Davonta Valentine. I also got to spend a good deal of time with the family of basketball player Nolan Long.

I’d never stand up and cheer at a game I’m covering, but when a local team goes up against an out-of-area school in the state playoffs, it’s only natural to want to see your local team succeed. I had been to three Waterford basketball games this year, and they had lost all of them, including the league semifinal when senior Matt Irvine missed a potential game-winner at the buzzer.

Things finally went Waterford’s way in the opening round of the state playoffs against Middletown, and Irvine was a big part of their success, scoring all of his ten points coming off the bench in the last ten minutes of the game.

Combining two of my favorite things: cameras and maple syrup

Peter Huoppi — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:05:32 +0000

After moving back to Connecticut from Vermont, I find I miss the ubiquity of maple sugaring. It’s not like Connecticut doesn’t have maple producers – back in high school I used to help my friend Ben collect sap during spring break – but there aren’t as many as there are up north. When I worked in Vermont, I feel like I photographed some form of sugaring at least once every year. It seemed like every time I drove down a back road, I’d see pails, tubes, or even better, steam rising from an evaporator. When I wanted to do a story about sugaring down here, I had to hunt around to find more than a handful of potential subjects. But when we did, the smell of the sugar house was as sweet as ever. Katie Warchut and I went to Maple Leaf Farm in Canterbury to profile a very modern operation:

For a more traditional take, I paid three visits to theday.com’s outdoors blogger Steve Fagin, who taps trees by hand and then boils his sap on an open fire:

Song Spinner: Joe Lussier

Peter Huoppi — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:56:32 +0000

Joe Lussier is the youngest songwriter we’ve featured in our Song Spinner series on theday.com. I’ve enjoyed all of the musicians we’ve profiled, but after songs dealing with addiction, the death of a father, the financial crisis, and the dark side of religion, it was a nice change to have a young perspective and a hopeful song.

Geoff Kaufman’s brunch serenade at Lyric Cafe

Peter Huoppi — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 15:56:24 +0000

On a recent Saturday morning, Rick Koster and I took a break between shoots to grab a sandwich at the Lyric Cafe in New London. We got the last available table, and were pleasantly surprised to find that Geoff Kaufman would be singing there. Kaufman launched into a song, and the entire restaurant joined in, harmonizing perfectly. We may have been the only ones not singing. We went back for his next performance to produce this video.

Geoff Kaufman’s brunch serenade at Lyric Cafe, posted with vodpod

Hygienic: New London’s weekend of art

Peter Huoppi — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:53:53 +0000

One of my favorite things about the city of New London is the weekend surrounding Hygienic Art’s annual open show. It’s something we cover every year, and this year we went all-in with our video coverage. Rick Koster and I did a longer-form (for newspaper web videos, anyway) preview, mixing a historical perspective with a look at a few artists who would be submitting to this year’s show.

That video was published Friday. On Saturday, we shot three video reports throughout the day. The first was a story about the early risers who were waiting outside when the doors to the gallery opened at 8:00 a.m. This was published on theday.com at 11:00 a.m.

After a quick lunch break, we went up to the Garde for their Take the Stage event. We posted this around 4:00 p.m. and then it was home for dinner.

In the evening, we did a less traditional piece that was a compilation of the various musical and visual arts one could see and hear around downtown. We shot from about 7:00-9:30, and published the video at 11:00 p.m.