Tech Tip Tuesday: Mic Att!

Hey peoples, time again for another Tech Tip Tuesday!

Last week we talked about what to do if your external microphone is picking up unwanted radio signals (if you didn't catch the post yet, check it out here). After posting the tip, I chatted online with friend of Reel Grrls and awesome video blogger Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency. Here's an excerpt from our conversation:


ANITA: love your short little post about the mic audio problem!
me: Thanks!
ANITA: now if only you'll make one about why my audio is always so low no matter what mic I use
me: Hmm... low audio, I'll have to think on that one...
ANITA: I got it to work with a shotgun put right underneath the person speaking, but any further away is inaudibly low, even with a lavalier.
me: does your camera have auto & manual audio levels? have you tried it on both?
ANITA: no it doesn't have that unfortunately.
It has "turn mic attachment on" and then you can adjust the audio, so I guess it does, but even when it's all the way up it's still low
me: Wait, is the "attachment" setting just called att?
ANITA: ya it says MIC ATT
me: Actually, "att" stands for "attenuate" and it is used to cut off high levels on your mic. So when it's on it just brings your audio levels way down.
ANITA: OH NO
all this time!
I thought it was mic attachment so it would pull from the mic and not the built in
me: It's a common misconception, no worries.
Try turning it off and see if it helps. Let me know!


So, the big message is: MIC ATT does NOT stand for "mic attachment," but "mic attenuate"! And what does mic attenuate do? It makes your incoming audio LOWER. What exactly is attenuation? Check the definition from this great audio glossary Anita sent over:

Attenuation: The process of decreasing the amplitude of a signal as it passes from one point to another. Analog attenuation circuits typically use resistors to reduce the voltage of a signal.


So, as Anita next asked, why on earth would anyone want to turn mic att on? Great question! Truthfully, I have never had to turn this setting on, but if you were in a situation where the audio was so loud it sounded distorted or blown out (like yelling & clapping at a game or event), or if you had a mixer or similar line-out attached to your mic input (mics have a much quieter signal than lines), you might want to try turning on your mic att.


To sum all this up and illustrate the point for you, Anita made this fabulous little video about our friend (or enemy, as the case may be) Mic ATT. Enjoy, and thanks Anita!

Save the Date: the Reel Grrls Gala is October 23rd!

We are thrilled to announce this year's special guest: Anne Rossellini, director of 2010 Sundance Jury Prize winner Winter's Bone, and to welcome Boeing, our lead event sponsor for the 4th Annual Reel Grrls Fall Gala and Auction.

Tickets will go on sale soon - for now, save the date and get in touch if you are interested in volunteering or donating to the auction.

We can't wait to see you there!

Tech Tip Tuesday: Radio in your Audio?

Today I'm excited to share a Tech Tip with you that I learned from one of our mentors, Claire Beach, last week during a Reel Grrls shoot.

Our summer Apprenticeship Program for advanced students pays Reel Grrls participants a stipend to create promotional videos for local non-profits (who do not have to pay for the video they receive–pretty awesome right?!). This year, one of the videos we are creating is about women's suffrage, and will celebrate the 100-year anniversary of women receiving the right to vote in Washington State. 

Last week the Suffrage Team was setting up for an important shoot with author Patsy Clark. They had two lavalier microphones hooked up to their main camera and the audio levels looked like they were coming in fine, but when the camerawoman put on her headphones she noticed a low level of audio coming through that sounded like a BBC radio report. Huh?? That's right. Our mics were picking up a radio station!

Believe it or not, this happens all the time. Why you ask? Well, according to the internet, it can happen for lots of reasons, but this is probably the one we were dealing with: "Sound systems are made up of several pieces of electronic equipment as well as a lot of wiring. Each run of wire is potentially an antenna."

So the wires of our microphones were acting as antennas, picking up a radio station and broadcasting it through our video camera. Yikes! So, how do we get rid of it? Well, Claire had a neat trick to "shield" the connectors on the mic cables:

That's right, regular old aluminum foil! In fact, this particular foil Claire kindly rescued from her lunch. We wrapped the foil around each area where the metal shields surrounded our XLR plugs. Then the camerawoman, RG participant Julia Levy, listened for the radio station again:

It worked! With the mic cables shielded, our valiant RG team went ahead and filmed an excellent interview with Patsy Clark. Foil saved the day!

Don't forget, there are lots of different reasons why your mic might pick up a radio station, so use the bounty of the internet to explore further if this tech tip doesn't solve the problem for you the next time you come across it. Still, it might be a good idea to add a little piece of foil to your filmmaker's emergency kit (I know you have one!) just in case.

Summer Video Camp is Coming!

Take a video production crash course with Reel Grrls! Learn to write, shoot, and edit a short video in only three days. Work in an all-girl, noncompetitive environment, and receive instruction from adult women media professionals. Register online today!



Mon, Wed, Fri, Aug 23, 25, 27
10:00 AM - 4:00pm
Location: Reel Grrls New Media Lab in Seattle's Central District, 1409 21st Ave, Seattle WA 98122
Ages: Open to young women ages 13 - 19. Beginning and advanced media-makers welcome!
Cost: $175, or pay what you can. No participants turned away due to lack of funds.

Register online: http://lucia.reelgrrls.org/webform/2010-summer-video-camp

Contact: Program Manager Maile Martinez at (206) 393-2085 or maile@reelgrrls.org with any questions.


And be sure to check out the Flickr stream from last year's Video Camp:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/reelgrrls/sets/72157621368286338/with/3715499084/

Programming Update: KUOW Weekday High Skill Swap!

PROGRAMMING UPDATE: Our Summer Apprenticeship Program is well underway, with advanced Reel Grrls working in teams to produce outreach videos for the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, the Alliance for Education, as well as a short documentary about the 100-year anniversary of women's suffrage in Washington State!



With all this production, things have been really busy in the office lately - in the best sense! Last week, we had two youth groups join us for a skill share extravaganza.

First, we had arranged a skill swap with the youth from KUOW's Weekday High Program. These are young women (coincidentally - it's a coed program but it happens to be all girls this year) who are learning radio production skills at our local NPR affiliate, KUOW. They are starting to incorporate video into some of their reporting, and they came to us to learn some basic video skills.

So the Reel Grrls apprentices put together some activities covering camera work, lighting, shot composition, and b-roll.



It was really amazing to hand over the reigns to our youth and let them take complete control of the instruction. They were great teachers!

Then we switched, and let the KUOW interns take the lead on an interviewing skills workshop:



They put on skits in which they enacted BAD interviews, and they were hilarious! We loved it!

Then everyone ran out into the neighborhood and practiced their interview skills on our neighbors at 20/20 Cycle, Alleycat Acres, and Katy's Corner Cafe (we have the best and nicest neighbors!).

But that's not all! At the same time, we worked with the World Affairs Council to bring a group of Iraqi youth in on the same day. The Iraqi youth were participating in a cultural exchange program, and they, along with some local teens, came to Reel Grrls to learn animation skills and produce short animated films.



All three groups - the WAC group, the Weekday High interns, and the Reel Grrls apprentices - got to know each other through some warm-up games, and shared our work at the end of the day. We are so happy and proud that Reel Grrls could be a hub for so many dynamic, creative youth. Big thanks to Jenny and Nathan at KUOW for helping to organize the skill share between their interns and our apprentices, and to our former Americorps VISTA Nickey for pulling off a fantastic animation workshop for the WAC group! Whew!

Video Blog: The Gaga-fication of Pop Music

In our third installment of the Reel Grrls Vlog, Social Networking and Outreach Manager Nickey Robare and Program Manager Maile Martinez discuss the recent "Gaga-fication" of pop music, particularly among female pop stars:




So what do you think - is Lady Gaga a true original? Do you know of other contemporary female media-makers who are producing creative, weird, utterly original work? (They don't have to be pop-stars - how about filmmakers, photographers, graphic artists or performers? Who inspires you?)

Youth Media Showcase: Press Freedom

Check out this great video from students at Theodore Roosevelt's Arts Media and Communications Academy in Washington, DC.

Hello from Sami!

Reel Grrls graduate Samantha Muilenburg and director of Generation of Consolidation recently wrote us this blog post to tell us what she's been up to out East.

Hi! Samantha here. During my Freshman year of high school, I became a participant at Reel Grrls, a Seattle non-profit that teaches film production and media literacy to young women. I fell in love with the program, so much so that I spent the next four years making media with them.

My Senior year at high school came and left, so now I’m old and graduated, living my post Reel Grrls life. I imagined that life after Reel Grrls would feel sad and empty, but thanks to all my Reel Grrls media skills, I was able to land a spot at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where I’m studying Film & TV Production.

Now a rising Sophomore at Tisch, I can happily report that I absolutely love it. My Freshman year was fulfilling and fun. I’ve taken classes on photography, digital editing, audio production, screenwriting, and directing actors.

As a filmmaker, I am concentrating in media for social change and youth media education. The professors and faculty and Tisch are wonderful, and support the wide variety of careers that filmmaking has to offer - even my not-so-Hollywood career goals. Next year I am looking forward to taking specialized production classes, such as documentary filmmaking.

Life after Reel Grrls is far more than my classes though. Living in New York City has opened a wide variety of opportunities for me, such as finding $1 pizza at 2am and feeling local enough to make fun of tourists. But those are just minor benefits compared to the opportunities I’ve had to learn about the many wonderful non-profits working here.

This summer I’ve been interning for People’s Production House, a non-profit that, among many things, teaches youth about media policy and how to create radio productions. I worked in their introductory schools program, helping 7th and 9th grade class in Brooklyn create radio pieces about issues important to the students. Now I’m excited to be starting their Digital Expansion Fellowship, a program that teaches advanced level media policy and journalism.

I miss Reel Grrls a lot, but I’m so thankful for the many doors it has opened for me. New York is a great city, and I can’t wait to see what will happen with my next three years at NYU.

Programming Update: Animation Camp!

A couple of weeks ago we completed another successful week-long Animation Camp here at Reel Grrls. Open to young women ages 9-19, registration was so high that this ended up being our BIGGEST camp ever, with over 20 new and returning participants!

We had an incredible group of mentors for the camp, including animators Tess Martin, Celena Adler, Nickey Robare, Katie Gregg and Suzanne Twining (who worked on the Academy-award nominated feature "Coraline"!), as well as RG alumnae Sarah (who graduated way back in 2002!) and Kinsey.

Participants tried out a few different kinds of animation: paper cut-outs on lightboxes, claymation, stop-motion with toys and objects, pixellation using SLR cameras and computer animation using After Effects. We also learned about the history of animation and discussed media literacy with regards to our favorite animated media (have YOU ever stopped to think about the female characters in popular animated film & TV shows?).

By day 2 we were ready to think about creating our final pieces. Everybody had a chance to pitch a story that they thought would be pretty cool to animate, and we voted on our favorites. After choosing 6 amazing stories, participants broke up into groups and started pre-production.

After that it was animate, Animate, ANIMATE!! It was so much fun around here, with animation stations set up in every corner of every room and all around our neighborhood. Everywhere you looked there was clay, glitter, paint, paper of all shapes and colors, wigs, ketchup & mustard bottles with faces, and just a general amazingness of chaotic creativity. Not to mention tripods, camera, lights and computers. Awesome!!

Participants also learned about soundtrack creation and how adding music and sound effects to animations really make them come to life. In the eleventh hour, yours truly even helped out with foley sound effect creation in one of the films, by tapping into my secret talent: burping on cue!

The friends and family screening for our Animation Camp was completely packed, and everyone was so impressed with the completed films. Below is a small sample of the awesomeness. You can watch all the films on our Vimeo workshop page, and check out all the photos at our flickr site. See you next time!

Mamma Knows Best from ReelGrrls Workshops on Vimeo.

Wednesday links round up

Women Without Men is a beautiful looking new feature from visual artist Shirin Nishat that will be showing at the Northwest Film Forum next week. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing it!

Our friend and fabulous mentor Wynne Greenwood (the mastermind behind post-Riot Grrl electroclash sensation Tracy and the Plastics) is teaching a workshop on performance with video here in Seattle. More info on her website.

A Reel Grrls alum just started the blog Queer Tibet. There's not a lot on the internet about queer in Tibet, so you should definitely go check it out!

There's been a bit of hub-bub around the internet in response to this article on Jezebel about sexism behind the scenes at the Daily Show. In fact, a huge group of female staffers from the show just responded with their own letter, saying that it not a sexist environment. And Amanda Hess at The Sexist blog responded to that. It's an interesting chain of events, for sure. But I'm curious as to why the Daily Show in particular is being singled out as sexist. The unfortunate fact is that the entire television industry, and all of comedy, is systemically sexist. So what do you think? Does it seem like sexism at the Daily Show is worse than other workplaces, or do we just expect more from them because it has a liberal bent?