Every 15 Minutes

Pasco senior Ashton Bott finishes off her transformation into a walking dead as part of the Every 15 Minutes program, which seeks to raise awareness for drunk driving-related fatalities.

The "every 15 minutes" part refers to an old stat that claimed one death from alcohol-related accidents every 15 minutes. The rate has dropped since the program started, thanks to numerous programs aimed at getting heads pulled out of asses.

I shot some video for this and planned on editing it, having thought out a tight edit during and after shooting. Unfortunately, a last-minute A1 story came up and I had to pass the footage along to be edited. What I had envisioned as a quick 1:30 about the event clocked in at a flabby 4:09.

Now, I'm not talking shit about the coworker who edited it. I dumped it on her toward the end of her shift and it's much faster to edit loose than tight. There's that famous Mark Twain quote: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Well, that rings true for these multimedia pieces too, and with our current drive for quantity of videos over quality, it's tough to find the time to edit properly. Week before last, we slammed our interactive media department with four videos in one day. My fear is that by the time we get our video priorities in order, a good percentage of our readers will avoid our videos out of conditioning.

My hope is that things will settle down before that happens and we are given the time to produce some quality storytelling.

True. I got pulled away from editing the Every 15 Minutes video to go hang out in a bar and shoot some Cougar fans watch the Tar Heels smother WSU. I got an hour of overtime to hang out with a pretty fun bunch and catch the first half of a bitter Sweet 16 game. And sure, I'm pretty happy with the frame I got of a 1993 WSU alum leading the crowd in the fight song:

But I would've happily traded that to edit my own video—even from a less-than-stellar event. Why? Because every time I slog through my own footage, I learn a little more about what I need to do next time, and while we're in this orgy of video production, I want to use the lack of demand for quality to work out the kinks so when the quantity/quality formula is reciprocated, my pants are snug around my waist and not wrapped around my ankles.