Production Memo

By Nicole Vella

I got the idea to do this story after going online and discovering how many sex offenders were actually in the area. It made me wonder how the people in the community felt and if anything was being done. At first I wasn't sure who I should interview. I wanted to interview a Hempstead resident with children and get his/her perspective. Well as i continued my research I saw that certain Nassau County legislators passed laws restricting sex offenders from living a certain distance within schools parks and playgrounds. I also saw that laws were passed to enable the installation of software into the computer of a sex offender that allows any online activity to be monitored and if any inappropiate sites are visited, the police are notified. Well I wanted to speak with one of the legislators responsible for passing laws dealing with sex offenders and i sent out e-mails to 10 different legislators. I also sent an e-mail to the Hempstead civic association and and heard back from 2. David Mejias was the first to respond and Kevan Abrahams responded shortly after. It was hard to set up a good time because of both their busy schedules so i had to pretty much be ready to go when they were available. After i got those interviews I wanted an interview with a Hofstra student but it was harder than I thought. When I finally found a student who was willing to answer a few questions, he/she did not want to go on camera. I finally found a student who would go on camera and had 3 interviews and it was time to edit. I had a few problems because at first the sound did not transfer from the flipcam to my computer so I had to covert each file that i downloaded onto my computer. It was pretty though trying to fit everything in 2 minutes. I had to decide what to cut and what to keep, every second mattered. My advice for future students taking this class is to start everything early. Plan ahead, make sure you have a lot of potential sources and have a plan b and maybe even plan c because people are busy and might not get back to you or might not want to be on camera. Also even though you have a source willing to talk it might take a week to get a date arranged to meet with them so allow yourself to have time. Make sure there is always room for error, expect things to go wrong for example your movie might have a problem uploading to blip, or certain things might take longer than you expected, if you allow expect things to go wrong and they don't it's better than expecting it all to go well and not allowing time for any error. It's not as easy as it look, editing alone can take hours so be organized, don't procrastinate and work hard.