Deanna Lutz

This commercial was written, shot, and edited by Junior Mass Communications major (and Geography minor), Deanna Lutz, as a part of the Spring 2007 offering of Video Editing (27.336), a course required by the University to graduate from the Telecommunications track of the Mass Communications major. The video was edited using Final Cut Pro 5 under the instruction of Mass Communications professor, Mr. Jason Genovese, and with the help of Dr. Patty Beyer and Dr. Jeff Brunskill from the Department of Geography and Geosciences. The focus of the assignment was to develop a 30-second commercial and fine-tune the learned skills essential in creating a successful final product and becoming an outstanding editor.

Deanna comments: "I tried to focus on transitions, beats, and rhythm. The viewer should be able to see the commercial in its logical order with no breaks or jump-cuts. I believe my musical background helped me incredibly in creating this commercial.  Because I have a knowledge of how rhythm and meter work, I could properly place the beats of music to sync up with the beats of the video, to produce a coherent and aesthetically pleasing commercial that is both entertaining and informative.  I created the commercial and permitted it to be posted on the Weather Den website to spark interest in both the Geography and Geosciences Department and the website itself.

In the commercial you will notice at each picture change, there is a downbeat of music.  During the fourth picture, the zoom in to the weather station is synchronized with the introduction of the music track.  In the middle of the sequence, the actor’s typing corresponds with the rhythm of the music and the mouse click near the end of the commercial is on a downbeat of the music.  These are a few examples of the close attention I paid to the detail in the commercial.  I hope you enjoy."

Dan FitzPatrick

Dan has worked hard to get the rain guage set up and calibrated. Thanks, Dan!

Chad Betts, Ryan Hipple, Jacob Kelly, Matthew Rhoades, Anthony Tersine, and Paul ZipkoSpring 2007, 56.480 Object-Oriented Software Engineering

As part the computer science course 56.480, these students designers/programmers helped develop an instructional software program to make better use of the information collected by the weather observation system. For more information on the project, click here.

Updated Friday, January 11, 2008