Thread: Digging in the Dirt pilot

Here's a small sample of the sort of thing I get paid to do these days when I'm not researching and writing lengthy background essays on oil spills and such.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-phG26Kz8z4

How's that for sheer excitement?

This was something I thought of one day while traveling with an extension officer in the Stann Creek District. We stopped at a farm where a lady was planning to start growing and selling organically produced table vegetables. She wanted soil samples taken in the area. As usual the Canon was hanging on my shoulder, and I had the Extension Officer pause at each step for a picture.

I used this as a pilot to sell the idea of a series of super simple video demonstrations. It got me a contract to produce 13. I reshot the soil sample pictures to match a new, more detailed, but still easy to understand script, so what is on Youtube remains my personal property. The entire series will eventually be available on a couple of websites, but in the meantime are distributed to interested people on dvd. As a follow-up, and for extra fees, I've been contracted to lead one-day workshops for home and school gardeners and to write and produce a booklet with the same information to be used mainly in schools that have or are planning to have school gardens.

And the rumors that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have signed on for the sequel?

Kind of cool (in a down to earth way), my man.
Everybody assumes New Media stuff is all about novels, but it's actually informational material that's really making it in the app and "extended media" markets.

If you look through that section of Youtube you'll see enough material to get a pretty damned good education in agronomy, plant science, just about everything you need to know about agriculture. But the tag line in each of the videos in the series is that the only way to really understand the subject is to go 'Digging in the Dirt', which is the title of the series.

I have suggested a second series on animal husbandry called 'Mucking out the Pigpen', but the idea was turned down. 'Come back with a different title,' I was told, 'and we'll discuss it.'

had


Oops, sorry. You speak broadcastese

There are two good ways of fixing the conflict in tense. One is as you suggest, changing 'have' to 'had'. For newspaper that would be the best. The second way to to leave the 'have' as is and change 'I was told' to 'I am told'. The second way preserves the immediacy, the sense of 'it's happening right now', that broadcasters love.

I've been caught out that way many times, especially when writing for newspapers. A few editors have made a fuss over it. Most just change it and go on.

I would blame it on age, the way everyone here wants to do, but keeping tense in order has been a problem from childhood. In my mind I tend to shift everything, past, present, and future, into present tense and I don't always catch it when it spills out onto the screen.

With you looking over my shoulder I'll need to be careful about keeping to a proper time framework.