If you don’t want to play, move out of the way
Posted on July 18, 2007 by Melissa Worden
Watch out reporters and photographers, future journalists set to join newsrooms full time in the next couple of years (if they stick around) are producing some nice online stories.
I’m particularly impressed with this piece by Roanoke.com’s Tim Gruber from Ohio University (his first for the paper).
Check it out:
Note: Keep in mind that Tim created his very first piece for a video class in May — of this year. (Should be inspiration to us all!)
You can watch it here.
He blogged about it and shares a few lessons learned:
No matter how steady you think you can hold the camera. You can’t.
Headphones are the key to good audio, but don’t forget to do a visual check of the audio levels on your camera.
The more you shoot the more you have to edit. If at all possible know what you’re going after coming into a story. That’s not to say go in with the story already written because the beauty of life is that it’s unscripted.
Don’t let the camera shoot for you. Turn off auto everything and do the thinking for the camera. It’ll guarantee you the results you’re after.
You can never have enough detail shots.
Depending on the pacing of your video (ie: alot of fast cuts) you better make sure you wide variety of material to work with.
A good soundtrack can help reinforce what you want your audience to feel. Care must be taken though not to abuse that power.
Tags: video
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5 Responses to “If you don’t want to play, move out of the way”
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That was a fun, well-produced video, and a nice, tight print story, too. But let’s not move me and everyone else out of the way just yet because we can’t wield a camera this stylishly.
Clown features are one thing, but the old-fashioned reporting being done by, for example, Doig and Chris Davis ’round your way isn’t going out of style anytime soon. Particularly not when it goes hand-in-hand with the new-school presentation and features of a project such as Broken Trust. As long as we’re going to call ourselves journalists, reporting skill still matters, after all.
But you still have time to learn. :)
I predict as newspapers evolve (and downsize), everyone will have to learn how to produce, edit or at least understand different forms of storytelling.
Your future competition will be old-fashioned reporters who can tell the story in a variety of ways: Print, audio, interactive graphics, databases or video.
No, they don’t all have to be clowns (the online video, that is, not the reporters). Look past the subject matter in this example and see the solid reporting and presentation.
And of course, reporting skills matter. I’m not suggesting otherwise. I wrote two posts awhile back about how it all comes down to journalism. (Read them here and here.)
Yeah, lots of time. I am only 29, after all!
Bring those punks on, I say. I might not be all that handy with a camera, but, to steal a word from Will, my journerdist kung fu is pretty respectable otherwise.
I’m not actually suggesting that our future looks any different from the picture you paint, nor that hiring multimedia skills means sacrificing traditional abilities. But my fear is that less thoughtful editors and executives will head down this road out of panic, rather than a true comprehension, or at least vision, of where we’re heading. In that case, those unfortunately led newsrooms just might find themselves sacrificing journalism for storytelling.
Tim told a cute story and gave good advice.
[…] in Sarasota, FL, recently used my clown video to highlight an important point on her blog. In a post titled: If you don’t want to play, move out of the way, she […]