MNPW: How good video works

Posted on August 17, 2007

Julie Jones, award-winning television journalist and doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, talked about what makes good video in her “Visual Grammar” discussion Thursday at the Multimedia News Producers Workshop in Minneapolis.

Here are some notes I took from her presentation:

We publish moving images because it makes the reader feel something, pulls the reader into your story, is enjoyable and helps the reader remember a situation.

OK, so how do we do this?

We need to mimic how the eye/brain works. Basically, the human eye looks at the world for information. Our eye may scan the world, but our brain looks for information. So when we do this in video editing, we need to break down the scenes for the viewer and act as the eye/brain does.

This is why pans and zooms are BAD. They aren’t how the eye works. In real life, while watching two people talk, we don’t pan the scene from one person to the next. Our eye jumps back and forth. And we don’t suddenly run across the room to get a closer work (a zoom). Only use them in special situations when you have a clear reason for doing so — ie, when you know you’re breaking the rules and why.

Here are five tips for shooting good video:

1. Think in shots — wide, medium, tight, super tight

This gives the viewer a variety of scenes and a variety of intimacy within those scenes. Wide can be an establishing shot, medium gives more detail, tight brings the viewer into the subject’s personal space, and super tight allows for detail/accents shots.

2. Shoot and move

In a video, we’re trying show little sentences that convey information; we call these sequences (two or more shots of the same action — but they shouldn’t be from the same place).

You shoot sequences with:
>> Cooperation: understanding what will happen when (talk to your subject to learn about the story and to make landmarks in your mind of where you want to be when)
>> Repetition: looking for overlapping action
>> Anticipation: knowing what is coming next

3. An action creates a reaction

When you shoot something that has an action (ie, the flip of a switch), make sure you get the reaction (the TV turns on).

4. Cutaways.

The little details that cut away from the action, within the context of the same action. They will help you get around

5. Enter frame, enter frame, enter frame

OK, I have to admit this took me too long to grasp (to the frustration of my classmates, I’m sure) and may take a while to perfect. But if I understand it correctly now, you always want the person you’re interviewing to enter the frame and not to exit.

So if someone’s walking toward you (imagine a politician walking down a sidewalk shaking hands), shoot while they’re walking, then stop and run ahead so you can pick them up again entering the frame. You’re going to lose the viewer when you let someone exit the frame and then enter back in again. And it’ll just help you get more material to work with if you’re always in front of the person.

And here’s some technical tips I picked up in the classroom before going out and finding out for myself (so nice of Julie to share these ahead of time):

>> Give yourself some editing cushion. Record 30 seconds to 1 minute of blank tape at the beginning and end. This will help a lot when you capture and start to edit. Why, exactly is TK when we go through it ourselves Saturday.

>> Don’t cut your shot short. You’re going to think you got enough, but you most likely won’t. So count to 10 seconds in your head for each shot.

>> Avoid a break in time code. In cheap cameras, if you power down, the time code will stop, there will be noise, and the time code will power back up; when you bring something in and batch capture, you could possibly overwrite your content.

>> Don’t replay your video in your camera in the field It’s tempting to peek at what you shot to see if you got it. But doing so will restart your time at 0:00 (which will mess with your time code). Plus, you’ll run a chance of accidentally recording over your original tape. It’s just easier to wait until you get back at your computer.

>> Headphones. You wear them for your audio recorder. You have to wear them for video. Just get over feeling like you look like a dork. No one really cares.

>> Screen direction. Keep what you’re shooting in the same direction — the noses know. For example, when you’re shooting a conversation between two people, they should stay in the same place in space (aka, axis line, 180 degree rule). Don’t shoot on one side of the axis line and then cut to the other side so that they’re now facing in opposite directions. You’re going to confuse your viewer.

>> More tips from Jones.

Here are a couple of takeaways from our discussions during the lesson:

>> Natural sound pieces are the toughest thing to tell. And newspaper Web sites seem to be taking ownership of this form. I’ve heard several times: “We HAVE to have the person we’re interviewing tell the story.” But do we ALWAYS have to do a nat sound piece? Are we locking ourselves into only one form of online storytelling?

>> Starting as a photographer in video storytelling isn’t necessarily an advantage. Writing teaches you structure, and the video demands a structure to begin with.

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MNPW: Why multimedia?

Posted on August 17, 2007

Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, kicked off the Multimedia News Producers Workshop by talking about why exactly we publish multimedia.

Here are some of my notes from her presentation:

“Multimedia storytelling is another way to build understanding between neighbors at a time when we often notice our differences more than our similarities — Sunnyvale, CA City Council minutes“

So why do we create multimedia?

Well, there’s a few reasons why we’re doing it right now:

>> More people than ever have access to broadband
>> YouTube has made video sharing possible
>> Sites such as Blinkx are going YouTube in their video sharing
>> Evidence shows that the audience wants it, so therefore, rich media has become part of the business model.

But that doesn’t mean we haven’t had or aren’t still encountering hurdles:

>> Newspapers loathe to support R&D. Only in the late ’90s was attention paid to how we can recraft our product
>> DotCom bust also burst the excitement around multimedia
>> Because newspapers operate as an assembly line, it’s been difficult to create a multimedia production environment (a better model is the TV newsroom — all positions work on the newscast — get better explainer on this!)
>> Newsroom culture is so difficult to change. Studies show that the newsroom is like the military and healthcare. All are like triage operations and very difficult to introduce change.
>> The lack of training in news skills (this is a benefit of multimedia — more training and more money is being spent now)

What is multimedia?
This is difficult to answer because it’s hard to define. The range of multimedia terms is so indistinct. For example:

>>TV has defined pieces, ie., b-roll, nat sounds, feed, voice over
>>Print has defined pieces, ie., headline, column, byline, cutline
>> Online, not so much. One may call it interactive, another non-linear, another multimedia. These aren’t commonly defined terms.

The elements of digital storymaking, a project by the Institute for New Media, tries to define multimedia by creating a taxonomy, analyzing projects and measuring the effects digital stories have on users. You can view a .pdf with more information here.

Definitions are so important

Newsrooms are finally paying attention to multimedia — but if we don’t have a clear, shared definition of multimedia, we won’t know when we’ve hit on an answer: Is it to drive traffic, inform our communities, do kick-ass interactives to win contests? What is the point of the game?

Not until we’re clear on this definition will we know who/how many we need, what are the rules, how will we know when/if we’ve won?

Here’s how Paul categorizes what’s being done now with multimedia:

>> How is it displayed? Are all the pieces thrown on the page? (Paul calls this ghetto-ized)
>> Multiple-media vs. multimedia Paul defines mutliple-media as story-level ghetto-ization — ie, sptimes.com’s Wetlands special report, whereas multimedia has parts woven together where if you take one piece out, it unravels — ie, washingtonpost.com’s The Women of Kabul
>> The display is the thing (ie, Kansas.com’s On Gossamer Wings)

Paul closed her presentation telling us about how a photographer with still, video, audio skills takes his still and video camera with him out in the field. He defines his position outside the profession as a photographer; inside the profession as a multimedia news producer.

That gave me goosebumps. For years I’ve defended my job as an online producer/editor as being a journalist, too. Now they are defining their jobs with my title. Love it.

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‘Learners inherit the earth’

Posted on August 16, 2007

Today was day one at the Multimedia News Producers Workshop at the University of Minnesota. More to come on what I’m learning.

But here’s today’s quote of the day from Nora Paul’s presentation:

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to work in a world that no longer exists.” — Eric Hoffer

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Good reads for 08.12.07

Posted on August 12, 2007

>> Is the future of TV-watching online? Not yet, says Jennifer Woodard Maderazo.

I like TV as it happens. When I’m away from the U.S. I like to catch ABC World News on iTunes. But only when I’m away, because I prefer to see nightly news live rather than several hours later. The real-time factor is another reason why I prefer traditional television to online, and why for me ‘real’ TV won’t be going away anytime soon.

>> When a talking-head style works. Angela Grant showcases a video about a woman who is dying of lung cancer, published as a weekly video blog on The Oregonian’s Web site (love the design of these blog pages).

>> “Cheesy effects to beautifully designed typefaces”: Danny Sanchez has found a list of 80 Photoshop text tutorials, and a few more tips to share.

>> “So which typefaces are ‘bulletproof’?”: Not to be outdone, I’ve found a list of 80 gorgeous typefaces for professional design. :)

>> The BBC is taking it’s multimedia storytelling to the U.S. For their project “¿Hablas español?”, Jose Baig, Hispanic affairs correspondent, and BBC MundoCarlos Ceresole, a video producer for the Spanish American section of the BBC, will be traveling from St Augustine, Fa., to Los Angeles and visiting 12 cities along the way to see what it’s like to cross the country without speaking English.

They plan to use Flckr, Skype, Facebook, a blog and the radio to tell their story. The final product will probably be similar to Bob Hammersley’s Turkey journey.

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Sony’s flexible full-color paper screen

Posted on August 12, 2007

You could also call it e-paper, which could someday revolutionize how we receive our daily “print” newspaper. (Link via Editor’s Weblog; video with narration found via a YouTube search)

Details from the video:

Sony researchers have developed a full-color flexible plastic display that shows video. The 2.5-inch screen supports 16.8 million colors at a 120 x 160 pixel resolution. It’s an OLED (organic light-emitting diode display); the pixels produce their own light, which enables the screen to use less power and can be made thinner.

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LA homicides in 2007

Posted on August 12, 2007

Los Angeles has endured it’s share of violence. Seriously, it’s a tough city whose paper has to devote a daily blog to homicides, which is turning out to be an effective way of presenting their story that’s too big to fit in print.

The list represents an effort to provide comprehensive coverage of all homicides that occur in Los Angeles County. Overwhelmed by the sheer volume, the Los Angeles Times, like other major media organizations, covers only a fraction of the more than 1,000 murders in Los Angeles County each year. Many violent deaths become, in essence, private homicides — catastrophic on a small scale, invisible on a broader one.

Recently, they added an interactive map to better visually tell the story. The Baltimore Sun put together a similar map last month, but the Times’ version shows what you can do by adding more resources to the presentation.

The Times has integrated theirs with a bar graphic, photos, reader comments, a list of the deceased, and a search box. This is really impressive. I particularly like the photos and ability to leave comments. The editors have taken a stat-heavy, impersonal presentation (the map alone) and instantly have created an emotional link with the reader.

Here’s a sample comment posted by J.Henn that illustrates best what I mean:

Being a former LAPD officer I’ve been to more homicide scenes than I care to count. But seeing all these PEOPLE murdered is quite shocking,all these lives taken in a few short weeks. All these victims families devastated, in the blink of an eye. GOD bless the Victims and their Loved ones, and take vengeance on the ignorant murderers.

Another thing I like about this interactive: Readers can access the information in many ways, without the whole package seeming too repetitive. You can sort by date and then filter that information by age/ethnicity/gender/etc. Or you can search on your own. Once you get your data, you can click on the map and get the information. Or you can click on the name from a list.

Credits: Jill Leovy, a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes the blog. I don’t know if she created the interactive, too. No credits are listed on that page.

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Tooting my own horn

Posted on August 8, 2007

I finally created a portfolio page, if anyone wants to take a peek.

The WordPress app has a quirk and won’t let me embed .swfs, so you might run into a dead link. But I’m working on fixing that.

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Good reads for 08.06.07

Posted on August 6, 2007

>> Photo podcasts from washingtonpost.com. Says wp.com: “Our newest podcast features some of the best photo and audio slideshows on our site.”

LOVE this idea.

>> Smashing Magazine takes a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.

Be sure to take a look because there’s some way cool stuff in here, including this 2007 Web Trend map, which shows “the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.”

>> Paul Bradshaw offers recent graduates a 5-step plan to getting a journalism job.

1. Get a job.
2. Get a blog.
3. Get involved.
4. Get a good mobile phone.
5. Get an eye for news.

>> Seems that 5 is the “it” number. Laura Ruel and Nora Paul offer 5 steps for testing your multimedia news packages.

Here’s what you need to do:

>> recruit FIVE people
>> set aside FIVE hours (that’s total time, start to finish)
>> follow the FIVE steps described below.

Step 1: Determine tasks to test
Step 2: Experimental design
Step 3: Develop questions
Step 4: Gather data
Step 5: Analyze data and make list of potential improvements

>> Mindy McAdams says her Travel Channel Academy was an excellent experience and explains how the TC’s strategy to educate TJs (travel journalists) connects to the newspaper business (read more about this from TJ teacher Michael Rosenblum):

Journalism is a child of the printing press (Rosenblum spiels the same schtick as I do about Gutenberg), even though news was spread by mouth and by drum for centuries before metal types were cast in Germany. As we move out of the age of printed texts and deeper into the digital era, journalism will not necessarily come loping along beside us. Adjustments must be made.

The Travel Channel is adjusting itself to the new marketplace. Is journalism adjusting in the same proactive way, looking for new talent and offering opportunities to new people?

>> Vin Crosbie, however, isn’t sold on the future of video. In his response to Business Week columnist Jon Fine’s recent article, When Do You Stop The Presses? he says:

These presumptions ignore the fact that newspaper readerships have been declining for more than 30 years and that approximately half of those declines occured before the Internet was opened to the public or the public had any online access. Shouldn’t that give publishers a hint that the major cause of their readerships’ declines isn’t the Internet or their content not being online?

And is adding video and audio to that content (so-called ‘multimedia’) going to reverse those declines? Consider that television station’s news viewerships have been declining for more than 20 years and that radio station’s news listenerships have been declining for even longer. Do you think that if radio or television stations add newspaper-like texts to their own websites that this will reverse the declines in their viewerships or listenerships? So, why do publishers think that newspapers adding video and audio to their own texts online will reverse newspapers’ declines in readerships? Adding together two or more declining media do not an ascending new-media make.

The real problem, Mr. Newspaperman, isn’t that your content isn’t online or isn’t online with multimedia. It’s your content. Specifically, it’s what you report, which stories you publish, and how you publish them to people, who, by the way, have very different individual interests. The problem is the content you’re giving them, stupid; not the platform its on.

(link via David Black)

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Photojournalism turns HD

Posted on August 5, 2007

An interesting magazine crossed my desk this week: The premier (May/June 2007) issue of “HDVideoPro,” a magazine about high-definition technology.

In it are equipment spotlights and reviews (small HD cameras, tripods and lighting) and features about Web video, the difference between interlaced and progressive scanning, an explainer on recording formats and an interview with David Leeson of the Dallas Morning News on how he uses a video camera to capture BOTH moving and still images. (Note: Richard Koci Hernandez does this at his paper, the Mercury News, too; and in doing a Web search, I found that Hernandez also wrote about this magazine a few months ago and highlighted this story by Leeson on Sports Shooter.)

Leeson, winner of an Edward R. Murrow Award, a National Headliners Award and a regional Emmy for best television documentary, is a leader in video storytelling. He has been shooting video for the newspaper since 2000, developing a new methodology that is rooted in how still photographers work.

“Let’s throw out the idea of what we think video is and let’s begin to think about what it is when it’s in the hands of a photojournalist,” says Leeson. “Think of the vast amount of resources available to us at that point. We don’t have to retrain people in what they think.”

Change can be difficult and scary for some. Are photographers ready to leave their still cameras at the office?

Says Leeson: “Remember when we went from black-and-white to color? I remember thinking, what am I going to do with color? I never had to deal with color before. I thought about it and realized that color was simply an additional layer of information. Black-and-white is the basic information, then here comes color, which gives us more information; now we know that’s a green sweater a person is wearing rather than a blue sweater.

“I began to look at the video camera as providing two additional layers of information: motion and sound. And that’s all it was, a camera that, in addition to everything else, can give us motion and sound.”

Leeson’s son also works at the Dallas Morning News, and he developed a process that will allow the paper to take frame grabs from the HD cameras that can run five or six columns. Here’s how, as described in the HDVideoPro article:

1. Find the frame to capture in your video editing software.
2. Increase the size of the edit window, filling up the monitor.
3. Take a screen grab of the enlarged window.
4. Open Photoshop, paste your screen grab and flatten and crop the image.
5. Enlarge the image to 30 inches wide and 600 ppi.
6. Resize the image to a normal size at 203 ppi.
7. Process photo as you would a still in Photoshop.

But Leeson maintains moving from still to video cameras will not signal the end of traditional print photography.

“Still photographs will be with us forever — video doesn’t replace the still photograph — but the demand upon still photographers, especially at newspapers, is to produce video and still at the same time. we must keep in mind that if you don’t approach video with the eyes of a still photojournalist, looking for and recording those decisive moments, how are you going to pull a frame from that video that’s going to have that moment in it to provide a great still photograph?”

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We’ve come a long way, baby

Posted on August 4, 2007

This circa 1950 film, “Your Life Work Series: Journalism,” reminds us that we have come along way not just in what we do, but who does it. The narrator in the video states:

“Women find it difficult to compete with men in general reporting jobs. So girls who want to be successful in journalism should prepare for work in the special women’s departments.

“Home decoration, childcare, gardening, and household hints are found in the homemaking section, a department handled by women.

“Also included are cookery, meal-planning suggestions, menus, recipes and attractive ways of arranging the table. Work in fashion, beauty care and merchandise reporting, affords further opportunities, almost exclusively for women.”

Opportunities for women seem much better nowadays, but a 2006 census by the ASNE shows that the number of women in the industry is up only slightly.

“Women outnumber men in entry-level jobs. But when it comes to the prestige beats, the assigning editor ranks, the department heads and upper management, the scales tip back toward the men,” says Pam Moreland, assistant managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News and former president of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

“The larger the newspaper, the likelihood is that you will find male publishers, male executive editors, possibly a woman managing editor, two or three women in the deputy or assistant managing editor ranks, and two or three women department heads. Progress when compared to 30 years ago? You bet. Progress when compared to five years ago? A bit.”

But one place where we seem to be coming full circle: 1950’s “country publisher” is becoming today’s “backpack journalist.” The film’s narrator says:

“In fact he has to know and be able to do a great many things which can be learned only through actual experience … all this knowledge and experience seems a great deal to ask of one man, but he leads a happy life.”

Sound familiar?