This post was written for an internal blog that I have been keeping for my work and was written for reporters with no video experience:
We all know the basics of what goes into a typical tv news piece:
Interview and/or voice over narration
Lots and lots of b-roll (footage to lay over interviews/narration)
Establishing shot
Medium shot
Detail shots (anything to do with hands, eyes, mouths talking, etc)
Some general rules of thumb for shooting (Again, these are just rules of thumb, and rules are made to be broken once you have a grasp of them):
Use a tripod. Given the small size of our video camera, camera-shake while hand holding is almost guaranteed. Film your interview, establishing and medium shots and some details with the camera on the tripod. No one wants to feel like they are watching the Blair Witch Project. I can barely watch this video by ESPNwith commentators Michael Wilbon and Jon Barry (Apparently the video was so bad, they took it down)
Take the camera off of the tripod. I know I just told you to keep it on the tripod. And you should, to gather all of the basic elements of your piece. For a photographer, this is similar to grabbing the shots you know will work in print. For reporters, I imagine it is getting the who, what, where, when and why in a story. Once that is done, you are free to get creative and find that well-composed shot.
Change your angles. This applies mostly to when you take the camera off of the tripod. Place it up high, down low, frame your subject by shooting through something. Move back, get close. Try and avoid shooting from the same distance at the same height for each clip.
When interviewing, control is key. As we discussed last week during the audio gathering training, you want to have control over your environment when conducting interviews. In the case of video interviews, whenever possible, you want both good sound and good light. Just as in audio gathering, this means moving your subject to a quiet location. As for light, window light works well indoors, shade outdoors.
Avoid unnecessary zooming, panning and tilting. The most common culprit is the zoom while filming.
Keep your shots static. Related to the last item, compose your shot as if you were taking a still photograph. Let your subject walk into and out of the frame, rather than following him/her around.
Storyboard your video ahead of time. Just as you have a list of questions you plan to ask before heading in to an interview, you should have a sense of what shots you want before you start filming. This will be a great help when you are back in the office editing, which is the real time-intensive part of video production. Having to sort through and make clips of five to 10 minutes of footage is far easier than 30 minutes of footage.
Some video examples:
One of my favorite multimedia producers. Katy Newton, and her husband Sean Connelly used to work up in the Bay Area. This ongoing multimedia piece features profiles of people that Katy finds on the Missed Connections area of Craigslist. They also have done a great package for the Oakland Tribune called Not Just a Number, which puts a name, face and, at times, a story, to all of the murders that happen in Oakland and the surrounding area. It is an amazing piece as well.
This post was written for an internal blog that I have been keeping for my work:
Here is a recap of our first multimedia training session, which focused on audio gathering and editing:
Though video is important, it is not the revenue generating magic bullet that many made it out to be a few years ago. Also, we only have one video camera as compared to three audio recorders and four cameras. That said, whenever possible, we will be deciding what media to use based on what best suits the story being told.
Control is key. You want as much control over the conditions in which you gather audio as possible. Good sound in = good sound out.
Be aware of surrounding noise when conducting interviews. Alter your location or move if it is too noisy.
Do not be afraid to
Turn off computers
Unplug refrigerators
Turn off lights, especially large banks of fluorescent lights
MOVE
When outdoors, consider shielding yourself from the wind by:
Hiding between buildings
going into your car
using your body to block the wind
going inside
Audio gathering is more than just conducting an interview
You want your audio piece to be strong enough to stand on its own without any visuals or print accompaniment.
Gather interviews, ambient sound and detail sounds
Interviews – Watch your levels and hold the mic approx. 4 inches from subject. Yes, that is close, but subjects will understand that you are doing your job and trying to make them sound as good as possible. Have your subject say the question in the answer and avoid yes or no questions.
Ambient – Turn recorder on at location and record 30 seconds to one minute of sound from the environment. This will serve as the base for your audio project.
Detail sounds – Often overlooked, these include things like typing on a keyboard, a coach yelling, shoes squeaking, etc.
Examples – From traditional to artistic, a few examples to get your creativity flowing and expand what you may think of as newspaper multimedia.
The best way to learn how to both gather and edit audio is to do it. Luckily for you, two of your coworkers were nice enough to gather sample audio and images today in order to practice editing in Final Cut Express. These files, and other sample files, will be available online in the next day for you to experiment with.
I don’t know why I like doing these horizontal scrollers so much, but here is another one (still have some art left to add). I found out yesterday that they were doing a sports tab to preview the upcoming winter sports and thought, again, that this would be an easy way to aggregate all of this disparate content (each preview goes to a specific area page on our high school sports site) in one place. I could definitely use more art and probably more stats such as last season’s record, coach, returning players, etc.
The past few days have seen me try to learn as much as I can about creating custom maps as possible. There are plenty of ways to go, from the simple My Maps, to more elaborate, yet still code-free sites, such as ZeeMaps, Wayfaring and Platial, all the way to learning to manage your own databases and work with the Google Maps API. This is my first attempt at a user-populated map, which would potentially feature garage sales in Garden City, Kansas.
Below, you will find a map I created on mapalist.com, which I have since linked to a spreadsheet. It is set to update automatically, though I do not know how often it refreshes. Currently, the balloons on the map vary depending upon the date. I only wish you had the option of turning various dates on or off while browsing the map. It ain’t pretty, but it’s a start.
