“The reason it didn’t succeed was not for poor training. The training was very good. I wouldn’t be a multimedia journalism professor today without that first workshop from Lane and Harvey. They did a fine job, and taught us all of the best practices for video journalism.

But after Lane and Harvey packed up and left my newspaper, the message got muddled. It wasn’t a conscious muddling; more of a gradual decline. One photographer let go here, a writer there. Soon, all we had time for was run-and-gun junk.?”

Ahmad also wrote that only 5 to 10 Gannett papers stuck with video, and I happen to be working for one of those. Why does video work here when it has proven unsuccessful elsewhere. For starters, it doesn’t hurt that there is no Delaware-based television station. Aside from that though (because I run into news crews from Philly and Maryland all of the time), I think we do a good job of recognizing what videos play well and focusing on those. Sports, crime and weather … Those have always been the bread and butter of our video offerings and they continue to be what we push. That’s not to say that we don’t give 100% to in-depth reporting that we assume won’t get the type of traffic that it deserves. My own sleep-deprived face following two three-day investigative series (along with Hurricane Irene coverage) serves as proof that we focus on what we should be covering as well.

The mistake that photographers make most often when shooting video is that they try to be filmmakers. I hate to break it to you, but 99.99% of the time, you are a news videographer. Ahmad writes that “even the best editors spend about one hour on a polished minute of video.” Other photographers complain of spending hours to days editing and exporting a video piece. We can turn a crime video around in fifteen minutes, twenty if it needs a voiceover. During our hurricane coverage, I turned out ten videos in three days while editing on a laptop and sending through a cell phone.

We aren’t doing any Vincent Laforet stuff here, we are recording a scene and getting interviews, then turning around and laying that interview down and putting the b-roll over it. Working on a project for three days should serve as a sign that you need practice, not that the task itself is impossible. This seems to be most frustrating to photographers because the amount of post-production with their photographs is usually nowhere near the amount of work needed to edit a video (as opposed to writers, who perhaps are more used to sitting down after the fact and spending time crafting a piece).

Of course, video will always be better if shot and produced by someone whose sole job was to focus on that. When I shoot both stills and video (which has become more and more frequent) one or the other suffers … but the more you do both, the easier it is to recognize which moments are best suited for which medium. In the end, it is about meeting readers’ needs and expectations. As Miami Herald Managing Editor Rick Hirsch said in this Poynter article on video traffic, “This isn’t rocket science, but do video on the things that people come to your site for,” he said by phone. “You may think, ‘This would be a really great thing to do video on,’ but if it’s not on a topic or area where people are already consuming content, then it’s going to be hard to draw an audience.”

For what it’s worth, our highest video last year had just under 14,000 plays. This year, we have nine videos with play totals higher than that, with the most viewed having just under 100,000 plays in Brightcove. If you take into account Youtube plays, our most viewed video of this year has just over 500,000 views.

Rhythmic Motion Typography

My friend Shaminder is convinced that this is overdone, but I still enjoy the effect. You’ve seen it in everything from Ford commercials to the initial Cee Lo Green F*ck You music video (not to be confused with Skee-lo).

Animated homage to Bruce Lee

An extension of the previous tutorial, this one includes additional animation and camera moves along with the kinetic typography.

Cinematic opening title

This tutorial shows you how to utilize scripts in After Effects to pair an effect with some external file or database to create an interesting 3D fly-through effect. It could be paired with something as mundane as text from a speech, or perhaps graduating seniors and their senior quotes, or something as serious as a list of casualties from Iraq. Koci used it to great effect in his Interrupted Lives piece on Iran (the effect is just about 1:00 in).

Dynamic Bar Graphs

This one seems straightforward enough … You could use it to add a little interest/graphics to an issue story filled with numbers.

Map your destination

This tutorial has arrows jumping from point to point as you move along in your travels. I’m not sure just what I would use it for yet, but hopefully you have a story that it would be useful in. Similar to this is the Trim paths tutorial, that features an animated red dashed line instead of arrows.

Motion tracking your golf swing

I doubt you are going to be filming a golf video anytime soon, but motion tracking comes in handy for a number of things, from effects like this (if you were profiling an athlete for an all-state prep sports feature) to using it for image stabilization.

Twixtor faux-slow motion tutorial

Twixtor (a $300 plugin for After Effects) takes video shot at 60fps and slows it down to 1000 or even 2000 fps. The tutorial gives some guidelines on how best to shoot prior to importing into After Effects, and then what settings are recommended once you are using the plugin. There also exists a built-in plugin called Time Warp, though I read that its algorithms are not as sophisticated and result in more artifacting when video is slowed down.

Endlessly zoom into your own Droste Effect

This one just seems fun.

Bend flash video in After Effects

This tutorial shows you how to take a flash video and bend it around the geometry of an object that you have in a background photo. I could imagine using something like this if I was trying to build out a landing page and had some sort of looping intro video that I wanted to appear integrated into the scene.

Virtual 3D Photos

This tutorial reminds me of the sort of movements seen in the RJD2 music video for 1976 on MediaStorm … or perhaps of those NBA Where Amazing Happens commercials. It involves cutting up a still image into different layers and having them move at different speeds in relation to each other.

I like to think that video is one of the things that we do well at The News Journal. From what I’m told, we are among the top fifteen for video plays among Gannett properties (90+ daily newspapers and 23 television stations) and among the top five when comparing newspapers alone. Back when Gannett papers first started to shoot video, the company purchased video kits in bulk to equip all of their papers. I am not sure exactly when this happened, but I did use the kit back in 2007 when I was interning at the St. Cloud Times.

Fast forward four years and the Sony HVR A1U I currently use is a Frankenstein amalgamation of parts from fallen A1U’s. You can imagine how I felt when I heard that we may soon be ordering replacements to the trusty A1U. Initially, I thought that what we ordered as a replacement would be a no-brainer. As a still photographer, I obviously wanted an HDSLR. I wanted the low-light performance, the vibrant color and, of course, the shallow depth-of-field. It was around this time that I bought a 7D to use for some of my projects at work. Six months of HDSLR use later, and I’m honestly not sure I would recommend purchasing HDSLR’s to replace our A1U’s.

That is not to say that my 7D is without merit. It is an amazing camera. The color is great, the image is sharper than anything I will ever get out of an A1U and there is nothing quite like attaching a 300mm 2.8 lens and shooting video. With the 7D, I am a much more versatile journalist. If I am shooting both stills and video, I can do so with one less piece of equipment. If I am using the A1U, I can use my 7D as a second camera to record cutaways while also shooting stills. Even when I am only shooting video, still screengrabs from the 7D video can be used in the newspaper and are virtually indistinguishable from a still image.

If newspapers cared only about producing beautiful, cinematic pieces, choosing what to purchase wouldn’t be a choice at all. The reality is, newspapers care about numbers and money. According to the numbers, our video traffic is driven by breaking news and high school sports. When shooting breaking news, the A1U can be operated with one hand, leaving my other hand free to hold a stick mic for interviews. For sports, The A1U’s auto focus lets me follow a play if it moves down the field, approaches me or moves away from me. And for both news and sports, the A1U’s 10x zoom allows me to cover the focal range of at least two lenses if I were shooting with my 7D. It would be impossible for me to shoot a long drive at a football game without missing the running back if he ran down the sideline I was shooting on, or to go from a shot of traffic backed up to a wide shot of an accident using my 7D (not to mention trying to zoom smoothly without a rig and a follow focus). As for the money, purchasing a Rebel T3 with a kit lens sounds great at $500 – $600 (we upload our video at 720p already). However, considering that we couldn’t repair a 70-200 until it literally broke in half, I’m not sure how many new ones we would be able to purchase to go along with the T3′s (and it definitely isn’t as effective on a day to day basis with only an 18-55 3.5-5.6).

Could not have been shot with my 7D:

In the end, an HD camcorder makes sense for the types of stories that drive the most traffic at our paper, though I do think that we should have one or two HDSLR’s available when shooting longer projects and feature stories.

50 Who Matter is a series that we do twice a month that profiles someone working to improve their community. Despite its recurring nature, we typically shoot it all in one day. In this instance, I was given two days to shoot, and I think it made a huge difference. Initially, it was going to be like most other 50 Who Matter’s … shoot interviews and whatever broll I can get in an our or two, and then scrounge for additional broll using archive footage. I wasn’t going to shoot any broll at the all-star game because it was on a Saturday, and we prefer to have everything done by Friday (video publishes on Sunday). In order to assuage the fears of my editors, I put together a version on Friday that could go up if I didn’t have to to re-edit for some reason on Saturday. Having completed my interviews during media day for the high school football all-star game, I had a better sense of what scenes I needed to shoot the day of the game and had everything I needed before the start of the game.

As it is the Fourth of July, I thought it only appropriate to share some relevant videos. The fireworks video was the second of two assignments that I had within an hour of each other, both of which required photos and video (something that is happening with increasing frequency these days).

Going in to the assignment, my editor was hoping that I would just grab some scene shots and interview a bunch of fans in a manner similar to a piece I did with fans tailgating during last year’s World Series. I had plans to try something new, and luckily I am, for the most part, given the freedom to do pretty much as I please (in regards to trying new forms of storytelling).

At first, I thought I would do some form of timelapse … perhaps shoot fans going through turnstiles, players on the field, seats filling and emptying, etc. However, after hearing that one of our photographers AND a photographer from Cherry Hill (a neighboring Gannett paper) would be doing that same exact thing, I decided to go the opposite way and experiment with slowing down time instead of speeding it up.

While there are some definite issues in some of the shots (athletes were moving too fast and I tried to slow them down too much) I do hope to use the effect for future profiles on local athletes. And next time, I will avoid hand-holding a 300 …

Just over a week ago, the Delaware Department of Transportation went out to the Radnor Green neighborhood in Claymont and began removing basketball hoops that were planted in the parkway facing the street. Apparently, a resident in the neighborhood lodged a complaint after his car was hit by an errant basketball, and the hoops were found to be in violation of a 2005 “clear zone” law that requires the area adjacent to pavements in residential developments to be free of obstructions such as basketball hoops and bushes.

One resident apparently was not having any of it, and climbed her basketball pole in protest, causing DelDOT and the police presence that arrived in response to leave one pole shy of their goal. The photographer on scene shot some great photos of her pole protest, but we did not have a staff videographer on site (though a freelancer did arrive later and shoot an interview).

I strolled into the office three hours later and was told to head back out, see if any state troopers were still around and basically feel out the situation. Not knowing exactly what the freelancer shot, I thought I would conduct an interview just to cover my bases (after all, there must have been some reason they sent me back out). As luck would have it, the Delaware State Police and DelDOT returned to retrieve the last pole during the middle of my interview, affording me the chance to film the drama as it unfolded.

While I’m sure the video would have gotten some play on Libertarian sites just because of the general theme of government taking away from private citizens, the video because a plain-clothed officer informed the homeowner he could keep his basketball hoop one minute, and then seemingly did a 180, telling him that it would be taken away the next.

The story hit the frontpage of Reddit two times, was listed on Youtube’s main page and was featured on a few prominent national blogs. Of course, as with any news organization, the first thing some editors thought was, “How can we capitalize on/emulate this?” Whenever something brings in a large amount of traffic, even if it is a one off, it becomes the next hot thing and everyone tries to recreate the same numbers. In St. Cloud, they found success in posting photo galleries from parades and graduations, and we would bend over backwards to ensure that not a single one went uncovered. In Des Moines, prom season was especially hectic and you could always find a Metromix gallery on the frontpage.

At The News Journal, the video’s initial success meant that Mr. McCafferty was our life for the next week. From following him to a meeting with the state police, to accompanying him to pick up his hoop. I will admit, while we did have our doubts as we waited outside of the New Castle County Public Works building for over an hour just to talk to Mr. McCafferty about filing a complaint, the story and accompanying video did generate far more page views than other daily content.

Lessons learned:

• Keep shooting (if it helps, turn off your tally light)
• Don’t underestimate the power of social sites such as Reddit and YouTube (far more views came from these two sources than any other … I’m still surprised more news sites don’t regularly submit things to Reddit. It’s not like this is a new phenomena, Digg has come and gone and Slashdot before it)
• Arrive early and stay late (It was always taught to me in j-school, yet I am constantly surprised at how many journalists show up late to assignments)
• If something works, be prepared for someone to try and milk it

While there have been both pros and cons to switching from the Sony HVR-A1U to the 7D, I have been mostly satisfied. Shooting with the 7D allows for a much shallower depth of field and better image quality in general and especially in low light. Also, because the 7D is a still camera, I feel as though people are less threatened by it. They don’t immediately assume that I am filming, especially if I am holding it at hip level. In comparison, when I shoot with the HVR-A1U, it is more easily recognized as a video camera, and I will often be asked not to shoot. The Sony remains superior in regards to audio controls and is still my go-to camera when shooting sports such as football where I need a reliable autofocus and the ability to zoom far down field.

I also enjoy shooting with the 7D because it allows me to stay at least partially connected with photography. I may not be shooting for the paper, but I can still switch out of video mode and grab a few stills if I see something worth capturing.

Mary Hampson

Mary Hampson was unique for many reasons, the most obvious being her age. Most of the people we feature in the 50 Who Matter series are middle-aged, but Hampson began volunteering with the Freedom Outreach program at 17, and became its director at 21. She is also unique because she works directly in areas that are often skeptical of people from outside the community. One such area is Southbridge, which we focused on during a project on poverty and crime. Mary has been more than welcomed into Southbridge and Riverside, she is practically a member of everyone’s family. She checks up on schoolwork, knows when family members are in the hospital, drives kids to and from basketball practice and bakes and delivers over 100 birthday cakes a year.

Dolores Finger Wright

Dolores Finger Wright is an associate professor of social work at Delaware State University. Back when Ms. Finger Wright was attending Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., she helped to plan and organize the Greensboro sit-ins which were a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement. In speaking with her she reminded me of how different life was for her growing up as compared to the youth today, and explained how she tries to instill the same passion for social change in her students today that she had as a college student.

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First Day at School:

The Paper Airplane Guy Visits Green School:

Melaspas Blessing Ceremony for Green School: