Here's a new opportunity for videojournalists to critique each other's work. Spokesman-Review multimedia guru Colin Mulvany has launched a Website that enables his colleagues throughout the industry to get feedback on their projects from "expert visual storytellers."
It's called Finding the Frame, and Mulvany envisions it will become "a gathering spot where multimedia journalists can receive feedback on their videos, audio slideshows and multimedia projects from industry professionals and fellow visual journalists."
The plan is to have onboard as many “expert” volunteers as possible that have solid foundations in video storytelling, audio slide shows or Flash projects. This pool of reviewers will peruse the submitted links of multimedia in the “Story Pool”. If they decide to comment on a story, it will then become public on the Finding the Frame home page where anyone else is free to give added feedback.
So why do this?
While most publications have driven head first into the online world, multimedia storytelling is still in its infancy at many newspapers. Unfortunately, not all people tasked with producing multimedia received adequate training or had the financial ability to attend a multimedia storytelling workshop. Many multimedia producers are self-taught, having picked up bit and pieces of knowledge along the way. Many photojournalists are struggling with how to tell an effective video or audio slideshow story that is different from the traditional still picture story.
Our hope is that Finding the Frame will begin to address the need for feedback and in turn, help multimedia producers improve their storytelling. Just read some of the comments by reviewers so far--you’ll be impressed. The professionals that have signed on as reviewers are the some of the top in the industry. If they critique your story, please thank them for giving up some of their precious time to help out a fellow visual journalist.
What we need is for enough producers, multimedia editors and photojournalists who have a solid experience with multimedia storytelling to step forward and share some of their knowledge with those that are looking for constructive, honest feedback.
So far about a dozen videos have been uploaded for review, and topnotch practitioners are volunteering their services, including many whose own work has been showcased on KobreGuide.com. Among the accomplished panelists: Chuck Fadely (Miami Herald), Peter Huoppi (TheDay.com), Eric Seals (Detroit Free Press), Will Yurman (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle), and KobreGuide's very own senior editor, Kathy Strauss.
If you want to improve by learning from the best, or feel qualified to help others learn from your insights and experiences, Finding the Frame should be your next stop. Says Mulvany: "We hope over time that this will become the place where great conversations about multimedia storytelling will take place."
(Editor's Note: KobreGuide reporter Kathy Strauss spent a long weekend at the Northwest Video Advanced Workshop in Yakima, WA, and couldn't stop talking about what an amazing experience it was. So we told her to shut up and write about it already.)
Part 1: Class Notes on the Making of My Video
By Kathy Strauss
What is my story about? Who is my central character? These questions are buzzing in my brain as I record ballroom dancers at the Yakima senior center. The dance will end in 30 minutes and I’m fumbling with manual focus, manual exposure and a shotgun mic, while trying to identify one of these smiling, graceful seniors as a character to drive my story. The final song is “God Bless America.” As the 50 or so dancers link hands and form a large circle, I jump in and find a spot on the floor. Each time the group sings the chorus they move forward raising their hands above their heads, surrounding me in a tight circle – these are lovely images and I’m in heaven!
I’m on assignment during the 3-day intensive Northwest Video Advanced Workshop in Yakima, WA, and feeling the pressure to make a good story. Top notch coaches are here from throughout the northwest to help train others like me on how to improve our video storytelling.
The workshop is happening for the second time thanks to T.J. Mullinax, news producer at the Yakima Herald-Republic and Assoc. Director of the National Press Photographers Association's Region 11 chapter, along with a host of other generous volunteers. Intended to provide opportunities for journalists to adapt to a rapidly changing industry, the workshop is a multimedia “bootcamp” that offers trainings in interviewing techniques, field equipment handling, ethics, editing and video production workflow.
The 2007 workshop was a 2-day intro to video class with about 30 participants. This year a 3-day advanced class was added for journalists with prior video experience along with the 2-day intro class. The workshop was held at the Yakima H-R office and was sponsored by the NPPA, Canon, ThinkTank, Apple and Society of Professional Journalists. Best of all, the workshop was given at the remarkably affordable price of just $100.
I was struck by the diversity of students who attended this workshop. As the demand increases for newsroom staff to learn video skills it’s not just photographers attending these classes. Writers, editors and students came too. Clearly more collaboration among journalists is in our future and we need to learn to work together – staffs of newspapers, television and radio stations -- to make sure news stories are still covered fairly and accurately.
Friday Morning
Advanced class begins – just 8 of us in the class! Wow, what an incredible student-to-teacher ratio. Feel so lucky I am pinching myself.
The day starts off with a lively hours-long presentation on video storytelling by TV videographer greats: Kurt Austin of KGW in Portland, OR and Adam Tischler of King 5 in Seattle. Before the multimedia explosion and demand for news videos for the web, photojournalists almost uniformly scoffed at so-called “TV cameramen,” and their use of reporter stand-ups to tell the news. But now we are running to these experts to teach us the craft. There’s still plenty of crap on TV news, but we have much to learn from great television photographers like these two.
Tips from Kurt and Adam:
1. Sequencing – shoot everything wide, medium, tight and super tight. Remember tight shots of faces. Viewers like to look at faces, and tight shots are critical in editing. 2. Whenever you record “action” remember to also record the “reaction.” 3. While shooting, be looking for your opening and closing shots. 4. Surprise your viewers if you can - don’t reveal everything about the story at once. 5. Audio is Key: Learn proper use of microphones. (Wireless mics are a must.) 6. Make sure your interview audio is strong. Car interiors make good sound studios when out in the field. 7. Listen for natural sound “pops” or “exclamation points” to punctuate your piece. These can be a giggle, a quick “yep” or “uh oh.” 8. Think about texturing sound.
Friday, 1 p.m.
We pick our story assignments out of a hat. My assigned story isn’t actually happening until Saturday and I want to start shooting right away so, with T.J.’s approval, I find my own story. I discover the senior dance in the newspaper and rush over to record the colorful crowd. Their musical accompanist is 68-year-old accordion player Gary Malner.
I capture my video with the help of friendly, peppy Danny Gawlowski, video editor at the Seattle Times. He emphasizes how important it is to have a standard work flow. Thing is, editors have different workflow habits, so best to find one that works well for you and stick with it.
Friday, 6 p.m.
Final Cut Pro Workflow with Apple trainer Jan Shvalb
Saturday morning
Both intermediate and advanced groups together for an Ethics session led by the Olympian photographer and former NPPA president Tony Overman.
Tony says not much has changed from the world of still photography and we most importantly must tell the truth with our stories. Is the context truthful or are we changing the meaning of the story?
A core value in video is that we are compressing time and interpreting events for the viewer. Ask yourself, is it truthful? Is this what it was like at the event? Must have pictures to support your audio. Goal is to weave together a truthful representation (versus linear record) of what happened.
Saturday noon
Colin Mulvany (Spokesman-Review) asks me to define my story and describe it in one sentence. Is it about the senior dance or is it about this accordion player? He encourages me to think about telling the story with a strong character and helps me decide to catch up with Gary the accordion player again. I head out to a retail store where Gary is playing for a holiday open house. I know music is key to this story and want to record more of his playing.
It is crowded tight quarters at the shop Fiddlesticks but as he strolls around I am able to shoot video of this playful guy while he interacts with customers. People love his music and it shows. I keep asking myself how I would work these two different scenarios into once coherent video. I hadn’t known Gary would be the center of my video when I was at the senior center. What else do I need to ask him and what else do I need to show?
Saturday, 2 p.m.
Audio session with Anna King of NPR – I miss most of this because I was shooting my story but catch some tidbits at the end during open discussion.
1. In general, instructors agree it’s very difficult to tell a full story without some kind of narration or voiceover. Definitely prefer voiceovers to text boxes. 2. Colin Mulvany says you may hate your voice at first but it will improve with practice. 3. Always record your narration with a microphone, not with built-in mic on computer. 4. Write your narration the way you talk. Anna King says she has a technique that works well – read the text as if telling the story to a friend. This will make you sound more comfortable and natural. She has a photo of a friend taped on the wall so she can “talk” to her when recording audio. 5. Remember to smile when you are recording your voice – listeners hear the smile.
Saturday, 2:30 p.m.
I saw a very similar presentation by Colin at NPPA’s multimedia immersion class last year but now that I have a little more experience, it is much more meaningful. Wow, is he good! He’s been doing multimedia for longer than most and really knows the craft. Plus he is a master editor in Final Cut Pro.
Colin starts off with an interesting thought: Though fewer and fewer people are reading books, YouTube streams 1.2 billion videos each day. Learning to make videos is worth our time!
Tips from Colin:
1. Not every story needs a video to go with it. If a video has nothing to show, it’s not a video. 2. Define your story early and be able to describe it in one sentence. 3. Avoid tangents; they can destroy your story. 4. A roll + B roll = story. A roll is the narrative spine of your story and B roll is video of what the subject is talking about. 5. Get to the core of “why” – Why does this person do what they do? 6. Keep sequencing to a quick pace in B-roll 7. Remember to shoot action/reaction over and over 8. Listen for narrative sound pops. They are little breathers from narration or interview audio. 9. Use a wireless lavalier mic 10. Try to avoid panning and zooming. 11. Keep B-roll short – be ruthless with length.
Colin continues with a Final Cut story timeline walkthrough. He has tons of shortcuts and tips for editing with Final Cut. Highly recommends Lynda.com tutorials. Practice, practice, practice. He encourages me to first lay down the A-roll (that narrative spine) and then to add the B-roll.
Saturday evening
I take a dinner break and then work on reviewing my footage and trying to do some general organization of it all. At around 10 p.m. Colin sends us to our hotels to get some sleep and T.J. promises he’ll be there to let us into the building at 7:30 a.m. Sunday.
Sunday, 7:45 a.m.
Back to editing. Sit there for about six hours straight editing this 80-second piece. Colin moves around the room, sitting with each of us and working one-on-one, commenting on our progress and helping us fine-tune the edits. How amazing it would be to work regularly with an editor like him.
Sunday, 2:30 p.m.
Forced to finish our projects and export them to present to the group. I never did get to use those great shots of seniors circling around singing “God Bless America,” but who knows? Maybe it will appear in the revised longer version!
Here's what I end up with: "Music for the Heart":
(Here's a link to a full-screen version. And you can watch my classmates' videos here. )
Part 2: Three Most Amazing Aspects of the Workshop
1) The coaches 2) The coaches 3) The coaches
Truly, these people are unbelievable!
I’ve been to a handful of these classes and workshops now. They are always staffed by the best and brightest people in the field. These are the experts in our evolving profession and they spend their weekends – sometimes 15 hour-days -- to teach the video gospel for free. They are unpaid! They use vacation days and leave their families for the weekend. Their generosity is tremendous.
I asked some of them why they did it and got these responses:
T.J. Mullinax:
Why? Because there's a need. Journalists, regardless of the name, title, experience, need to take the growth of multimedia seriously. The ones who do, find it daunting to get adequate training. With (in my opinion) so few opportunities to learn about videojournalism in the Northwest on your own dime, I thought I should step up and do what I could for everyone who cares. It's inspiring to me when I can see others get excited about the things I am passionate about. Fortunately for me I am surrounded by amazing visual/multimedia journalists and they share that motivation to get others ready for the dawn of a new industry. Without that help and camaraderie the Northwest Video Workshop would not exist.
Colin Mulvany:
When I first started shooting video, I saw a tremendous need for video literacy education within the newspaper industry. Several years back, the amount of video training opportunities were limited. mostly because only a few videojournalists at newspapers were qualified to teach video storytelling. In those early days, the few of us who had experience were asked to speak at every photojournalism conference and workshop to the point of exhaustion.
Now things have changed. Video is integrated into most newspaper Websites and there are many more talented videojournalists out their producing quality video storytelling and sharing their knowledge.
When my newspaper invested in me by sending me to the nine-day Platypus Video Workshop in 2005, I came home exhausted but professionally changed. I understood video had a great future and I wanted to share the knowledge of what I learned with my co-workers.
I made a deal with myself that I would teach anyone that wanted to learn multimedia skills, such as audio slideshows, video storytelling and editing. I’ve kind of stuck with that through the years.
I had one visiting journalist tell me to guard my gift. That somehow, if I shared what I knew with others, it would be taken away from me. The idea that knowledge is power is true. I hated that; I felt in order for my newspaper to embrace their digital future, I needed buy-in from the top management all the way down to the content producers.
By taking my video storytelling gift and sharing it, I feel much better about myself than if I had kept all that knowledge bottled up. Teaching video storytelling is something I feel passionate about. It has been fun to see the seeds that I’ve sown begin to grow. Our industry is in transition. As our print products diminish, I hold firm to my belief that video storytelling will have a solid future in the digital world. Making sure that ALL newspaper journalists have some understanding of video will only do them and our industry good.
Both endeavours were in their infancy, and searching for online examples proved frustrating -- not only because they were scarce, but the noteworthy ones were also well hidden. Major media outlets did not yet know quite what to do with this new hybrid form of visual journalism, and how to integrate it with their text stories and still photographs.
Though we started searching in earnest for first-rate examples of videojournalism nearly two years ago, it wasn't until October 2008 that we had put the finishing touches on the Website and uploaded nearly 100 video stories from the nation's major media outlets.
Jim McNay, an old friend and colleague who had run the photojournalism programs at Brook Institute and San Jose State University, did the bulk of that initial pre-launch search, plowing through scores of Websites to find the proverbial needles in the haystacks. Subsequently, two accomplished former students -- Kathy Strauss and Beth Renneisen -- have served as our primary scouts.
Since this KobreGuide trio has individually and collectively looked at more online videojournalism than just about any humans on the planet, we thought this would be an appropriate juncture to ask them to share with us their perceptions of the current state of the art...
DISCOVERING DELIGHTFUL HIDDEN GEMS...
By JIM McNAY
The most fun looking for stories to post on KobreGuide has been the chance to find previously unknown little multimedia story gems and shining a light on them for a wider audience.
Sometimes that has been discovering work by someone beginning a career. This happened when we received a tip about Jenn Ackerman’s story called “Trapped: Mental Illness in America’s Prisons.” Since producing this story Ackerman attended the selective Eddie Adams Workshop, has done work for the New York Times, and this year, won an Emmy for this story. And many of you saw it here first. Cool.
Another little pocket of storytelling gold has been the work of our neighbors to the north. We don’t often think much about Canadian soldiers fighting in the Middle East, but a Toronto Star story, “Without Warning” of a returned fighter has its own sudden turn in the presentation that goes off like a visual IED. It’s an unexpected surprise. On a more upbeat note, Toronto Globe and Mail journalists bring us “A Farm Family” in which a farmer goes abroad, finds a wife and saves his family farm. The story runs counter to what we so often hear about farms forced to close. That makes the story a delightful surprise.
So here’s to many more years of the opportunity to surprise and delight audiences. Happy viewing!
FINDING WINNERS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES...
By KATHY STRAUSS
It’s been exciting combing the Web for videos over this past year. Papers like the New York Times, Detroit Free Press and the San Jose Mercury News are dedicating great resources for multimedia while other papers are cutting way back.
It’s surprising how difficult it is some weeks to find anything to post on our site and then, bingo, a real winner surfaces once again. Clearly many publications are frantically trying to predict the future and to decide where to put their energies. Maybe it’s a leap of faith to put their resources into visual storytelling but clearly the stories that make us laugh, cry and think are the most powerful ones.
It’s not just the fulltime staffers producing these stories. AARP hires freelancers for moving stories such as “A Day with Francisco,” by Michelle Cassel and “Silverton Saves its Paper,” by Sonya Doctorian. Small film fests like “Media That Matters” uncover heartwarming independent productions such as “Looking Back,” by Emile Bokaer. These are the stories which in the past would have been published as photo stories in the paper. Now they are the stories that keep our attention and stay with us long after the video ends.
WISHING WORTHY ONES WEREN'T HIDDEN SO WELL...
By BETH RENNEISEN
In spite of the lip service the industry has given video, actually finding it on news sites can be a frustrating treasure hunt. Sites may include a video tab in their top navigation bar, only list video in small type at the very bottom of the home page, lump it in with multimedia, or not flag video content at all. If a video player (or icon for same) is not displayed with a current story on a home or section page, a user would not know to look for it elsewhere, even though — as evidenced by YouTube — a good evergreen video has a far better shelf life online than a typical text story.
Conversely, the stand-alone video player of a site may not indicate that there is a text story to accompany it. Since some editors prefer non-redundant text/video combinations, the video may lack context without the print story. A good example of this was “David Byrne Bike Ride" found on USAToday.com. Byrne, of the rock band Talking Heads, was ironically just that in this seemingly pointless video. A camera was apparently mounted on his handlebars, and shot skyward toward his head while he pedaled and talked about traffic — never actually showing any of his surroundings. On further investigation, it was determined that this video was related to the release of Byrne’s new book on bicycling the world, which was not indicated anywhere in the video component. The “talking head” point of view of the video could have been intended as 1:29 minutes of intentional irony — but the concept only made sense if the viewer was familiar with the back story. (Subsequently, the New York Times did a much better job with the same material.)
Technical issues may also confound the user on some sites. Video libraries are not being maintained as carefully as print archives, rendering searches futile, and links that previously worked may disappear on second visit, or not work when shared with others. Video players load too slowly, and connections to a story or other parts of a series may not work. Worst of all, the player itself may not stream the video well, emitting sketchy audio, sticking on a frame, or pixelating. Even Newsday, while investing copious time and money in high-quality video production, has an attractive, but unreliable video player.
This is not just an issue for locating and playing video. How well a site actually functions when items are clicked, its quickness of response, and relevance of its design elements to their topics is crucial in determining a site’s overall success or failure — regardless of the site’s content or appearance. Poor performance is known to be just as important as weak aesthetics in sending a visitor immediately elsewhere.
Bottom line: You can’t see the light if there’s a basket over it. Put video where users can easily find it, and make it easy for them to play it.
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