Robert LaHue

On Friday, I was invited up to my alma mater, Chico State, to do a workshop with the videographers of my old college newspaper, The Orion.

As part of that, I gave them a handout with a few suggestions for how to tell stories with video. But, I figured that there’s people out in the public who know even more than I do. So I’m posting up the handout I wrote up and wanting to see what else people have to suggest as far as this subject goes.

SHOOTING

• The video should stand alone: A video should completely explain itself, without the need to read an accompanying story to know what the video is about. Example: If you’re shooting a rally of some kind, the audio/text should explain exactly what the rally is about, and the visuals/text should make clear where the event is happening.
• Videos should match written material: While videos don’t have a specific nut graf like a written story does, it should be clear what the focus of a video story is. If the video is part of a package with a written story, the two should be of similar focus. Example: If there’s a package on a baseball player from a foreign country, the writing shouldn’t focus on his travel to Chico/cultural differences and the video just focus on his on-field performance.
• Let the subjects tell as much of the story as possible: Viewers want to hear from the people they are seeing on camera, not Written on-screen text blocks and voiceovers should only be done if the on-camera interviewees do not satisfactorily tell the story on their own.
• Good angles to shoot B-roll from: extreme close-ups on action (like on hands, feet, moving machinery, etc.), scrolling wide angles of large crowds, overhead angles, having action move towards you.
• Not-so-good angles to shoot B-roll from: Dutch angles (camera is tilted to one side, used to create sense of psychological imbalance or tension), low-angle shot (only if attempting to show an object is extremely large), angles where you can’t see anything that’s going on (obviously)
• Zoom in close on interviewees: Their head should be near, but not completely all the way to the top. If you’re not zoomed in close enough, the viewers’ eye could move to the background.
• Shoot more B-roll than you’ll think you’ll need: Because you’re probably going to wind up needing more B-roll than you’ll think you’ll need. Too much B-roll is a good problem to have.

EDITING

• Think about the effect transitions have on pacing: Any sort of creative transition between shots (cross-dissolves, cube spins, etc.) slows the moving between clips. In most cases, you don’t want or have time for that, just cut straight across to the next clip. Fading out and fading in audio also has a slow-down effect, so limit those to the very beginning and very end of videos.
• Pay attention to audio levels: If one subject talks loud and another talks quiet, adjust their audio levels so they are a closer match.
• Beware the “Foreign Film Dub”: Make sure your audio is in synch with your video. Sometimes, the limitations of technology cause the two to get thrown off. If that happens, don’t ignore it – match them back up!
• Avoid sharp changes in audio: If you’re switching between one interview in a quiet environment and another in a loud environment, use a cross-fade to limit the harshness of the transition.
• Make the title and descriptions match: Just because you’re shooting video doesn’t mean the writing involved doesn’t matter. Don’t just rely on the lede of the written story or the print headline for the title of your video.

Remember, they think what they’re saying means something. You have to reflect that when you write to them, even when they’re wrong.

This gentleman responded with his thanks and hopes we’ll write something on Mamo Rafiq soon.

Also important: When you say you’re going to do something, do it.

For an even better example of being a social journalist in the social media age, read this post by my KDMC small group teammate Mandy Jenkins, now a social news editor for HuffPo Politics.

…and you don’t even have to friend me on Facebook to follow it!

You can click here to view it.

Going to shoot video in your news organization? You better be flexible and be able to think your way out of problems.

It’s safe to say that things, usually, will not go as planned. The dream background will not work. Shadows are going to jack with your universe. Microphones will not perform to the best of their abilities.

That’s when you’re going to get well-acquainted with your video editing software.

We do a lot here with the Marysville Gold Sox, a summer college baseball team. For those of you not familiar with college baseball, during summer when school is out players will play on teams outside of school, often in towns that treat it similar to minor league baseball, but more affordable. Think of the movie “Summer Catch.” In that film, Freddie Prinze Jr. is playing in the Cape Cod League, the premier summer college league in the country.

One regular feature we do is “Meet the Gold Sox,” where a sports reporter interviews one of the players on the team using a two-camera shoot, then in post-production we overlay the videos with b-roll featuring game highlights of the player in action.

For a recent interview with a middle infielder from Northern Colorado University, the post-filming check revealed a number of problems. The first was one dealt with regularly in that players ballcaps create shadows across their faces. That can be dealt with easily by bringing up midtones, and I’d rather have baseball players wearing baseball caps.

A couple of other problems were going to be tougher to deal with. First, the mic was being held too far away from the player when he was talking compared to when the reporter was talking in it, which created a big difference in the sound level. Second, somehow the reporter wound up looking at the wrong camera for the wide shot, rendering a lot of the pre- and post-interview segments unusable. (Actually, I bet he looked at the wrong camera because the guy running both cameras — guilty — didn’t make sure to tell him which camera to look at first.)

This required a lot of work in the soundtrack with FinalCut Express to fix, along with strategically placing highlights, and cutting to our ending graphic sooner than we usually do.

For comparison’s sake, here’s a clip of raw video:

And here’s what the finished product looked like:

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote a column on Wednesday discussing what he feels are the shortcomings of social media like Facebook and Twitter.

To be fair, Keller wasn’t completely anti-social media, like most critics of such come across as. He just views them more as aggregators of information than mediums of real conversation. But his key argument is a concept of “trade-off.” For every new technology that comes along, society trades off a way of thinking and living. He goes so far as to argue it changes how our minds work.

Here’s the passages I felt were the crux of his arguments:

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect…

…The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

What is this really going to boil down to is a social media version of a gun control debate. Instead of saying “Guns don’t kill people, people do” it’s “Facebook doesn’t kill real conversation, people do.”

Keller’s argument does not hold up, for a few reasons.

No man lives by Twitter alone: Humans primarily communicate three ways – reading, hearing, seeing. (Provided you were born with the ability of the latter two and learned the former) But just because the printing press was invented didn’t automatically mean everybody learned how to read. Just because the television was invented meant people forgot how to hear without seeing. Just because Twitter and Facebook becomes popular doesn’t mean everybody abandons other forms of conversation and just tweets the rest of their lives.

“140 characters are a novel when you’re being shot at”: This was a tweet that came out during the post-election uprising in Iran two years ago. It touches on something Mr. Keller should know as a newspaper editor and something way too many people in newspapers have forgotten: The importance of tight writing. You can fit a lot into 140 characters if you really try. It just takes practice, like good writing in general.

It’s not a one-and-done: Just because you only fit 140 characters in a tweet doesn’t mean you only get one tweet to say what you have to say. If you link together, say, five tweets, you’re getting 700 characters, or around 100 words. That should be enough to form a salient point. For example, let’s take my last point and make it a string of tweets:

Re: @nytkeller, Twitter and “real conversation” Keller should recall that good writing is tight, and tweets should be also. (123 characters)

You can fit a lot into 140 characters with practice @nytkeller. But like all types of writing, it takes practice. (113 characters)

I’m sure @nytkeller is aware of journalism concept of tight writing. Hard to get much tighter with writing than Twitter. (120 characters)

Ta-da. Post those one right after the other, and it’s a multi-facted argument, and each tweet is an individual part of the argument.

Displacement of conversation is dictated by the individual, not the medium: Sure, a person could spend their entire life posting on Facebook to the detriment of other forms of conversation. But a person could just as easily lock themselves in a library, read books all day, and never say a word about them to anyone else. Or put themselves in a radio booth, talk into a microphone all day, and never listen to what anyone else has to say (cynicism alert – maybe that’s talk radio now!) A person ultimately controls how they choose to communicate and they control its depth and complexity, no matter how many characters or Like buttons they have along the way. It also feeds a myth that conversation was greater in the past. Really? By whose standards? I’m not willing to assume it actually was better before.

Keller’s not wrong in saying Twitter and Facebook are great aggregators. They are. But to abandon them as genuine conversation and discussion mediums because you’re not getting to type as much as you would like to isn’t correct. A single device or invention does not automatically create a trade-off. Society isn’t the same as economics. Sometimes there really can be a free lunch.

Now, how to conclude my argument, Hey, I got it…

@nytkeller Social media won’t displace real conversation if users choose not to abandon it. Life doesn’t always have to have a trade-off.

137 characters.