The BBC invited a delegation to look at its new shiny offices in Salford. Geoffrey Davies, the head of journalism at the University of Westminster was among the group and took these pictures. Over many years Geoffery has been specialsing in capturing media studios around the world.
So this represents his latest batch, which he's allowed me to post
Here, BBC 5 Live show they've taken a few ideas from Google in design
This is a great idea. This booth allows you to connect with one of the studios for live transmission etc. There are a number of gadgets inside. You can imagine these in years to come being dotted over the country or on campuses - where you can edit and do 2-way ISDN chats.
A wide shot of the new BBC building with seating pods - those round objects. The lower floor is a popular studio for football fans
Yep its the Match of the Day set. You still need kerzillions of cameras for live broadcasts, or do you?
Journalists have their own monitor and a number of new gadgets for the 21st century reality gatherer.
And thos cameras are fixed in the radio studios. Radio with pictures. Think NY1, The James Whale Show of the 80s.. Now we want to see online who is being interviewed. Wish that was there when I was on radio interviewing the likes of Van Peebles, Fela Kuti and George Clinton.
Unfinished studio, which is probably completed by now
The exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum on Postmodernism puts where we are now into context.
The picture is from 1996. The videojournalist is today one of the UK's leading film makers.
I came across this constructing the lay out for a chapter on postmodernism and self filming.
Without the past we don't have futures. Postmodernism or in this case the videojournalism of old may be rubbished. "Hey it's all about the 5D now!" But the past influences what direction we take now.
In five years time we'll be doing the same to this present "here and now", as the next generation give it short shrift and you try to convince them otherwise. "Hey it was the period of the IPad 2, Facebook and the Social Network".
It's easy to become nonchalant about the past unless you've lived through it. But there's other value. Traces of the past find themselves into our livelihoods. For creatives it provides cues for cycles of innovations. Sometimes they emerge as retro.
More importantly for me as a practitioner and academic with specialist knowledge in television, radio and the Net around the 1980s onwards, it gives context to understanding current trends.
Without The Garden of Forking Paths - a hypertext novel published in 1941 by Argentina novelist poet Jorge Luis Borges, there would be no Inception (2010)
Without videojournalism circa 1990/ 2000, we'd still be adamant what can and can't be done.
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Miami Vice - 80s post modernism before CSI. Visit David's main site www.viewmagazine.tv for more
A difficult and at times pretentious word to comprehend, postmodernism; never mind the post modernism journalist.
As the opening quote at the Victoria and Albert museum's exhibition puts it, if modernism was a window on the world, postmodernism was the broken shards, spelling out multifaceted, pluralistic ideas.
V&A Exhibition on Postmodernism on until January 2012
They - artists, filmmakers and journalists - were radical, even dystopic and most certainly individualistic.
For the 1980s the height of postmodernism, there was the idiosyncratic The Face Magazine; in Film, the epochal Ridly Scott's Blade Runner (1992); whilst TV birthed Miami Vice - so cool it makes CSI Miami look damn dour.
Miami Vice changed TV programming and TV Journalism. Those music breaks in Docs and features...
Africa Bambaataa George Clinton (play David's BBC interview below), MTV and the The Pet Shop Boys; Jeff Koons, the BYAs e.g. Tracy Yemin et al pushed the edge of Art, whilst Ettore Sottsass' Memphis group kick started a design revolution.
And then in the wings the emergence of the postmodernist journalist (PMJ)- the DIY journos who could just as well speak intelligibly of a Guy called Gerard or Public Enemy with the Palestinian-Israeli Intifada, and the Contras & Oliver North.
The now famous slogan of an unknown sports brand circa 1988 caught the zeitgeist as one of basketball's greats Magic Jordan showed man truly could fly without technology.
All this created a heady mix, from which emerged the PMJ. They worked across radio, magazines, newspapers and TV. I recall walking into a BBC radio suite with people like Ekow Eshun who typified the PMJ presenting on radio one day and then deconstructed Mary J Blige's troubling career the next as deputy editor, then Editor of The Face.
On TV the PMJs occupied Channel 4's Network 7 which decomposed and reconstituted as BBC Reportage (see David reporting from Reportage below). They were young, brash and not afraid of risks. If you weren't doing everything, you felt left out, so I too did magazines, presented radio and did TV on reportage.
And like others when I got restless, upped sticks and moved to South Africa for 18 months, or ended up in Falaraki in the summer making films on Hi-8 cams. And no, I didn't know anyone in South Africa when I moved, but I'll be forever thankful to British Airways for the complimentary ticket.
And then in 1994 the PMJs dream job - videojournalism at Channel One TV. That extraordinary era is presently being written up for publication, but let's cut to the next movement, the PMJ became the postmodern videojournalist at the time when post modernism was dying.
Attracted by money, big money, the original movement sold out. The post modernists grew up, made careers and went suburbia - in any case there's only so much you can hold on to an idea before it becomes commodified by the industry.
The New Videojournalists
The videojournalists created their own ecology of havoc. Bemused onlookers watched in disbelief thinking "poor journalists, not enough money for a camera operator". And we had public figures by the ropes. Media training then was something you did in the gym watching television. Now you can't get a straight question out of anyone.
David vjing from Paris
Ten years later videojournalism popped mainstream. Its ubiquity dissolved an important caveat of the PMs gene sequence - rarity- when videojournalist could earn up to £38,000 and invent their own rule book.
Today PMVJs are no more. But the Net and Social Digital Discourse continues to promulgate the need for individualism and radicalism. It's a little more difficult now, but ironically today journalism needs getting tough and innovative more than ever.
Cue: the current assessment from the UK, and China two days ago presenting to a high profile academic delegation. TV's dominant form, its hegemony has now filtered and settled in digital media.
Nothing's changed. We might have Facebook and Twitter, but they affect journalism's physique, not it soul.
Meanwhile we appear know more about the world, but less about depth of story, unless Wiki leaks tells us. Public figures have learned to be sub prime mortgage with the truth. The average sound bite has become so perceptibly short, you'd think your interviewee had turrets syndrome.
Broadcasting won't fess up, but the journalism that was in trouble fifteen years ago and then six years back (thanks Youtube) has not completely healed. So we need a new radicalism, one that emotes journalism to deliver on its original and new promise - which is what?
But we don't have a name, a philosophy or even theory to call it. Videojournalism has been mooted, but I know you're pondering as well. It's not the name it's what those practising it do with the form. Remind me again why we loathe the word postmodernism again.
David Dunkley Gyimah hanging out with old pal Ozwald Baoteng from 1990s
If you liked this, visit viewmagazine.tv my main site for interviews with Eartha Kitt, Roy Ayers, and a range of media, war and videojournalism issues.
VIEWMAGAZINE.TV PUBLIICITY IMAGES FREE USE BELOW (Creative Commons) for blogs, twitter and other publications referencing the blog viewmag.blogspot.com and viewmagazine.tv. If you're interested in 300dpi images please email david(at) viewmagazine.tv stating re:Image use in the title. The use of images does not waive moral rights of owner and therefore warrants being used for purposes described above.
We're trying to arrange another talk at the Apple Store London. Hopefully now, next year. In the meantime we're due to hang out at the BFI - the title being Inside Videojournalism.
Do you accept nothings changed though? TV is still dominant! After a 2 hour performance lecture in the city (of London), a senior Chinese executive was keen for an answer.
About thirty from one of China's top academic institution wanted to know whether we possessed any new methods to teaching New Media.
Over 20 slides I built this argument which addressed the following questions:
1. How do we go about acquiring knowledge?
2. Is there truly a different way of teaching New Media?
3. How has the student and lecturer changed over the years.
Learning Methods
We're already awash with all manner of tried and tested successful learning methods. I wanted to concentrate on Creativity.
Problem is creativity is a bit like stand-up. The approach comes seemingly unrehearsed, depending as much on other factors e.g. the environment, material etc. It works against being rule-bound. Yet seeks an inherent theory to define the creative actions we undertake.
Donald Schon documented this in his explanation of the inadequacies of Technical Rationality.
Disruptive fields are cyclical and happen all the while and the way we can get to grips with these is by being creative in our approach.
A couple of things emerge from this, which hopefully I'll spell out at the BFI. When's the next disruptive flow that calls on new creative challenges?
It took an eternity to surface from Turkish seas and feels just as long coming up for air from a period of binge reading.
It would be simple enough if I had a photographic memory latching onto facts as if they were football figures whose stats were worth noting.
We can try all sorts of things to increase our capacity to retain information, but what's required is active learning. Anytime I'm offered the chance to present, I sneak into the room early, to 'mark territory'.
It is my little ritual, as I imagine it is to others. Listening to Professor Gabriel Radvansky on the BBC, his authoritative musings on the human memory appeared to show my predatorial walkies make sense.
Radvansky's published research in a book on memory claims our memory auto refreshes when we past a door way. Indeed when was the last time you entered a room and forgot why you were there, and the only way you could remember was to return to the source of the thought.
So the answer to Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney could have been to learn which three agencies were for the chop within the theatre.
Now, if that were the case, the idea of any successful presentation would be unheard of, since we're forever travelling walking through doors.
So part of the solution I guess is a bid to understand and to become the text, removing the idea of learning by rote. That requires making meaning from what Donald Schon ( listen here for BBC Lecture) calls reflection-in-action.
Essentially it's thinking about what you're thinking about, your experiences and learning to unravel the complication by logically setting about a new solution.
Active Learning
Learning becomes an active discussion with others or yourself. In lectures rooms, that's something I actively encourage.
The idea of getting into character with the text - method approach - and thinking about the audience opens us to wider solutions.
Questions such as how do I know this, and coming at yourself from another POV, may sound schizophrenic, but it questions expectations.
It's that technique which I'll be using this year acting as a juror for the UK's prestigious Royal Television Society Awards ( RTS) 2012.
Thankfully I won't have to memorise any presentations, but the collective work I'm going through now, I guess can only help.
The sartorial noted, but all round media maker, Dan
You acknowledge it, but rarely challenge it. You blog, film, podcast, multimedia and the rest, but you're prone to believe these are different entities.
We think so because we've been conditioned so. The futurist media maker or student must entertain different ideas.
The very act of me listing the aforementioned suggest the use of genres. But how did these become what they are and do they still hold? That's a thesis in itself, so I'll be very brief.
In a world of collapse media, thanks in part to the Internet and more probing heuristicism, constructivism and internationalism, much has happened to the unit discipline. Blogging might be just a platform, but it encourages a diffusion of forms: literary criticism, features and commentary pieces - all find their way in
I need to honour the names above to push my argument. In film, we call on documentaries, news, features and feature films. These definitions guide us into modes of understanding and acceptance.
This is a good example. When you want a salami sandwich because you like salami, you don't want to be given something that looks like Salami, but isn't.
We need specifics, and the media is no different. The audience demands it. "download this photo montage", "watch this amazing film", but the audience largely cares less whether the author happens to write nonsensical riddles for a living or plants rose bushes - all worthy professions.
However it's the profession that holds to the division and while this worked at some point, some of those core reasons are now defunct. This is not a reason against specialisms. We need those, but the argument against genre-specifics is weakening.
This morning a visiting Chinese scholar had a question he needed to get of his chest. Why is it that many institutions do documentary, when the graduates will unlikely do documentary in their first jobs; more likely news.
It was a loaded question, though not intended. I can't speak for others, I said, but the assumption you're making is that a two minute news piece has little to do with a documentary. If we fail to make the connection, then that must be so.
But they have common features, more so than perhaps what separates them - which we tend to emphasise. They use a medium of the moving image, they use a language of moving images, either explicit or implicit, they involve technical and symbolic elements.
Their differences seem obvious - that one is lengthier than the other, and one is new whilst the other isn't. These conventions have held long enough for them to be defined accordingly- they sell books and the rest. Yet, whilst I might need them to define work, or submit work to others, in practice they are the same.
Film lengths present a case for a logic, which has become convention. 90 minute - an arbitrary figure - was marked as the norm. The reasons? Hollywood execs figured it was the right length to hold the attention of the audience.
Today, that length can vary from a Warhol's 8 hours and 5 minutes "Empire", to one minute film. Similarly, TV New went through the same angst. Bosses were terrified anything past two minutes would have the viewer reaching for the "off" button.
It is no coincidence that the heritage of producers, and production houses that delivered anything from promos to six part series has now evolved into a cadre of multi-skilled individuals.
It's likely in the near future we may internally discard these designed-terms as a generation of new journalists ignore these boundaries and just go about creating media. - even when the clients and audience still hold these terms dear
Some things don't add up. And when they don't our immediate reaction is to purse our lips and become dismissive. Some things too manifest themselves as a revelation, but seem so obvious that we feel the need to be dismissive.
I encountered both today.
In building a new narrative for videojournalism using established theories, I came unstuck. Then it became obvious. However this revelation lay outside of the discourse of its common established theory within communication.
In History as Art: Art as History, the author's note: Art provides students with new languages and with a new set of visual tools and methods to process and articulate their ideas. (p.6)
There's more, but then as I said it should have been so obvious, but on the other hand in academic journalism studies it might not; purse your lips.
Art offers a powerful expression, less understood in formal circles where genres are rooted. You know its journalism because of its conventions; its objective and impartial. These are powerful forces that have shaped generations.
And the only way we deconstruct genres is by theories. The word theory in academia has a more profound ring to how we use it in everyday parlance.
Because in pedagogy, someone wants proof. Prove it is the retort. You say the web is different, or videojournalism is something else, or multimedia is a new language. Prove it! Critically! Logically!
But then proof itself is abstruse in communication and the arts. There is no right and wrong, but theories more suited, by the theoritician, towards deconstructing their puzzle.
As Robert Stam puts it.. Theories do not supersede one another...and they can be playful, even anarchaic.
The words and songs of artist and pioneers yield fresh ideas, which are absorbed, tested, and verified towards theories, and if they are new are compared with others. But how do you know to give credence to these. Therein lies another conundrum. And that's how circular it is.
How do we report the economy in a manner that articulates more profoundly the implosion about to grip Europe, as Italy sits at the precipe of a massive financial calamity?
David Dunkley Gyimah meets an icon, doc pioneer Albert Maysles
Et voila the great Albert Maysles.
In the time I have worked for the BBC, ITN, ABC News and the rest I have met many stars and VIPS. In many cases I have admired them, but not been moved enough to want my picture taken. Also it's not, well, how do you put it, cool!
But I do have a select compendium: President Mandela, Quincy Jones and Lennox Lewis whom I co-shot his documentary fighting Tyson. All of them can be found on the site I built viewmagazine.tv. To that now, I have recently met Albert Maysles.
There are many reasons why Maysles message is still strong and should never be forgotten; he is one of the rare and true pioneers in documentary.
Whatever you're playing with at the moment, there's a strong claim Albert Maysles et al would have been there first in films such as: Grey Gardens (1976) Gimme Shelter (1970) and Salesman (1968). Then there's that unprecedented shot in Primary(1960),
That Shot
And more recent stories such as Muhammad and Larry(2009) co-created with Bradley Kaplan. But this iconography goes beyond hero worshipping of the past. At a time of disjointed and complex imbricating forms in our digital ecology, to gain a better understanding of the future, we must look to figures such as Albert.
Last year as part of my soon-to-complete doctoral thesis on the Outernet and moving image where, digital codes works with the realism of film making I spoke to another pioneer, Drew.
I'm hoping to do the same with Albert and will share that with you soon and with the community we're assembling for our next BBC-BFI-UCLAN meeting- the inaugural one can was quite a success.
How not to win awards. Why are they sought in the first place is topic in itself, but how not to win them sounds tautological.
It's like Fred seen here - a latter day version of Pee wee - sending out invitations to friends about NOT being invited to his party.
So yesterday I was one of four nominees for this Ghana Awards. And the winner was a barrister and deservedly so. Being nominated was more than I could wish.
But it was a lavish fine show of talent and awesome enough to be asked to come and sit down and sup with Ghana folk. There's always a funny incident where someone's giving me some food and has to describe it in detail.
"That sir is fried yam and a black pepper recipe called... "
"Me daase.. me nim..comes my reply in Ashanti saying, yes thanks, I know.
The last time I failed to show my Ghanaian roots at some other function I got a ribbing from a couple thinking I was out of my depth with the food - believe me Ghanaian food can be quite chilli hot.
So back to the awards itself which frankly I didn't stand a chance in a room by myself ever winning. Mainly because I never told anyone.
After the nominations delegates were asked to amass votes for themselves online. Well that's me out as:
a) I don't have a wide friends base :)
b) It's a bit odd asking people to vote for you for what you do
Effectively we're in the realm of the X-factor. I could understand if it was a public vote for some performance the public might want to see again, but if you're a nurse, a doctor or a mechanic, your either good at what you do and your peers recognise this, or er you're not - and feel comfortable about it.
The idea I have to ring around my friends and mum, who'll tell her friends and what not, is a bit vain.
Now I'm not suggesting the victor did this. You'll have to know me better to believe I could think that way, but I do hope at some point where appropriate we jettison the idea of X-factor voting for things that should be judged on merit.
Otherwise, in the future we could be voting for whether you get the hospital appointment, or whether you pass your driving test because of pubic votes, or the pilot flying that plane did so not because of her professionalism graded by anonymous peers, but a public vote.
Which in any case if it had gone that way, the winner of this award, would still have won given her many achievements. That's one thing I am pretty sure off.
Buy the book as its too late to attend the night club
There's a story I believe to be true about Robin Williams from his visits in Britain the 80s, and 90s.
In the centre of Piccadilly Circus, next to where the Odeon cinema, used to be was a small dimly lit room club called the Cat in the Hat.
I knew this club well, as on Fridays it featured some of the damn funkiest people in London, dancing to what became 'rare grooves'.
These were tracks from Maceo and the Mack, the JB's and Vicki Anderson's Message to the Soul Sisters (you need turn this up and kick of your shoes. Er p.s close your curtain's too otherwise the neighbours will think you mad)
Anyway, on Saturdays the Cat in the Hat would transform into its original domain - the Comedy Store. Now the legend was it, from a couple of people wanting to go dancing, was they stumbled into the club and stayed because there was this US guy doing stand up.
Many people went back and each time noticed his set was never repeated. Robin Williams did not have a parachute to protect him. He was just a wise-cracking flanneur who couldn't be contained.
Zudong - former online student. Picture by Valeria
Newer media is a set not so different from Robin Williams sojourns. Yes, for the sake of the following year's cohorts you might repeat things, but in reality, you end up with new material, and thus new enterprises for running your mouth.
This doesn't amount to a lack of structure, but more importantly an attempt to see past it. There are rules for everything in the media world, but in this mutating ecology, the only rules become there aren't any.
Wait there is one rule. Learn what they did, why they did and disregard it and strike out. In a couple of weeks a delegation from China come by our uni wanting to observe and understand how online and videojournalism get refluxed.
It's not the modules in themselves that are all important, but the strategy behind learning how to learn. This involves a couple of things, I believe. Firstly don't teach perfectionism as the end-product, but the idea of understanding how being forced to make mistakes leads you to understand perfectionism and respect it.
Here's an example. We may speak about social networking, but in Journalism classes, its anything but, independence is still a strong charateristic of the new journalism. So how do you get people to social network amongst each other? You tell them? Chances are though if they've not recognised the value of interdependency our instincts return us to type.
In other words we'll always seek to conform to our own traits and individualism, when frankly the wisdom of crowds done well is a powerful learning resource.
So one exercise we run is to give out assignments to finish against the clock, and then midway through this invent a crisis that forces people by default to work together ( the Hitchcockian crisis of dilemma) Then as we're nearing the assignment end we introduce another variable, which leads to the wisdom of crowds making decisions about their immediate outcomes.
In our case, we let them kill half their stories which had them decide who's would go forward and with ten minutes left on the clock asked the cohorts to kill all but one of their stories to present.
Inevitably I'm talking structural and delivery here, but there are more fine-grained examples I could give which look at the subject matter, which we'll leave for another time.
p.s I don't put former students comments up here about what we do, because well that's what we do and you need to keep you humility in check, but here's an extract from Zudong speaking about her experience from last year.
I have to say it was quite challenging and during that time I constantly felt that I must come up with something good enough, worth your time and attention, which gave me great pressure, for i knew that you were really difficult to be impressed and set high standards at all times.
A friend who's bought a 5D got into a protracted conversation with me over a story I'm making. I shot on super 8mm. Could he achieve the same look using After Effects?
Sure, I said, but I thought he missed asking a more appropriate question. Why would he?
The allure for nice pictures can often cloud the purpose of the film. The problem though is two fold. Not knowing what you want the compositional elements of the film to say overall.
Videojournalism is a freudian chess game where you alone are trying to anticipate stages ahead, by playing against yourself and your alto ego - the lone audience.
Oh yes he knew to create a textual narrative, but understanding a whole set of parameters: his placing, framing, lens language, parrallel editing - that was a new conversation piece.
The moral to this edited logic is captured by Stanley Donen the great film maker behind the likes of Singing in the Rain (1952) speaking to one of the people I admire, Film maker and all-about-everything Mark Cousins.
"The camera's just a pen. It's how you use it". It's a well worn phrase, but Donen injects life and purpose into it. So 5Ds may be de rigeur but it's not unsurprising that an alternative look to the status quo should draw attention. Watch out how in ten years we're all be eulogising over deep focus.
Put another way the project and person dictates according to a set of variables, what equipment and style they should use and your methodology will differ, or not to mine.
The most rewarding task in lecturing is helping people find there; for there are no definitive answers. It's just that we're so creature of mimicry that it's so much easier to have the template there to copy and adapt.
Video Methodologies
Looking into methodologies opened up this window of interest.
Last week a behind-the-scene shoot with the Master students putting together a news programme
Tomorrow an awards ceremony I'm attending, from being nominated for an award
The GUBA Awards is Ghana's professional community recognising each other. As awards go, this lavish event will be a procession of the good and great: some footballers who wowed us in the World Cup, and pop stars with global fans.
Somewhere in there I have been snuck in for a nomination. I have no intention of entertaining the idea of an award. Yes everyone says that, but trust me on this one.
But the stories, think of the many stories - I do. And not just at the Plaza Place hotel and the individuals, but back in Ghana, the biggest of which has to be the oil its discovered of its shores. How epic is that!
Meanwhile, my mental state back in the UK, I've all but completed the cut on our MAs at work, but a couple of things struck me so evidently in the process. Firstly, developing a variation on the human tripod that ensured a "steadycam" effect and secondly in editing.
That is how I could frame the outcome of the story into any number of forms or genres. Herein lies the seeds of methodologies, how we convert something informational into something affective, complex into simple, or news into accelerated cinema.
As it happens I have spent the best part of that week writing up my methodological approach to videojournalism into my thesis.
So I have been living out of my garage undergoing the equivalent of an archeological dig, rummaging through papers and articles from 1989 which have become sturdy references. Take this one from 2001 The Family - a videojournalism and multimedia artifact made in 2000 using game theory.
Strange as this may seem, but part of discourse is thinking in scale. Something delivered principally for online has a different "thisness' than something built up in scale for the big screen.
I have learnt that watching videojournalism films I have made being shown on the big screen in Berlin, various doc fests and at the Southbank Centre.
This is something rarely discussed as most of us don't have access to the silver screen unless we enter film competitions etc, but I believe this medium is becoming more and more commonplace and so I hope to share more about this at a forthcoming BFI-BBC-UCLAN event on videojournalism.
If you've come across the first one we produced seen here on the BBC Journalism College , the next one looks to go one stage further.
