Videojournalism - I'm not the camera guy

Memo from Director of Programmes after leaving the UK's first and only Videojournalism- driven programme

The phone call from the news desk gave the location. An event- an accident - and could you make into a package.

The package is the unit of a broadcast report comprising different interviews and locations. Then there were other times, usually an event of such insignificance that I'd wrestle how and what I would do with it.

Two things emerged. If you're a broadcast or newspaper manager who's never packaged yourself as a videojournalist then you ought to. Videojournalism does not start or finish with news gathering.

Camera men and women have their own gripes, within the pool room. Slow news days can be torturous as another "cat in the tree" story emerges.

Fifty grands worth of camera gear, a remortgaged house, years of experience and it boils down to this.

Reporters too often don't get off lightly. At some point you will begin to curse your manager's ineptitude at planning that story. Another "cat in the tree" package.

It's not that you wouldn't want to show moggy being rescued by the fire services, but that "cat in the tree" is a metaphor and even when it is the real deal, there are only so many ways you can package this singularity without seemingly adopting a supercilious tone or being cliche-ridden.

Years on the job and you're still stuck with: .." and so as Molly the cat is lured into the arms of his anxious owner to applause, due credit to Notts firefighters. Molly may be safe now, but she truly has lost one of her many lives".

Groan! Next time a friend stops you in the pub to say how exciting your job is you can tell em to go blow.


The bad luck of videojournalism
Videojournalism gets it in the neck even worse. That's because to management you're life's stenographer: a lonesome, couldn't cut it as a camera operator, working minimum wage.

When it comes to chasing ambulances, you're the person with the bright orange cap. Your manager will dump on you, the camera crew have found the person who's going to take all the drudge stories, and the reporting team can walk tall knowing, "you get Molly next time".

These circumstances are not. But the present predicament stems from the misnomer classifying videojournalism; that it's cheap and a poor substitute of television.

You're not a real journalist, they'll say. Laugh loud now because soon you won't be able to.

Think it through. You want to become a film making. In the past you researched, associate-produced, produced, produced/directed, directed a series, waved goodbye to executive producing, then sought out your first independent film.

Now, you research with the caveat you must be able to use a camera, then you associate produce with the use of a camera, then if you're lucky you're made a videojournalist. Then you're stuck there for life.

Forget the idea you have producer qualities. To management you're rapid deployment. Don't think, do. So, OK there are a kerzillion ways of becoming a film maker, but many will have recognised the aforementioned route with the odd changes here and there.


Videojournalism's stuructural flaws
Videojournalism doesn't come with a career structure. As yet there's no such thing as a senior videojournalist, chief or maestro videojournalist. Once you're known as the guy or gal with the camera, every walking zombie of a piece of so-called-news is yours to be sent off to scavenge and make sense of.

Most outfits still understand when to use the big band and when the trio with the synthesisers can take centre stage. The BBC for instance does not let its videojournalists ambulance-chase.

Yep that's official so I'll say it again: no ambulance chasing.

Sky News recognise videojournalism, but won't be using it any time soon, with minor exceptions for particular projects. Yep that's official as well. I got that last week visiting Sky.

The best videojournalists often have backgrounds as camera operators or photographers and for that you'll be equipped with a technical proficiency that most can only wonder about.

White balancing, black balancing, back focus, light rigging, reds, blondes, may be terms that are a little unfamiliar and without the prospect of interchangeable lenses, you're not quite in the league of camera operators. That much they'll tell you. That much I always got told in the early days circa 1994.

Truth is if you had your way, why would you want to be called a videojournalist? The most recent tweet I RTed from @yemisiblake was "The art of photography is imagining. It’s very related to poetry. Suggestive and fragmentary."

I then suggested film and videojournalism be added.

Where do you want to be
There's never going to be a consensus. Videojournalism will for a forseeable time be the low hanging fruit. I don't work in the news machine any more, so I can naively state my luxuries.

And for me, man or woman with a movie camera is an artistic practice; a multidisciplinary agent which if used well can yield high gains. And artistry requires motivation and intelligent perception of what the outcome should be.

That's the message in the Zero Principle.

Sadly, we're a long way from where we want to be, yet and by dint of having a camera,will still be asked to grab footage of Molly the cat before she loses another life.

+End

Videjournalist David Dunkley Gyimah is an artist in residence at the South Bank Centre

The Zero Principle - Videojournalism. Extract from David Dunkley Gyimah

Extract from Video Story telling and VideoJournalism ( published next year by a US publisher)

As stories go, a hospital closure, this wasn't a difficult one, but it had legs. That meant it could pan out through the day and carry an arc of interest.

Have you ever wondered how broadcasters shape their news throughout the news cycle? More of that in a minute.

I am just completing my MPhil to PhD transfer at SMARTlab (which includes a fmr Nasa expert) and coupled with the extensive training and insights with others and 22 years broadcast experience have quite a bit to share.

One of the things is how I believe later architects of videojournalism have not quite realised the potential of the form's semiotic. On the other hand there are a number of VJs worldwide who are truly pushing the form.

The 1994 story
In 1994 when we launched videojournalism in the UK with Channel One, videojournalism was described as film making within news. Videojournalism was not then, and shouldn't be now a straight lift of news' lingua franca - something I said on Videojournalism Today: The Next Generation seven years ago and continues to be a resources.

It is to a video revolution what impressionism was to art or French New wave was to cinema - that was the theory anyway. But producing a new language assumes one is well versed in the literacy of video and visual form.

What is video Journalism and how you build a VJ outfit from david dunkley gyimah.

The News Cycle
By default their news is driven by time pressures filling the bulletins and then furnishing the extra outputs later on.

You can't have a full day's meal in one go. So sometimes even when the news item does fulsomely present itself, the oblique strategy is to weigh the consequences of the dividend-yield (amount of viewers watching to the effort exercised ) and consider going big later.

Of course these are temporal decisions for time-based media i.e. TV, but have been transferred to the spatial planes of online.

The Telegraph's MPs Cash saga report stretched over many days illustrated this well. Super chip technology that could run computers at mega speeds today is another example where for monetary reasons the technology is held back.

Broadcast News have crews. You as a videojournalist do not, so it pays to understand zero principle. The executives I'm helping to build a VJ station get this.

The Tao of News Packages

Mostly all news packages start off with a main contact- the axis - that makes the item possible. Think of them as the reporter's deep throat. See if you can spot this watching the next broadcast.

The unit of the videojournalism piece, just as in broadcast, is the package. It's the piece that often yields the biggest rewards with rolled up sleeves. It sits at the nexus of the Z principle. Below it lay other considerations.

Above the trapezoid stem of the 'Z" is the possibility of developing the story into a cinematic package - the long format feature that's going to pull further eyeballs and become a reference.

But just as in branding terms it helps enormously if there is a perceived quality. It's a boon if your news site telegraphs what viewers can expect.

Embed video, but what video?
In 2005, the good people of the Batten Awards in the US saw this on Viewmagazine.tv when I started using embedded video clips extracted from the package. Two plus years later at a London gathering of ONA members at the BBC, executives would confirm in their own test the value of the embedded clip.

But this feat doesn't and shouldn't stop there. The TV clip is a powerful example of the "action clip" or online the "meta clip" or "action clip". In television bulletins it's the 30 second or less bite. Online it needs to reflect key words and be self contained.

Emerging Techniques

As we move about in ever more refined social networks how we singularly capture the essence of the video package to have an impact within our social news grouping will be more pertinent. That's for the another discourse later.

But for now, the image at the top illustrates the Z principle strand of videojournalism, delineating between structural and event-driven packaging, the aesthetics weighed against the narrative and how if you plan for the package with the Cinematic aesthetic in mind, there are further spin offs, not least you'll have material to pull in further viewers.

This isn't an ad hoc procedure, but one which will strengthen both your output and skills in turning around packages to meet the demands of your output.

By the way when I got back from my story with all four elements ready to run, and with enough material for 'ownership' of a long format the director of programmes, Nick Pollard sent me a memo, which I have since kept.


In the following chapters I'll deconstruct how with the minimum of effort you can turn over each unit in good time, from techniques derived over the years.

Viewmagazine.tv - a mathematical personal sojourn of expressive video making.

Viewmagazine.tvs, David Dunkley Gyimah, an Applied Chemistry graduate, has been training videojournalists since 1995. He's been a Videojournalist since 1994 and a broadcaster working in front and behind the camera for some of the worlds' biggest news brands e.g BBC. ABC News, WTN and Channel 4 News. He lectures in IMVJ.
He's recently returned from working with Rich Beckman, Knight Chair of Miami University, in South Africa. When he's not teaching, he can be found at the South Bank Centre, where he is an artist in residence, creating a range of pieces.