The Videojournalists's Playground in Denmark

Pictures from my presentation as part of an international line up for #Videoplay  (Video Playground) at one of the prestigious films schools The European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark

This is their really nice cinema auditorium we're presenting from

I had two 2-hour slots mapping out how different styles can be used to create different feelings in videojournalism. I also proved to delegates that cinema has nothing to do with cinema. Darren Dutch, a US Emmy award winning solo videojournalists tweeted.

Darren Durlach ‏@DarrenDurlach10h

@viewmagazine: cinema is the spectacle, it's what draws you in #videoplayground

The seminars over a week are aimed at predominately mid career photojournalists, photographers and TV Camera men and women.

My presentation was titled Doing as theory, the reflective practitioners. The goal was to show how new ways of working are becoming theory and that its the crafts person reflecting on what they do, which has currency, and differs from citizen journalism.

I have enormous respect for anyone doing video, i particular those calling themselves citizen journalist, but here I argued that unless you can begin to read media and change styles accordingly, you're very different from those who have spent years wrestling withe their disciplines.

I probably over did the slides running at 53, but I wanted to ground the theory. I stated there was no such thing as a unitary future of journalism. Why? because our ideas are as diverse as they are disparate and post modernism doesn't facilitate one big idea any more.

Can you think like a videojournalist? I ran a few cognitive experiments, but here's one that was a favourite. If you want to play here goes.

1. Look at the balls and see if you can detect a pattern

No? Ok look at this one

Any luck yet?  If you saw this. Well done.

But what about this? Did you get this? Prime numbers versus even.

Effectively I have demonstrated how we read media from patterns, but because we go for the obvious, journalism gets a bit dull. These are called semantic fields and the really clever videojournalists break conventions.

We looked at several videos and I talked about how some broadcasters were changing from the traditional package, but the delegates detected some short comings. Look at this incredible video from Alleppo from Channel 4 News, which will likely win awards and see whether you can come up with a critique.

I reccommended books like this one that gets you into the headspace of understanding how to reflect on what you do

And played through several videos deconstructing with the audience why they worked, or not

And demoed some of the kit I use on stories, such as the pocket rig, a small devise that mimics those huge shoulder rigs using the 5D, expect its much smaller.

There was a good degree of audience feedback on personal films I have made, and it was great to see critiques which acknowledged and challenged what might be acceptable or not. Great questions start the thinking process to reinforcing reflective thinking.

I summarised that it was neither my job nor my intention to claim to teach you my style. By showing tow different films and a range of commercials I wanted to prove that the best way to become a film maker or videojournalist was to pick a style and hone that, before moving onto another.

Thanks very much for the generous reception. Here's the image that underpin my practice.

And we end with these two pictures and my thanks to Martin Ramsgård and Søren Skarby two formidable practitioners who are driving various projects in Denmark to increase the value of professionals shooting video and making films.  

Next up was Daniel Moj, a prolific entrpreneurial videojournalist from Germany who put on a wonderful show, and tomorrow is Darren Durlach ‏@DarrenDurlach  award winning videojournalist from the US whom I really looking forward to seeing. 

And finally it was great to meet up with Henrik from the Bombay Flying Ducks, photography and Flash producers par excellence. 

You can learn more about the event and the people behind it on their Facebook site aptly called Video Playground. My thanks to all the delegates for being so generous, Leif, his assistant and Michael for taking the photographs of me including these two below.

David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer, videojournalist, filmmaker, artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre and consultant for a number of compabies, He tweets and can be followed at @viewmagazine

Journalism innovation Newsxchange and what's next?

David makes comparisons between 1920s and contemporary media with the Phantom Carriage, a 1920's Inception.

 By David Dunkley Gyimah. Connect with him on Google 

Next week it's the gathering of international journalists at NewsXchange, where the industry looks at what it's doing and how best in can improve on itself.

Journalism, if there was any doubt is a living and breathing commodity,  but really it's taken the Internet and new media practitioners to make this explicit.

I'm going to be a panelist with NHK debating innovation in journalism and it's an area I'm familiar with as a closet geek. I've been online since 1996 and more recently have been one of the judges for the UK's most prestigious innovation in television awards, The RTS ( Royal Television Society).

Last year that RTS for innovation went to Al Jazeera's The Source.  Last week in building a presentation for Danish journalists I have to say I was a little disappointed to see that improvements to the show have jettisoned the very on-the-go style that appealed to many of the jury.

Today it's all grown up, the playground's been taken over by the adults.

Video Play - Denmark

Timetable for videoplay in Denmark

Last week, I presented to Danish journalists in Denmark, closing a very popular 5-day conference that included:

• Seth Gitner, Syracuse University US.
• Ibrahim Hamdan, Al Jazeera, Qatar whose film: Images of the Revolution, about citizens recording extraordinary scenes in Egypt's  uprising is a must watch.
• Mark Carlson, Associated Press, renown as an exceptional media maker
• David Wright from National Geogaphic, UK whos embers were still smouldering long after he left.

I was asked to look at the future of videojournalism, which as it happens is part of my PhD research at University College Dublin, but something that I have been wading through as a videojournalist for  nearly 20 years and one of the first in the UK.

In my thesis I also contend, if you have experience of traditional news making; I started with te BBC in 1987, then that's hugely beneficial.

It was a 2 hour presentation, but frankly I could have spoken for four hours, but I am very grateful for the generosity and reception from delegates.

The essence of the presentation was to provide an overarching theory - based on the scrutiny of data I have collected from around the world, films such as this one Tahrir Memento, and interviews explaining where video story telling is going and why.

NewsXchange

And it is this why, underpinned by philosophy and pragmatism, which I will aim to reflect at NewsXChange in Barcelona next week, though we'll be looking much broader into innovation.



Call it technological determinism, supervening necessity, or meaning-making through cognitivism, why is it somethings work and others don't?

The philosophy behind this depends on a myriad of social, cultural and historical factors and I explain change by mapping various external theories on the landscape to provide, above all,  robust reasons, than our flailing penchant for new suppositions.

Theory, as I have come to learn is more complex than what we think, theory is generated through, in my case, what's observed, supported with other theories to see if those observations can be discredited.

And on the many Masters in Journalism modules that I have taught, that is far more invaulable. That is understanding how to interpret the many complex signs that make up media.

See you in Barcelona.

Video journalism's margins towards the centre of tomorrow's creative form

I have long argued the scope in video journalism. 

I'm on Chapter Seven of my 70,000 word thesis, and with this corpus almost intact have the opportunity to embark on a number of tours, to explain a past, present and future of videojournalism.

Predicting the future is as I have said a mug's game ( See Apple's site for what I spoke about some time back).

How do you know has to be the first question anyone should ask.  I have conducted various ethnographic studies in China, Tunisia, and the UK.

So whilst, yes, it would be a bold person to claim they've a hang on the next trend, using methodologies such as the Delphi procedure, Trend extrapolation and Media history, some interesting results emerge.

One question you could ask yourself is with broadband beyond your wildest dreams, what could you do, that you haven't done so far?

Gamer the film provides some examples in spatial film making, whilst my trip to China and hologram (previous posts) videos is worth considering.




However in breaking of from writing, I wanted to reinvigorate a conversation on Montage.

Creative Videojournalism

Last week in one of my first psychovideojournalism tours, we ending up at Trafalgar Square where I shared ideas with the team on creating montage.

Viewing a montage sequence at Trafalgar Square from Psychovideojournalism

Montage is the apotheosis of film form and extremely difficult to pull off. You can trace its background to the Russians in Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Vertov.

But one of the daddy's of montage to create it as a genre was Donald Siegel, who played a huge role in enabling the form to possess its own identity.

Remember montage, as seen in the modernist guise of CSI Miami etc is often used to show the transition of time within the body of a film.

As a stand alone, it conveys ideas in what semioticians view as unorthodox shots often prefiguring some symbolic meaning.

 A symbol is something that bears no relationship to what you see. You make up the meaning or in some cases societies convene on some understanding e,g, a red sign as a triangle.

In Se7en, you're no wiser about the image, but as a whole the meaning its frankensteined. That is together the sequences signify strange dangerous even criminal behaviour.

The film montage sets the tone. Montage is used elsewhere in "accelerated digital" to convey information in motion graphics. Motion graphics, which stems from graphic artists moving into the moving image is itself old as film with intertitles, BUT, you'll have a jolly time going through films in the 1960s and the great Maurice Biner who made several titles include this one below for Charade.

Anyway, below are some more opening titles, from the likes of Snatch  and the last one from Tarantino because it represents a different form of Montage, as a music break within a film.

BUT more importantly it creates the famous contrapuntal feeling again developed by Eisenstein. The scene works against the images to recreate something that shouldn't work, but does.

See you in Denmark next this month and then Cairo with UNESCO talking about the future of the media in December.

Meanwhile I'll post some new films on Viewmagazine.tv