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

The journo educational crisis

David's e-book ( pdf) working with Nato forces in 2005 looked at some of the methods and tips behind working in conflict zone.

There's a lot to take from Francis Becket, an author and journalist's article We're losing journalism education, just as we need it.

He says:

"I understand the Independent (newspaper) will stop publishing its Thursday education pages. Their last appearance will be on July 1.

Education - real education, that is, not training in the skills required for work - is in greater danger than it's been in my lifetime. Education journalists, who a decade ago would have been sounding the alarm, don't have access to their platforms any more".

More here

It had me thinking, particularly in this solitude time attempting to capture my thoughts and experience in a book, combined with teaching and training exercises over the last twenty odd years. And then in two weeks we're in Chongqing, China.

First things first. A revolution in traditional journalism or storytelling, no one perhaps can dispute and there have been countless attempts, many successful, to illustrate the future.

Adam Westbrook's self-published e-books have proved very successful in capturing an audience, and showing how the strength of ideas can still travel.

With the Ipad and related techware a more radical future appears to be opening around video+text books. Further evidence comes from ex-bbc colleagues of mine bidding for a multimillion pound contract for video delivery into the classroom.

And the blogosphere e.g. Lynda.com, Multimedia shooter has shown itself a great resource for learning. So, I asked myself what's the point of me publishing. What am I bringing to the table?

Education is about learning from our past
And the answer struck me from previous posts where I have spoken about my background.

The precis is something like this: 1987 (BBC Radio); 1990 (BBC TV Reportage); 1992 (BBC World Service/ ABC News/ SA TV/ Radio 4); 1994 (Channel One TV); 1996 ( WTN) 1997 (London Tonight/ producing in Africa);1997 (Channel 4 News/ BBC Breakfast/advertising Soho company) 2001 (politics show); 2001 dot com companies.

Bizarrely this peripatetic sojourn around broadcasting has in my eyes been my failure - in part because of the manner in which broadcasting was skewed culturally and technologically. You just were not allowed to be multiskilled in broadcasting. This was the era of monoliths.

However the knock on effect, whether it was BBC Newnight or Channel One and the Net in 1994 has been the different methodologies myself and many others have been privy to.

And in many ways it's been these different different insights and workflows, also working alongside some highly talented people, that has shaped me, and is the basis of a book in which I can reveal methods and tips.

Viewmagazine.tv was conceived by this mashup in 2005.

Journalism Training
Then there's been the training. Outside of creating stories, it's an area I deeply enjoy and have been fortunate to be involved in training since my early career (87), then South Africa, and more recently working with the Press Association and various outfits around the world e.g. Cairo TV.

Training I have learned has to be bespoke, because you're dealing with a range of experiences and personalities. There's no one size fits all.

Lecturing has different challenges balancing theory and practicals around a middle ground whereby students must reap the rewards of their own research - pedagogy.

We're in the final project phase of supervision at the moment with the potential for some amazing student work to emerge. And when it does it will be there work, sweat and toil.

The brief: take a single story issue and building a story. Chapter 8 by the way in the book.

Freytag's basic triangle as seen in Stephen Meadow's interactive, sits at the core of good solid story tellings, with an obvious plot featured in David's book. It can also be modified within multimedia.

It's not just the changes enveloping educational journalism we're all aware of but the experiments, and successful outcomes that many of us are looking for.

Those answers, I often believe do not lie in the profession, as many of Harvard Business Review articles in business strategy have shown.

Southbank Centre's Artistic Director Jude kelly, last January launched Collision - a deeply rich invigorating programme for mid carer artists. Any Journalism educator reading this would be minded to have a close look at it.

My good friend Patrice Schneider and I shared thoughts on a similar idea, and the concept is still up for grabs. Bring together creative journalists of different disciplines and create the surroundings for a healthy exchange of ideas.

Not as a conference, but something more tangible. Mr Westbrook, we will get the creative fight club up an running.

But perhaps after its had an outing in Chongqing, China. Next month four profs, me and my head of department head out to one of its leading universities.

So back to the beginning, where our education seems to be waning, (there are still great pockets of excellence by the way) the Chinese are upping the stakes. China's projected growth is a whopping 11.9% and the news today that China may allow its Yuan to appreciate, just shows the commanding position it has found itself in.

The mood appears to be China understands the value of investment, and quietly behind the scenes. There's a double whammy here.

Firstly predictions from an international conf. I attended that by 2015 the number of foreign students from China to Australia, the US and UK will fall significantly, will take crucial foreign earnings from theses territories.

It will also squarely place China, with its penchant for educational innovation, at the forefront. Innovation, web, China... don't scoff!

Our mission next month is to share ideas in lecturing and mentoring students, alongside training exercises which are designed so students can network ideas. I don't doubt also that we'll pick up vital methods, which I believe will work here.

And that in itself I hope will prove worthwhile inclusion in tomb I'm hoping will blur the borders between many of the storytelling disciplines.

Google says Chinese will dominate web in 5 years time

The opening para on Readwriteweb reads

"Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time". More

I'm not in the least surprised.

I lecture students from some of China's leading universities and while this is a generalisation, they adopt and mash up, and their general knowledge about the West and tech is not reciprocated the other way. Reasons of course; again this is a perception.

Here I'm giving an undergrad class a task after a forty minute accelerated lecture. What is the future of the web?

Regarding broadband speeds, although the word has already been appropriated, the concept of Outernet - the net on everywhere - has been a constant theme for me, written up on Apple Pofiles.

Most likely our ambitions will run alongside these new variables, but I'd imagine there's some furious modeliing and trend extrapolation going on.

Was it John McHale that said: "The future of the past is in the future. The future of the present is in the past. The future of the future is the present".

Should that read the future ic Chinese?

Count Down to China

To coincide with China's Olympic countdown and ahead of a visit to China, Viewmagazine.tv will be airing ( good word that, since it's a broadbandcast) a couple of vignette reports from China courtesy of my colleague who has just returned from lecturing there, Kienda.

Two years ago as London geared up for its Olympic bid, one of its ambassadors, the indefatigable Jude Kelly, a figure I so admire, invited me to the top of Canary Wharf - one of the highest buildings in London to brainstorm with an eye opening group of people.

Everyone from the creative industries of one sort or another was there. Jude also gave me her video blog she'd made from Athens during their Olympic run. It's never been aired before so I'm looking forward to cutting it and linking it to a Kienda's China stories and a feature on another colleague and friend in the runnings for scoring for the Olympics.

What I really like about Kienda and Jude's video is the personal nature of the reports. That's what VJ does so well and so what you get is an authored report which include some truly interesting stuff.