Journalism software integration

No one said it would be easy.

And there's no such emerging piece of software that screams Journalism.

History tells us that the gramophone's intital use was for recording voice before some bright spark decided music had some merit.

And Facebook, summer of 2005, when a professor at Missouri introduced it to me, had nothing to do with journalism, but students staying in touch with one another.

Co-opting is certainly de rigeur now.

There's a nice piece from Storm Media, which co-opts an animated cut out expression to tell a visual story, which works equally well as a pop video.

How did they do it? Well you can ask Brian himself if you're going to be a Wemedia. The organisers are looking to see if we both can lead various groups into the deconstruction of multimedia.

Amazing story telling
But back to his piece. After Effects!

Yep by now, you're editor has just figured out what flash is. Don't even mention Director ( huh!)

But after effects is the unsung hero in film making.

This one by Storm Media, mixes animated masks, in which you need to separate images firstly from their background. Then Camera and 3D on a path.

It is time consuming. Rob Chiu put together a project like this for his "Black Day to Freedom". And there were a few nights when we spoke, it sounded truly labouring.

But as you can see the results, Media Storm and the Ronin, are brilliant.

But how do you visualise the end goal if you've no idea of the ware or what's possible?

How do you get into that zone?

More later, but this year's motto could be learn a new software package that has nothing to do with journalism per se, but will have huge pluses down the line.

p.s I'm using animated masks from Flash for the front cover of Viewmagazine.tv, which I'll build up to something.

The Now and When Journalists - creative journalism

Everyone talks about the "Now and "When" journalists as if there's a magic elixir connecting the two.

Young savvy versus old fogey
Tech heads versus the paper toolers
The Yes-I cans versus the No you should not.

There is no science to this other than old fashion grease monkey hard work. All the aforementioned are fallacies in their own right.

However, met with a blistering array of new tech tools, it's easy to put off the learning process and say "when I have time"..

Multimedia for instance is more than re-arranging the furniture to disseminate more of the same via other platforms - a practice enviable in itself.

We flock to the now journalists because they offer both substance, innovation and food for thought.

And in conversation we soon come to realise they plough a different approach in thinking, often borrowing ideas from different disciplines. Roger Martin's How Successful Leaders Think plays to this idea.


Creative Journalism

One of the exercises I run in Video Journalism training is the primacy dump.

Get hold of an assignment and through sheer gut instinct figure out how you might execute the job. Then discard the idea, and again, and again.

There's nothing wrong with it, but it came too easy. The more we're forced to think beyond our own comforts, the greater variation we might introduce into production of the story.

When you're back from that course on "creative thinking" imbibed new methodologies, been ridiculed and thought why bother, see whether you're better informed at tackling the story another way.

I came to realise the value of working multiples on a story working alongside an advertising mentor, John Staton, at re-active.net

It is easy to turn from a now journalists to a when, particularly when cynicism sets in.

Video is the richer media and there's just so much you can do with other than talking heads, but you'll still have to know why you're using it. If not even the most enthusiastic of now journos can turn sour.

Exchanging ideas with some senior journalists last week, one of them exclaimed his company hadn't had that conversation yet: the what are we doing and why?

And sometimes unless you've brought someone to shake things up [a consultant/ expert etc.] it's difficult to know where to start.

But try we must, experiment we should, and fail every so often we must not be afraid of.

If you're not a high consumer of news, [read Blog - Hugh Hewitt], can still find time to blog after a knackering day, and not afraid to experiment, then small wonder you're in touch with the Now, and age has little to do with it.