What if Stephen Soberbergh did journalism? Apple talk by Knight Batten Winner David Dunkley Gyimah

What if Stephen Soberbergh did journalism?

If the evidence of his involvement in Citizen Four is anything to by, it would be memorable, perhaps entertaining, and above all cinematic.

With a 100 hours of video being uploaded to Youtube every minute, there’s good reason to do cinematic video — you stand out from the crowd.

Ask a focus group of young people, as I have done through academic research, about any piece of video/film they remember and invariably they’ll name a fictional film.

There’s something about cinema.

Journalists coil with opprobrium at the thought. At the least it’s naive — cinema is fiction and once we fictionalise journalism we’re in Alice in Wonderland territory.

At best, the two are immiscible. Good heavens is this a real journalist writing this gumf.

At Apple in a week and a bits time I’m looking to push this gumf out with a supertanker. The popular manifestation of cinematic journalism is Vice.com, and there’s a health warning attached.

Vice will joined by many others — lining up in new academies and the corridors of Youtube readying themselves for online dominance. It’s a warning to traditional broadcasters. [read How Vice became the voice of a generation].

Existing, somewhat antiquated, theories around journalism are feeling the squeeze as a pragmatism in digital that’s shaping new provisional theories soars.

The issue of cinematic has been a perennial one, eschewed by the news establishment in the past in defence of their industry. The web changed all that. Journalism can still berate this pretentious cousin, cinematic journalism, but it’s the audience, er, steward!

That doesn’t necessarily mean the audience is right, even if they’re dragging the advertisers with them, but academic research shows they’re onto something — particularly from a creative movement within videojournalism.

If you can make it down to Apple, I hope you won’t be disappointed. Some of the definates so far include short films on what NBCs President of News makes of cinematic videojournalism.

How Robert Drew created Cinematic journalism in the 1960s. And an interview with one of the UK’s fiest videojournalists Steve Punter — who sadly passed away last year.

BTW When film journalism was first conceived it was cinematic, then something happened ☺

David Dunkley Gyimah was one of the UK’s first official videojournalists. His worked for the BBC and Channel 4 News. He’s a recipient of several awards. His doctorate, a six year global study covers the impact of cinematic journalism. You can find out more about his talk here.

The Art of a New International VideoJournalism - A Brit, US Social Scientist, and Syrian Talent

EPILOGUE

By 3 O'clock in the afternoon, it dawned on me the magnitude of the story. We're holed up in a hotel near the Turkish-Syrian border. That's me standing on the bed.

Young Syrian journalists in the room, fifteen in all, have taken huge risks to cross over. Their stories are powerful, yet untold, and international businesses regularly lift or take parts of their report with no remuneration.

We're trying something called cinema journalism - an artistic form of news making. The story really starts here, almost thirty years ago... Five minutes of the film can be viewed below...

Nineteen eight-seven

Looking across the auditorium at some of the US’ most respected educators, Donald Schön presented a simple yet powerful tale he had recounted several times.

Its impact was no less emphatic for professionals who were not educators, such as designers, health workers, and for that matter journalists.

You’re riding a bike and you begin to fall to the left. How do you quickly regain your composure?

Turn Right
Turn Left
I don’t know
It’s an irrelevant question

The answer, the MIT social scientist said was to turn into the left. It has to do with the bike, which acts like a gyroscope, re-finding its centre of gravity. Racing car drivers braking around a bend at 200kph know this. But what about those who might say turn the other way? In practice, Schön continued you don’t fall off so what’s going on.

Often, we might know what to do, without necessarily being able to put this into words. This phenomenon Schön called reflection-in-action.

Doctors will sometimes detect an illness, not based on a clinical diagnosis but a hunch. Designers make use of reflection-in-action to ponder a new design, like the Stata Center in MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the concept appears impossible, and journalism?

Well, swathes of journalists have creatively thought through the process of compiling a report against a deadline when the odds have been stacked against them — but there’s a catch.

Schön’s address poked at education on the one hand and the professions on the other. There is an enslavement to the packaging of knowledge in academia he said, and the rigid modular form students are taught does not give rise to what he called reflection-in-action, or reflection-on-action. One is an ongoing process, the other occurs over time.

Here, students should have the artistic freedom to experiment, to develop new forms, to ‘make it up’ within a framework and assess their work thereafter. The idea caught on with many US educators doubling as action researchers who incorporated Schön’s teaching into their classes.

But arguably and generally television journalism has been in stasis.

A case in point, students undertaking television journalism or documentary will often work through how to create news and documentaries based on a rationale of the way things ARE done.

Not by what could be done, which is in stark contrast to visual or graphic designers who employ wide discursive methods to reach their goal.

News, we’re told, requires the use of one camera. You can’t use music, and the narrative has to be ‘he said, she said’ assuming total knowledge from the journalist. Often, it’s worth asking the lecturer or practitioner why?

Schön called this condition technical rationality. In one of several books,The Reflective Practitioner, published four years earlier from his 1987 AGM talk to the American Educational Research Association, Schön elaborated.

Technical rationality confines many professions to be rooted in a scientific norm of practice, what’s called positivism where data is derived from logical and mathematical reasoning.

It leaves little room for much needed artistry in experiments that would expand knowledge in ways that are unpredictable. A popular way to look at the two systems, postivism and reflection-in-action based on artistic methods, is the Apollo 13 near disaster.

If it was logic that got the crew nearly to the moon, it was lengthy periods of reflection-in-action, tearing up the rule book, shown in the film by Gary Sinese’s character that got them safely back to earth.

Gary Sinise in Apollo 13 Copyright: © 1995 Universal Pictures

The Reflective Practitioner has since become one of the most cited and talked about books for researchers talking about their practice.

Whilst journalism is not included in Schön’s book, the similarities are clear. The way television journalism is, and delivered by experts, has been fixed for the last fifty years. It’s based on a positivism, so issues such as objectivity, balance, trust are thrust before student journalists by professionals as absolutes.

New Journalism
In 2001 when Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel published Elements of Journalism, a book synthesised from several industry meetings from conversations started at the Harvard Faculty club in 1997, issues such as objectivity were finally being jettisoned.

Kovach and Rosenstiel listed ten essentials of journalism, writing that:

Some readers may think items are missing here. Where is fairness? Where is balance? As we researched journalism’s past and looked to its future, it became clear that a number of famililar abd even useful ideas associated with news were to vague to rise to the level of essential principles of journalism. Fairness, for instance, is subjective a concept that it offered little guidance in how to operate.

While Schön is not, and neither am I, criticising the many hard-working educators and journalists who ply their craft, Schön’s reflection-in-action advocates change, not as a cosmetic procedure, but to advance our knowledge and profession. He states:

Our systems need to maintain their identity, and their ability to support the self-identity of those who belong to them, but they must at the same time be capable of transforming themselves.

Television news is a Porche, often presented in a Skoda body. It embraces a language system that is so vast, so rich in expression, but has confined itself to a scientific norm of practices.

The camera needs to be placed here — inevitably leading to the rule of thirds. The reporter’s job is to voice-over bits of the film where an interviewee isn’t speaking, and a report needs to be 1.20’.

All of these have specific reasons for how and why they were brilliant at the time and why they would work when NBC news pioneer Frank Reuven popularised the news package.

If reportage is the skill and knowledge of articulating complex issues to an audience, then even in these video-utopian times there is still a vast terrain that videojournalism is reluctant to enter.

The artistry derived from experimenting and peeling back from technical rationality lies within a journalism that embraces Schön’s reflection-in-action. Sadly, such artistry is not taught.

Call it an artistic form of videojournalism or even a hybrid form of cinema — which this author has spoken about at the International Festival of Journalism in Perugia, Apple stores in London, and CUNYs Reinvent TV in New York, in which Jeff Jarvis and Hal Straus convened a gathering of twenty professionals to examine the future of TV.

That Syrian film mentioned earlier...

Young British Artists
In the UK an attempt at a new journalism happened twenty years ago to this day with the UK’s first officially recognised videojournalists.

Thirty British youngsters, many of whom were picked because they had never worked in television, were trained by the father of videojournalism Michael Rosenblum in an intensive three month regime.

The group made a serious stab at reworking television journalism though as yet there’s little evidence of their reflection-in-action being adopted by UK journalism.

I was one of them and over the years have become more familiar with reflective practice. But here’s the catch mentioned earlier. You can reflect, but you can’t affect change unless

a) You’re willing to step out of the conventions that so powerfully hold you

b) You are in possession or are seeking to find this non conventional solution.

In my case I have looked to cinema and art for these, which would lead to incredible journey’s, such as becoming an artist-in-resident at the UK’s illustrious Southbank Centre, or travelling to near the Syrian border to make a film.

Channel One folded after four years but its legacy amongst the founding staff lives on. The history of Channel One and its practitioners is due for publication next year from my PhD.

The company folded after four years but its legacy amongst the founding staff lives on. The history of Channel One and its practitioners is due for publication next year from my PhD.

Today, social networks and the impact of the Net have finally forced institutional journalism to rethink its practices. They’ve been dragged here screaming.

But the field, at least in video, is still wide open. When Adam Westbrook, part of a new generation of videojournalists and writers enquires about new artistic forms on the Net, he invokes a spirit of journalism, a reflection-in-action, that I believe became conscious amongst audiences 20 years ago and is now, finally heading to critical exposure.

@viewmagazine

www.viewmagazine.tv
David is a Knight Batten Winner in Innovation in Journalism and an international award-winning videojournalist. His journalism career spans 27 years working for outfits such as Channel 4 News, ABC News and Newsnight. His PhD looks at the future of videojournalism.

Video Journalism: How a variability in confidence impacts videojournalism news stories

Students being entertained by one of the UK's most respected journalists, Jon Snow

When someone asks you how you're doing?

The common response could be: I'm doing fine, otherwise, 'I'm fine, how are you?'

This reciprocal effect to the common usage of language is best illustrated in teaching manuals for the travellers to foreign countries.

You know it well, when learning Spanish, French or when a non-English speaker is learning English for the first time.

Invariably the recipient of your phrase can judge you to be a novice. Where local parlance would do, such as when Brits say: Alright! with the inflexion indicating a question, this can be lost in translation.

Every language moves from a first-base approach of communications to more informal. less rigid, exchanges.

In 'Good Morning Vietnam' Robin William's character breaks the rules with his Vietnamese class he's gate crashed.

'Give me some skin!' he intones to one student as a response to 'how are you?'

Poets are some of the leading proponents of up ending words and meaning as this video I created about the British poet Lemn Sissay shows.



In effect, poets and those who purposefully veer away from 'Im fine, how are you'?  exhibit what I call an indexical variability in confidence.

It allows them to do things, in which they confidently assume others may understand. Television, a domain, I have been associated with intimately for more than 25 years as both a news reporter, producer or anchor, and then a lecturer is one of the most interesting areas for observing this variability in confidence.

In my PhD thesis looking at communications and reportage in the 21st century, I took on the task of trying to understand how TV News was shaped from proponents of documentary, factual and even cinema. There are many strands that I will delineate through this blog. Here's one of them.

The understanding that video is not a language in the same way as the spoken word is a fixed now, but it is agreed by scholars that it is language-like. The way we use a camera, which is naturalised, depends on a filmic language.

Many educationists, teaching programmes, training centres and tertiary study programmes teach this language, and heuristics shows this to mainly be the: 'how are you?', I'm fine approach'.

It makes sense too. It is the most accessible and though may sound banal and simple guarantees a lot of  novices and 'foreigner's will understand.

Fo that reason, the language of Television News in the way video constructs meaning has not changed much, compared to how poets would orate.

But my studies came across a group of individuals, significant by how they are respected by their peers, exhibiting a variability in confidence in their language of video. They are neither tethered by social communities, and come from different territories, which makes it even more interesting.

They perform functions with video that would normally be eschewed. A German scholar Wolfgang Kissel brought to this my attention almost a decade ago, when he was evaluating my work.

The video of Lemn Sissay is perhaps an example of video interpreting an event, breaking the 'how are you?'.

But now I prefer to turn the tables on others to find out what makes them tick.


Confidence Evangelists
What then enables them to do what they do? On observation is this confidence comes from, among others, being radicalised by practitioners outside of their domain.

An examples of this is, if you work in television journalism  and I say: when you think of news amongst people like Cronkite, Murrow, Snow or Amanpour, what would you say?

The chances are  you're likely to reciprocate a dialogue along the lines of one of the above, or even journalists closer to them.

If you ask for any other influences. If you're depleted, you'll say nothing else.

Interestingly, a couple of things are happening. psychologists such as Robyn LeBoeuf and Eldar Shafir identify what I have done as 'Anchoring' you to supply an answer based on the question supplied.

However, those journalists that I have researched from my six-year PhD thesis exhibit a)  a confidence so they break out of the anchoring and b) deliver answers that are surprising.

They are less inclined to name a journalist, but more inclined to posit filmmakers, such as: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrei Tarkovsky,  John Ford or David Fincher, and many more.

What does this tell us?

That the aforementioned filmmakers are recognised in some guise as being poets of their craft. The 'give me some skin' parade.

That for videojournalists, what matters, surfacing for the first time is an interest in the process of fllmmaking, rather than solely journalism, as the writer/reporter, which appears to be a given.

And that just as over the years poets of the spoken/written word have been recognised, that an assumption is these videojournalists, whom though disparate in numbers are being recognised by industry, will likely inspire others.

In a couple of weeks time, I'm travelling to Columbia to engage in a debate about the future of television. Though I will not discuss this, it anchors into an overall schema for a new type of television-like I call the Outernet - a hybrid system.

End+

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How Vice Magazine's (Vice.com) became successful and its presence that can be replicated

'No Violence'

'You don't know violence'

'You deserve it'

The man smartly dressed in a dark suit approaches his seated subject with deference. "Excuse me'. he says. Moment's later he is straddled across the man knocking seven bells out of him.

The scene is not staged, and at first glance it appears that a TV reporter has lost his sense of decorum.

Few scenes in a documentary elicit as sharp an intake of breath and gasps of incredulity as this. 'What the F***' !!!! chime several of the younger viewers in the room I'm in.

The suited man is Okuzaki Kenzo, a war veteran who single-handedly is trying to track down army officers in his regiment who committed unpunished war atrocities 32 years ago whilst holed up in Japanese camps in New Guinea.

These crimes included eating captured soldiers. Locals were dubbed 'black pigs' and captured Americans, 'white pigs'. Black pigs were eaten.

This multiple award-winning documentary by Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara is an exemplar in the field of documentary making. The Emperors Naked Army Marches On made in 1987, by today's standards might be called 'Immersive'.

Indeed, immersive journalism is observed amongst a new generation of filmmakers as a new category in factual filmmaking. Witness the rise of Vice Magazine, whose juggernaut of uber cool filmmaking owns, if not is wholly responsible for custody of this new term.

The rise of Vice Magazine is often retold in mythical terms,  some believe it to be a johnny-come-lately overnight, but as this Independent newspaper articles shows it's an eagle rising from urban regions of Canada; its birth place via a government grant. That was 20 years ago.

Today it's a global empire and a hard won reputation exemplifying the mantra:' you've got to be in it to win it'. No wonder Mr Media Murdoch came calling. Vice's popularity is well earned in an industry that tends to reward media executives with mimicry and the ability to tinker at the edges.

What made The Emperors Naked Army Marches On particularly absorbing derives from qualities and cultural milieu that Vice sails close to. Though it's yet to feature any of its reporters beating up their interviewees.

But Vice too is not a phenomenon in the ambit of cultural wonderment, but an example of some basic tenants more fundamental of human behaviour, and the sneaking middle finger to corporate media befuddlement.

A minor point first, which might seem like angels dancing on the head of a pin, but stay with me.

Has Vice found a new journalism called immersive? No! Does its constituents care? No? Is mainstream media worried? Yes! And for that traditional media needs some way to define Vice's output  at board meetings with an accompanying consultant so they can replicate the franchise. That mimicry thing again.

The narrative is Vice is doing cinematic journalism. It's an ambiguous phrase. What does cinematic mean? To the generalist, it is the mimicry of a film perception whose fidelity is 4K, use of music integral to the form, and subject matter which is populist and youthfully-skewed.

Immersive???
Generally speaking all memorable factual films are immersive, and the argument of separating 'immersion' from 'Gonzo' as a special genre is a problematic one. Critics claim immersive differs from the Hunter Thompson approach that wraps the story around the author, as opposed to the experience of the author as the defining theme.

Channel 4 in the UK in the late 80s, early 90s took the radical approach of eschewing professional reporters for its documentary strands like Unreported World by looking for authors who were professionals in their field.

The comparisons fashioned between 'immersion' from 'Gonzo' in their respective fields of film amd print, fundamentally different media, is and ill-suited one.

The daddy of Gonzo, Thompson, was an essayist/columnist and a bad-ass writer, whose recourse to sell-destruction and daring-dos became the story in print.

It was the equivalent of Jim Morrison of the Doors penning The End after a mind-bending white-dust session.

In film, it would be like giving Marlon Brando, or Steve McQueen a camera in the 1970s to document their wild times.

In the 70s any television, whether journalism or documentary couldn't dare come within a comets distance to anything resembling drug-fuelled reportage.

Reporting and the documentary business framed by Western standards was generally respectful and professionalised.  Robert Drew's Primary (1960), Jean Rouch's Chronicle of  Summer (1960),  Ed Murrow's Harvest of Shame (1960)  are themselves captivating and immersive examples of of journalism for reasons that the audience are lost in the wash of the films.

And all of them, a significant point for this articles, were different to the prevailing status quo.

But for a closer definition of this so-called immersive journalism without the gonzo-fest, Paul Garrin's Fuck Vertov (1989) stands head and shoulder above anything in its time.

Garrin, an artist and activist, publicly and in a monumental way shows the power of a new handheld video cameras,  which was ridiculed at the time as the home movie camera.

Garrin talking about the revolution

He films himself getting caught up in New York Lower East side's clashes between residents and NYPD police. The story went national and Garrin's life was threatened. But not before proclaiming a new form of de facto immersive journalism.  He was not a reporter, and so did not have to play by the rules and somewhat immodestly frames his discovery as witnessing.

Garrin's 1989 film trope however did not become a mainstream style, but the 1990s were looming and a fundamental mutant relationship between technology and societies' behaviour was about to become a defining moment.

The key to Vice's Success
If, as a culture writer or social historian, you examine the different styles of film/news styles and the audience's reception to it, something both illuminating and fascinating occurs. By marking a genre, that is broad key film styles, you can define the time and the public mood at the time.

Each period of the 20th century possesses a dominant and generic style of film/documentary that is strongly motivated by what's going on in society - that is how we're living.

A key moment I have chosen to start from is the 1960s. Turning points can be detected from the war years apriori as society, worn down by the conflict, looks to restore respect and deference that mirrors the style of film and reporting that emerges. Grierson's documentary mode of the 1940s reigns.

In the 1950s, and cusp of 1960s, society begins to shift. Young people are being placed at the centre of consumerism, Beatlemania emerges, Rebels are without a cause, the Paris Riots spark a global renaissance. Equality in the Civil Rights underlines humanities push for equality.

All these both reinforce attitudes and individual attitudes erect behaviour which affect governance.

The film style of Robert Drew, and before that Free Cinema emerges from Drew and Lindsay Anderson's antipathy to corporate TV and film, and the pair are as irreverent as any young person to scheduled news today.

Filmmaker Robert Drew discusses his ideas that created American cinema verite (1962) from Jill Drew on Vimeo.

Cinema intimacy and mockumentaries, such as David Holzman's Diary, appear as answers to prevailing deficiencies in life. In the UK, society can begin to look inwards and 'take the piss out of its self'.




In the 1970s, there is an attempt towards the recalibration of traditional values. 'We are all in this together', as Lyndon Johnson tries to fix the narrative for 'our' boys and the Vietnam war. The mood transitions from liberalism to the hard knocks of Nixon.

The clues aren't to be found necessarily and exclusively on Television News. TV's journalism structure is on a high to make money and has no wish to change then as now.

But in documentary and cinema, there is a shift to capture the woes, anxieties and ambiguity of society. It is a reflexive state notes documentary scholar Bill Nichols.

Core films e.g. Coppola's Apocalypse Now and ET mirror new national bogies and uncertainties. Cinema Verite is waylaid in the 1970s, subsumed, of sorts, Robert Drew would tell me in an interview into mainstream TV.

In the US 60 Minutes, conceived in 1968, imbricates this new style of TV journalism reportage as 'participatory' journalism, meshed with the new found verite.

It comes into its own in the 1970s. In this scene from Ed Bradley's report on Vietnam boat people fleeing their country bound for Malaysia, Bradley the reporter becomes rescuer. So much for the objective reporter.

Ed Bradley helps Vietnamese boat people in his film

There is a tacit wink to personalistation, 'immersive' filmmaking then for the time and place. In the UK World in Action invents a style that is aggressive documentary making without a reporter. Paul Greengrass is one of its more famous graduates.

By the 1980s, the gloves are coming off. Whatever lessons society learnt from the 1960s are about to be put into practice. Baby Boomers of the 1960s, now adults, can start to fathom an individualism glimpsed way back. In the UK Thatcher, both innovatory figure to some and divisive to others reflects the whims of society.

We're allowed to get emotional. The Brits welcome Phil Donahue onto daytime and for the first time shockingly start airing on national TV their dirty linen.

In film mode the reflexive style, as detailed by documentary scholar Bill Nichols gives way to the performance strand. Nick Bloomfield, a soundman, peculiarly fronts the screen as reporter. It's weird-looking at the time and is redolent of the professional expert as spokesperson.

In 1991 it culminates in Bloomfield's signature film, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife.  It is a brilliant film that sends up South Africa's Right Winger Eugene Terre'blanche,  and Terre'blanche never gets the subtlety.

The 80s and 90s is about meism.  Me, me, me, me, me.  Films in this period largely rejected the status quo writes Nichols that is : 'Voice-of-God commentary not because it lacked humility, but because it belonged to an an entire epistemology. or way of seeing and knowing the world, no longer deemed acceptable'.

Even corporate television that had played with the style, but rejected young people for the 'conservative' reporter, gave in.  In the UK, BBC Reportage, made by young people, presented by young people, and  the Word landed on TV like a French Exocet.

Reportage broke rules and the niceness of TV's conservatism. It  tracked down paedophiles, mercinaries who laundered their money in the city, how criminals could steal money from your bank account with nothing more than a plastic plain card, and asked if young people do the crime, f***ing don't cry.

BBC Reportage from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

The rules were blown to smitherins. It's in this climate that Vice is born, alongside youth movements such as The Face, ID magazine ( which Vice would later buy) and a new rage in people activism.

Younger generation were demanding more from the media and could finally settle on outlets that could sate their appetite.

Vice had an invisble helping hand to later stardom in Canada. Whilst the TV Networks were still predominately older fogeys,  City TV in Canada invented the concept of the videojournalist, with young cafe-societiees wanting to run the show.

City TV in Canada, just like Channel One TV in London, which also embraced the ethos of young people TV had a good run, before they changed tack, or in Channel One's case, closed down. Reportage also saw out its time. The brash approach was giving way to a softer edge again, or so we're made to think.

Society was entering an 'US' phase - individualism upended by social networking. It was no longer de rigeur to show off. But here's the big difference.

Vice kept going. Vice TV could never have worked on TV because of the manner in which TV's business advertising interests is skewed to baby boomer high earners, as Current TV found out, but by staying in the game, Vice is reaping its rewards.

For Vice, and other big youth hitters at the time, like Heavy.com and F1 (a music site now defunct)
online presented fresh opportunities towards a different growth proposition. The embrace towards Vice, via a long tail of fandom is a reaction to the times were in. The audience, younger, tired of hearing what they should do or want, now has its own voice and outlet. It's MTV slanted to popular current affairs.

The style is performative, reflexive, observational and to older folks 'brazen'. In fact it's a post modernist stew largely prescriptive towards performance.

In interviews, including ones with me about new styles,  Vice is often cited to me as an example of cinema. It is, but of a particular type of cinema for largely its western audience. That's not a criticism, but that societies export styles they're used to within a given time and region.

For that reason one thing's clear, the audience will change again, a different style that soothes the audience will become dominant, the web will enable the recycling of tropes that are historical, but have been distanced from our viewing, and so long as Vice is alert to those dynamics, its relevance will hold.

All companies, a bit like followers on twitter, are prone to losing fans. The key is to be able to lose enough, but not so much it leaves you lean.

What's next  then as a style guide with society's witnessing sharing, greed, barbarity, extreme lengths towards compassion, is anyone's guess. Transcedental perhaps and going behind words and images towards deeper emotions.

That would be some Vice!

True Video Life : a millennium factual film language

We are fond of neologism in the Video-film world e.g. the Narrative Clip, Mobile film making, Videoblog. 

Often they are tied to specific technologies such as the iPhone  and help the innovative or/and commercially minded sell an idea. If you're lucky, you might even have a film style named after you, guaranteeing you immortality e.g. the Burns effect.

Many film scholars and film makers, such as Brian Winston, author several books on film, will tell you much of what we see today can be traced to the pioneers of the 1960s, 1930s and 1900s. 

Take the Russian film maker Dziga Vertov. In his early 20s in the Soviet Union, he found a job as an editor of news material. In the ensuing years, Vertov devised a way to film people unawares.   It was called Zhin Vrasplokh.

By flash mobbing his subjects or concealing his camera, he could film people without the perennial accusation that the moment people know you are filming them, they change their behaviour.

Today, this technique emerges as the narrative clip. Vertov however constructed stories out of his honed style.

My own neologism today is True Video Life. It emerges from several sources.

• Cahier du cinema - French film makers and scholar's attempt to start a new 'true' film dialogue in the 1960s.
• True Detective and True Blood - for their successful attempts to fold multiple plots into a narrative.
• Videojournalism - from our modern penchant to validate all that we see with video in a sort of Truman existence.

True Video Life is a way to tell bold passionate stories underpinned by deep engagement with film, whilst trying to inspire the audience.  Its followed with a new site revolutionising viewmagazine.tv  These aren't easy asks to accomplish.  

But the last couple of years of filmmaking, talking on the circuit and doing a doctorate study on film has proved very useful. True Video Life, is not a process.

The process that makes this form work likes in an innovative film schema called videojournalism-as-cinema.

In film's stylistic characteristics, it's the innovative production of factual material, but stems from collapsing multiple film styles.

Arguably, we could say we already do that. Yes, but often we're constrained by what we don't know from the Masters of film communications.

We're told of rules and laws, which at most may guide us, but if we know why these rules were made, you'll find many of them antiquated.

Imagine if you could take the innovative technologies of motor manufacturing to produce a car fit for the 21st century. That's how I see True Video Life. But unlike the 20th century, there isn't just one model car, but many to suit the appropriate circumstance.

Here's a though, literally. Could you tell a news story in which rather than the subjects speak, you decipher their thoughts and bod language to tell the story? This may be a more extreme form, but it opens up the possibilities of building on film's grammar.

Which by the way, exists not because it has a fixed language, but because clever filmmakers have done something that resonates with viewers and hence becomes part of video/ film's lexicon.

In the coming weeks I'll expand more on the emergent styles. The next post looks at the the relationship between the size of camera and intimacy and poses the question.

What's so profoundly different in film style for the iPhone? 

International: A British journalism and video affair

This is journalism, as a very British affair. Cue: Rule Britannia.

It may have an international reach, might even be undertaken by an internationalist, with a global view, but ultimately it emanates from a particular place, these shores, with a British sensibility.

There's no point arguing. 

For instance, when the British wanted to enhance their news filmic storytelling in the 1960s, when the world was swallowing new great ideas far more significant than today by the measure of some scholars, they turned to America.

ITN's Cox saw something about what NBC's news pioneer Frank Reuven was doing. His 'aha' moment was this:

"After studying the half-hour bulletins transmitted by the three American networks and examining their newsroom organisations I am convinced that not only will ITN take the half-hour bulletin in its stride, but will produce a better, more varied and flexible show than either CBS, NBC or ABC."

British journalism in the making ,1967, using an Auricon camera

So today the news story form from the Brits has a significantly different proposition to the Americans. Better? Well, that's business hyperbole; by whose standards? 


Fifty years later, this time the Americans would look across stream for their aha moment. Last year NBC hired its first President of News who was a woman (several men had glass in their shirt collars), but, also a Brit.

The French speaking, MBA-shaped, dynamic Deborah Turness was also the first woman editor for ITN. 

Among many things, she is doing a very British affair in journalism in the US at the moment. 

When she tells her staff, I want the "Queen on the loo" stories, the reference is piquantly British. It means searching for those impossible stories.  Ur hum, "loo" is bathroom, the actual porcelain we sit on [TMI].  More on Turness in a minute.

British Media Summit.

Tomorrow I attend the Guardian Media Summit 2014. A stellar line-up as always, The Guardian, an internationalist, but very British newspaper presents...

keynote panel: Digital content in a mobile-first world

As the opening key note, it features the erudite US Jeff Jarvis as moderator with a nice line-up of a British knowledge.

Vincent Blaney, European brand director – media & digital,  Millward Brown
Lori Cunningham, director of digital strategy and revenue, Telegraph Media Group
Paul Hayes, managing director, News UK Commercial
Ben Huh, founder, Cheezburger and Circa
Robert Picard, director, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford

It's not a controversial point, and I am not being jingoistic. Attendants will, for instance, hear how the Telegraph accomplished its aims. Jarvis' guile, knowledge and being from the US gives him a perspective in perceiving what others, perhaps, will not.

In fact, the two left to their own could indulge in that transatlantic pursuit, "You say tomato, I say tomato". The  point which I'll crystallise fully in a moment, is that there is no international standard to journalism. No one way of doing something.

An international view, yes, perhaps, but the vibrancy of journalism, its sociology, is still made fascinating, by how other people in different countries do things. And how they just might work elsewhere.

As my Masters  students research in Online Journalism showed last week, people who read the Telegraph online are likely to have £100,000 tucked away in savings. Betcha you never considered that as part of your strategy.

Searching for Utopian Journalism

Journalism, as a construct, is exciting by the new ideas, from yonder that shape it where it's being debated at source. 

The Internet may have connected us as friends and family by Facebook, but Brits still dunk their biscuits in sugared, milked tea, much to the opprobrium of the French, and Americans. Thanks for the video Joey on how we Brits love cream in our tea.

And sometimes, our search for a journalism of the 21st century requires a "why" question, from a point and place, that might often be overlooked, and considered too puerile.

We constantly intellectualise media and journalism, with searches for Neo's media Matrix that it's almost impossible not to think why we shouldn't debate things like, how having our own personal satellites, will necessitate an evil twin as gateways. p.s you really need to read the last link and yes the personal satellites was the idea of another much respected news maker.

A former Master student of mine asked a basic question. Why does British Journalism engage itself in ruin, rather than advocacy to effect change. If knowledge is power, how is it endlessly used to pursue a pop star's downfall, when searing concentrated attention on politics e.g. Crimea might have more of an impact.

Remember in the 90s when all the websites turned their screens blank in protest or Wiki went offline for a while. What if all the newscasts in the world, showed the same news condemning what was happening in Crimea for 24 hours. Solidarity, yes! Silly,  and impracticable you might think too. Journalism means different things to all.


So back to Turness. Turness contributes to another sensibility of Britishness - my PhD.

A theoretical and practical document, which examines an emergent, powerful 21st century form of journalism and video form which is not yet public access. Though it lurks  under the radar.

For the last six years, double-bent over a Mac, or positioned in any number of areas: 

• Inside ITN's archive vault - examining their media and archive as film

• filming near the Syrian border where young filmmakers spoke about their influences and how they set about storytelling. Many risked their lives daily, which I have made into a self-contained film.
• using my background and expertise to interview experts and observe the best of what the British do, such as Turness, and scores of other talented journalists.

I have been picking at the seams of this knowledge, contorting myself in knots many times, and awakening in moments of clarity to bash out another 5000 words.

Yesterday, culling 6000 words, 97,726 words finally stared at me from the screens. I am exhausted and it still needs to pass through the channels of academia, so in respect of that process I can't talk about its exact contents.

However, I can frame its general ideas. Firstly, there is no such thing as a universal form of video with journalism. Nope, sorry it doesn't exist. If you've been searching for it, breath a sigh of relief. That's my 3000 words of the thesis. 

And far from dancing on the head of the pin, what I write about for 30 percent of the time is a very British affair  - acknowledging a form of journalism which emerged in the 90s, then (sphew!) disappeared.

Does that matter? Well, it's a bit like an archaeologist stumbling across findings  e.g. Ötzi the iceman and realising that, hey wait a minute so we got that wrong. Because what followed afterwards, was a direction by powerful media forces that reverted to the tried and tested tradition.

By way of analogy, if Twitter and Facebook had been devised by traditional media, they would have used to to publicise their running orders to their own journalists in the field.  Just as well then!  But that's what happened in video news storyform.

This exhaustive research has had its moments. A couple of examples.

What connects this figure below, as a reporter twenty years ago, with this BAFTA award winning film, The Imposter?
 

Dimtri of Raw TV

And the connection to this photojournalist, whose day job was a British Editor, who was the top of his game with GMTV during the Gulf War, who helped the BBC comprehend videojournalism?

These two and 28 others were part of an informal movement, ( an experiment by default) chosen from 3000 applicants. Illustrated in the below figure. For every person chose, 100 people were considered. 

So what was it that defined the group and how has it been that they have been able to tap into innovative behaviour?

I'll shed some light on that in the coming days. How the research took three critical strands to investigate innovative form of  journalism, and how it commenced  following events in 2005, and 2006, when I recieved: The knight Batten Awards and International Videojournalism Awards. 

It wasn't the awards per se, but what happened next with dialogues between groups and individuals.