BBC Interview -Vlog Butterfly

Today, in a unique exercise for viewmagazine.tv a double whammy, an interview with the head of BBC News Peter Horrocks covering extensive ground in multimedia news and a vlog butterfly, in which 8 super bloggers and authorities in their own right posed a video question which Peter answered.

More soon

Vlog Buterfly

One day to go...

Heath Ledger The death of web news morals

Tragic by any circumstances, but also distressing that his parents learned about their son's fate via a news broadcast.

The explosion of media has a downside; the interminable race to be first.

Yes it wasn't born in the web era, but rears its head more often.

We saw it nakedly during the Virginia Tech shootings, and we'll continue to witness a slump in an area that must be preserved in the bid to tell others business: respect and a code of ethics.

David Brewer who was one of the earlier web evangelists to set up CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera shared a telling thought with me.

The desk team of a well known news brand reported an incident giving the names of the deceased; the incident itself happened on the African continent.

But watching the news from home, David hit the phones to instruct the team to cease to report further the names of those dead.

There was some bewilderment he says from editorial, but a call later from a senior editor thanking David put it into perspective.

When Africa seems so far away, when you don't know those involved, have no affinity, but know their names, what's the harm?

"We must first inform the next of kin", David would stress. Absolutely!

The dash for news, unmoderated, plentiful in its supply presents new dilemmas which outlets with no code of conduct could care less about.

Being first and gaining important currency and kudos overshadows a dying agreement of scruples and good judgement.

Whether it's ledger, Virginia or Africa, there are people affected by the pain of that story.

They deserve better.

We should try and keep some perspectives.

Feature stories - Testicular Cancer

I'm fishing out some stories that I made for BBC national radio and this one srtuck me. Testicuar cancer - one of those issues that dare speak its name.

I met a young man ex, navy in the Isle of Wight who'd had a testice removed because of the illness.

Miraculously he did manage to have children.

A specialist at Hammersmith hospital advocated self-examination by men.

I quipped after going behind the curtain, er slightly embarassing though isn't it.

Women exam their breasts all the time, no more embarrassing than what men should be doing.

I don't have the figures to hand, the presenter would have read out some about trends etc. but it does make you ponder.

I'll put it on itunes shortly

Front page of view features a little promo for the piece on multimedia with the vlog butterfly project - two days away.

Shoot Bourne - even cheaper @!^*!!

Thanks to Sionphoto who leaves this comment in response to last post which deserves a huge light of attention.

thanks muchos

sionphoto said...
...your spec is for PL cinema-cam lenses, which can cost a small fortune.

I have a Sony HVR-A1E with a Letus 35mm adaptor:

http://tinyurl.com/2ughqo

35mm adaptors usually flip the image upside down in the viewfinder, so you need an external monitor to 'turn' it back round.

The M2 needs an additional 'flip attachment' to turn the image back to normal, whereas the Letus flips the image to normal inside a single unit.

Get some support rods (they say you don't need 'em, but it puts a hell of a strain on the camera lens filter mount):

http://tinyurl.com/35gocn

and a 35mm stills cam lens (in my case, a 24mm Nikon) and you're good to go for plenty of handheld Cloverfield/Bourne SpewCam action, without having to drag an external monitor round to see which way up everything is...

The whole setup - which coincidentally I only bolted together for the first time yesterday - cost about 700 quid.

Shoot Bourne on DV Cam

There have been various improvements to make video look like film. The Panasonic 200 shoots 24p, removing various fields from your timeline and now this.

If you want to blow your competitors apart don't even think twice. Bourne Supremacy on an ultra shoe string budget. Mind you I'm off to find how much it costs first.

5 mins later.....

Back again, I have just found out. I have cribbed this from their site here.

M2 Cinematographer Bundle: HD Edition for PL Cinema Lenses

Includes:

• M2 Cinema Lens Adapter

• Special M2 HD Achromatic lens

• 15mm Rod Support System - 18"

• Arriflex PL lens mount

• Redrock Hard Mount Kit, Shim Kit, and 82mm - 72mm Step-Down Ring

• M2 Cinematographer's cap

• Power Supply

• Carrying Case


M2 Cinematographer Bundle: HD Edition for PL Cinema Lenses.

Price: $1,821.45

I;m not endorsing the company per se, but the results truly are stunning and considering, not so long ago a lens on this thing her could cost you 15,000 UKP odd this looks a good buy.


Shooting in South Africa for a Videojournalism feature for Channel 4 News

The design of online film making

I'm tipping a big hat here to Master of Flash turned Master of online film, Hillman Curtis, who is an extraordinary inspiration.

A number of speakers from Flash on the Beach went out for a spaghetti session couple of years back and I was able quizz him on some of the things he does.

That was after this interview here which, yes I'm gushing, but seriously if you don't know his work, I'd recommend you look at his site and short films.

On pentagram, he achieves the most incredible shallow depths of films, so I dropped him a line and he revealed how he gets it.

You've gota love film cuz Hillman engineers different lenses on his DVcam and the truth is it's not that simple a, and b, you need a really good cam op to get focus.

The aesthetics on this makes the point

If you subscribe to American Cinematographer, you'll find some handy tips in there which could easily influence your VJ shoot.

Vlog Butterfly

Two days to what could turn out to be quite an extraordinary vlog butterfly

CSS for journalists

It's not often I post about current Masters journalism students - my own rules of confidentiality et al, but today possibly proves a point for emerging journalism and journalists.

Within a couple of hours they'd learned CSS div tags and then with a deadline of 40 mins looming created the two front page holding sites, radically different to one another, in css to w3 standards.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

I posted a while back how at a Nato war Games exercise we made packages and filmed/interviewed senior personnel in situ of a conflict 10 mins, took 15 mins to edit and post, whilst then creating new host sites 10 mins.

Here's an aspect of that a teaser of the Nato programme, and then out in more detail what goes on.

I'll need to change the "load movie" variable as it takes a wee long to load, but bear with it.

Apologies I have just seen this, but my site was wiped off the server a couple of months ago and it looks like in reloading all the data, I missed loading the trailer.
(will reload soon)

The Cairo shoot with Robb Montgomery was also a fast turnaround; from the time we got into the Old City to the time we left a couple of hours later, the story and edit was in the can or mac I should say. We sourced all our interviewees cold.

Part of the technique, like videojournalism is learning to undershoot - go for the essentials but covering all bases.

I hope to expand on that when I hook up with Rob from in Chicago
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
That's where we as journalists can go with this. Swift turnaround, videojournalism films and css div tag sites to house, Metatagged n' al.

Next the IM6 approach of multimedia stripping a video and producing the MM package.

The perils of the world.. and er, videojournalism

A global economy on the brink of a recession kicked off by the US.

Does anyone remember Reaganomics - now that was something?

LA times Editor is sacked because the ed refused to comply with staff cuts.

Gaza's power supply is cut off.

And in the race for the Whitehouse the exchange between Obama and Clinton is about to heat up.

By the way, I hope to have my friend and radio host - one of the longest serving in New York, Mark Jack Riley online to talk about what's going on and what he's detected real soon.

So I was going to talk about perils and videojournalism, a subject that people/execs don't like discussing, but I'll save that for another time.

Back on View - a hommage to Bourne is in the making, with no deadly violence.

Videojournalism with no voice

We've looked at styles and production in detail and I'll be unveiling some interesting stuff in the near future.

A radio interview that really interests me includes a 20 min interview with Louis Farakhan, plus some other well know US writers.

And from the 1994 epochal assembly of US journalists of colour, Unity 94, interviews galore talking about a range of subjects.

How interesting for me, since OJ Simpson was on the menu then; he's about to be on again.

These however are radio pieces, but are an additional and necessary quotient to the VJs armoury.

We speak very little about the voice in VJ reports, as a core group of VJs don't voice over.

But the voice, and you don't need me to tell you is an instrument which is a k.app for reportage, videojournalism reportage particularly newspapers.

So how do you use it, appear natural on tape, project, set up a confrontation to match the pictures, create your ideal range, and sometimes just leave it alone?

I had on and off a number of sessions of voice training with the BBCs voice unit when it was around and I'll be talking about some of the things that helped me and might work for you.

Videojournalism Training ~ Press Gazette article

Still on the press gazette, I was interviewed last week about setting up VJ in the newsroom.

It's an easy-entry article.

Apologies as there is one thing that I would have wanted to have changed, but reporters deadlines and all that I didn't see the final piece before publication.

Anyhow fairly simple stuff: what camera, tripod, editing kit, training needs...

In a recent post I spoke about videojournalism for managers, which is worth reading if you're going local production or hyperlocal.

Some time soon, I'm speaking to managers of one of London's most succesful newspapers and will be telling them almost everything in this post.

BBC Ups Game

The idea was greeted with howls of "foul"; the corporation has done much to quell that, particularly with newspapers.

Some might have even thought the idea was permanently shelved after the BBC's financial cut backs.

But hyperlocal is back on the agenda.

Reported in Press Gazette this week, the BBC unveils a prototype for ultra local news TV.

Andy Griffins reveals details of the BBC's plans.

Last year I spoke to Andy and his number two ( I recorded an interview and presentation) and the plans as they were then, based on market research, were awesome.
I'll post that soon.

But hyperlocal sets up the dna of news as how its should be in the 21st century. News you can use.

Channel One TV coined that phrase: news you can use, in carving up london boroughs during its reporting/programme cycle.

It works.

Viewers will far more tune into a network which delivers door-step information, mixed with informative, education, entertaining national, and world news.


The question for newspapers is have they done enough, before the BBC's launches.

Brand value and a deep understanding of TV and videojournalism; the BBC has some 900 waiting to be deployed across their sites, some of whom are working regional already, versus brand value (local newspapers) riding the curve of videojournalism.

One things sure, inspite of all olive branches and the desire(?) by the BBC to work with local outfits, there will be casualties.

Back in my neigbourhood, I'll be giving a local feel of hyperlocal with a one off launch of a mag on viewmagazine.tv

This is the year of IPTV, hyperlocal, and maturing web video - as if we didn't know

View mag - back to basics

When it was first launched two plus years ago, it looked like this. BUT it was built in flash - and so was losing valuable SEO indexing.

Now I have taken the site back to it's original format, but strengthened the coding with CSS div tags, which should make it more easier for browsers to read.

The original concept, which was picked up by the UK Press Gazette in 05, is also resurrected.

And the colour, well black divides many people; its a closed colour, but does give some leeway to the idea of magazine journalism so users are expecting daily updates, as opposed to white which is instinctive in news paper journalism.

The Gazette then wrote this:

"Using View - now on its third quarterly edition - is like stepping into the sort of hi-tech world imagined in Steven Spielberg's science fiction movie Minority Report.

The site is made up of 64 pages and organised ostensibly like a conventional magazine - pages can be scrolled through sequentially if the reader wishes.

But the contents page also acts as a browser with click-through links to the various stories.

As your mouse icon hovers over pictures they burst into life, often with audio. And throughout the site, text reports are interspersed with video documentaries, audio interviews and other multimedia clips.

The site is put together with original video and audio created by Gyimah and other "backpack journalists" - people who are able to shoot, direct, edit and present documentaries and news reports using a digital camcorder, a laptop and the latest film-editing software."

In the coming weeks it'll feature more video showing the distinct differences between videojournalism across various strands, including IM6 Videojournalism highlighted by uber lecturer and super blogger Andy Dickinson on his blog recently.

The Outernet, Video hyperlinking in a multistrand interview and film, and pod-blogs will soon be evident.

Performance lecture

It may be a generic term but Prof Wolfgang Kissel of Bauhaus University threw the word into a phone conversation which I thought, "neat"!

So what is a performance lecture?

Truth I coundn't tell you, but based upon what Prof Kissel has in mind from a previous lecture I was asked to do in Berlin, it's a cross between stand-up and standing on your soap box at speakers corner ( Hyde Park).

Undoubtedly one of the most terrifying things to do is to stand in front of a group/auditorium of strangers and talk about something which as night follows day, you get something wrong, swallow some words and even, even fall of stage when your mikes not working.

So how do you stay calm?

For me it's the swan syndrome, trying to look ok on top whilst thinking furiously below and sometimes you can die on stage; or "corpse" - the expression.

It happens with me when I haven't sought or pinned down what the producer wants, so I once spoke about an array of things to an audience in Norway who wanted to hear about the birth and journey of videojournalism.

Yeouch. We rescued the talk in the main auditorium session as I furiously re-tuned my presentation with the producer.

Lets face it the producers always know best.

Al Gore a lesson in performance

One of the best performance lectures I have seen online is Al Gore's - a master class in delivery, hubris, attack, comedy.

Hands wide - showing what it's like to be frisked at an airport butressed with self mocking.

You may disagree with what he says, you may even think him insincere which some have posted on Youtube, but that's not what I evaluating.

Of course it's Al Gore and he contrast of the life now versus that with inches to the White House makes for good comedy, particularly when it's delivered by him.

But the whole point of the performance is to get a message across in an entertaining way and have the audience participate.

Stand-up comedians develop a sixth sense for reading an audience, preying on the one person who will be the butt of all their jokes.

For the lecturer, some caution as you're delivering factul stuff and you never know when the chap in the front seat is the IT guy from BT about to challenge you. Woops!

It's about a personality coming through the talk, a gonzo approach to presenting what you've learned.

I still get incredibly nervous before a presentation, not because I haven't prepared but because it's the unexpected, and then usually quickly I get into my stride and end up lying down on the floor with my hind legs up, running through the auditorium screaming something and often having a conversation with myself.

Why do I do it?

Why do I do it?

Well I don't always, but that's me.

One of my other fav performers is comedian Chris Rock who is gigging in London.

It's reported he brought the house down, or as my friends would put it, "he killed it. Yep Killed it"

It's also reported before taking to the stage, his first time in the UK ( will they get my jokes?) he was incredibly nervous.

Then he made an opening salvo:

If anyone of you think darts is a sport you must be out of your mind.

hahahahahah Quite!

Deconstructing the camera

This is my camera.

I will learn to love my camera

Where my camera goes I will follow

I will sleep with it.

Care for it

Treat it right

Because without my camera

I am nothing.


NB Ok it might sound a little extreme, but at the point where you can take the camera apart, decode all the buttons, prep the camera before location, then half the job's done.

My colleague has a nice acronym before she goes out to shoot; SING.

Shutter, Iris, Neutral Density, Gain - all of which affect exposure.

And you know what happens when your film's too hot.

.... this is my camera

Ouch Newsnight

Meaow ! Newsnight Michael Crick has a dig at ITN's new Flag ship news for failing to show appropriate footage in the Peter Hain MP saga.

Why I love Video - a journey through network to personal broadcasting

A scene still from 8 Days.
Question are these men i) Reporters discussing how well they've done ii) Policemen anxious about something iii) criminals anxious about something. Answer below

One of the most challenging, yet ultimately rewarding times I've had working daily in the media was at Worldwide Television News in Camden, which would ultimately be enveloped into becoming Associated Press TV.

The first few weeks were a revelation: video feeds, Sat 42 permanently feeding from the Middle East, telephones constantly ringing, editing-on-the-fly as feeds were coming in and broadcasters at the end of a phone demanded access and inserts for their national news.

At the same time you needed to collate information from various wire sources and present a bullet-proof script; six writers at a desk, with a chief writer overseeing final scripts.

What you wrote was often the crib sheet for other broadcasters to forge their packages.

One of the writers, beautiful writer, just beautiful, used to write for the ABC New anchor Peter Jennings....

Middle note
[in writing this post I went over to you tube to watch Peter Jenning's final on air broadcast and in that unforgettable honesty of his, he said something:

"And I hope it goes without saying that a journalist who doesn't value deeply the audience's loyalty should be in another line of work."

I never knew Mr Jennings but I was introduced to him and shook his hand, when I was an ABC News Associate Producer in Johannesburg during South Africa's 94 election]


Real Time News
By the day's end at WTN we'd package two reports, which would be sat'd over to CNN, WS and a host of international broadcasters.

It really was something to finally get home after a shift, tune into CNN to find your package being played.

I even kept one of mine, because WTN and supposedly other agencies made a science or art of packaging pictures and words:

Short cuts, intro often not more than 15 seconds, and always, mostly always, you'd be searching for the strongest pictures to catapult the package.

On any one day, two phones on both left and right ear, with three feeds coming in and fielding phone calls from crews, you'd be scribbling time code ready to hand over to an editor.

You quickly implemented a version of Gestalt's theory about grouping and associations.

Pictures were swiftly arranged into sequences, variety spawned different patterns of sequences; varying patterns of sequences broadened the visual consumption of the video.

Often a 1.20 package felt like 30 seconds.


I loved WTN

WTN has lent me many things, which cusp around videojournalism

1. The Visual Stockbroker - developing an urgency, a sense about the turn of speed of news and how to make rational judgements.
2. Visual acrobatics - developing a secondary sense of filtering news - a sort of muscle memory to handle what's necessary and isn't.
3. And a strong sense of story telling driven by pictures, pictures, pictures.
To recoin a phrase: It's the pictures stoopid!

Johannesburg 94 and a right wing terrorist bomb devastates downtown Joburg. This picture was taken about 15-30 mins after the attack, whilst I was working as an AP for ABC News (SA). I lived nearby and my house shook. Later I would report for one of the news channels of the BBC World Service. I'll post that soon.

Outer-agency
A year on or so, I left WTN.

I spoke to my manager back then, Guy ker, about doing some creative work.

Agency work is not creative, capital "C", and the itch to get into the field again was strong.

I left, but would re-acquaint myself with Guy at ITN and Channel 4 ( who said some nice things about me) and for four years regularly freelanced as a producer.

Before C4, I had shifts at a number of networks including BBC Breakfast and it's this journey that videojournalism begun to really make sense.

You can rarely tell how cold a hot bath is if you've been sitting in it for long.

Though I'd worked for a number of outfits before Channel One TV -which pioneered VJism in the UK in 93+, now the pieces were beginning to fit.


I love video

I love video

I love video for its interpretations, it's elasticity.

I love film for the same reason, though I think I can rub video in my hands and gesticulate more.

I love video for it is a living moving fluid canvas,for anyone thinking themselves an artist to brush stroke and eventually look for their master piece.

I love video because of its draw. It isn't just pictures. It's tone, tonality, balance, perspective, colour, texture, composition, can make you do things. It can make people do things.

I love video because it's flexible. It will share a stage with others e.g. music or make do on its own. It is, and someone else probably Mchulan said it better, there is no medium like it.

I love video because it doesn't have a square root, a pi, an exact answer. Just an approach, close, even body-odour close, to the author's wishes. When we talk to the old masters e.g. Charles Wheeler about their story experiences, we get a rich tapestry of "how, and why"; their conveyance of ideas.


What do you see?


What would be your reaction to this event if you witnessed it live?

News has defined qualities, what the camera sees cannot and should not be manipulated, however the true camera (the eye) records and interprets emotion and feeling by sending signals to the brain.

Go on, next time you witness a carnage, accident, an unexpected event with a friend watch as their eyes, the iris size changes.

They might squint, they might look sideways, they might manoeuvre themselves into a position that better suits the interpretation of that event.

If you witnessed an accident at that moment a child rides by on a bike, you'll track the kid, probably, momentarily re-interpreting: "Oh my God, what if...."

These are relationship issues, contextual, but they help to make sense of the event.


Video Futures

Video News which aims for a neutral density shies away from those cinematic micro-psychological-inner meanings.

Filmmaking does not, which is why great cinematographers can make you weep (yes news can as well) get you high with excitement, and get you angry just perhaps by using colour.

For that I loved watching the odd NFL film made of Super Bowl final game.

Visceral, in your face, every crunch a cringe, and loud thud - this is not as nearly matched by watching it televised on the day.

Getting into the trenches, getting eye level amongst the pack gives off a different vibe entirely - something the videojournalism I have come to know attempts to ape.

Somewhere, somehow, we can experiment with form, function, trust the authors or not to give us their interpretations which may be universal or not.

Videojournalism combining a wide gamut of things already discussed may move towards this, particularly for newspapers with points of view.

Videojournalism here by the way doesn't exclusively mean one-person camera for anyone familiar with the British national press.

It may well be that these news organisations delivering on the nuances and emotional persuasions we learn to know, will be the winners in the new Video news war.

It may well be (wishful thinking) that someone creates a video which acts more intuitively and closer to the eye; it already does in some regard with white balancing and you only need to look at some of the still camera lens technology to see what I'm alluding to.


And Finally

One of my last big foreign assignments was a story about a village boy in Ghana who would benefit from the skills of an internationally recognised plastic surgeon; he was to have a new face rebuilt after a flesh -eating virus had ravaged his features.

It's a story that had so many emotional strands, not least the family had no way of paying for the operation and matters were really coming to a head.

On the day we played it to on Ghana's national TV station, the TV audience flooded the decrepit phone lines wanting to see the piece again.

And in the end, the hospital waved its fee of a two hundred dollars which the family could not pay.

That's why I love video.....

.... And lest we forget

"And I hope it goes without saying that a journalist who doesn't value deeply the audience's loyalty should be in another line of work."

RIP


++++++++++++++++++++

Answer: Policemen. We're now so visually literate that the cold - blue tones are often associated with police, plus the masking closes the shot given the impression of anxiety.

I achieved this through after effects, but could have achieved, though not as good, the effect I was looking for by mis-white balancing ie white balancing against an environment with a different colour temperature, say indoors.

One picture - three different stories

This photo was taken by my friend, Yannis Kontos, a fantastic photojo who I've lost count of the number of world awards he's won.

It serves as a great illustration of the emerging edges of vjism

One photo, but there are at least three different stories.

I count six, though I'd easily take four.

Can you make them out or posit your own?

In news we'd run them as clips, but there's no reason why we can't start of the package from different vantage points and clip others.

You decide.

Incidentally this is the classic VJ picture.

If you could capture the same frame as a videojournalist, do what the photojo would do, NO FEARS, you're at the edges of emerging VJism - at least what I've been observing.

Question is how dirty are you willing to get?

I showed the above pic to some newspaper eds in a VJ session in what was a really good creative storm.

Vantage Point - Multimedia film

One of the best cop series of the early 2000s was Boomtown.

The premise was an event e.g. crime viewed from several different angles, a style called Rashomon - after the film title from that great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

For me it represented an interesting model for news and feature presentation.

The structure and content in news can often be about perspective and point of view; interpretation.

Experiment.

I once ran an experiment at a summer school where I had two young men run into the class I was teaching, shouting and yelling, scuffle on the floor and then take my bag on the desk.

After the class had calmed down, It was only about 15 seconds, I asked them what they'd seen.

You won't believe the different range of answers.

The excercise, once they realised it was one, was how we perceive and write up first hand incidents; effectively real news gathering as opposed to processing.

You won't believe the number of conflicting accounts I received.

Interpretation

So New's is about interpretation, and in punditry/professional comment you're seeking someone whose judgement aligns with your sensibilities.

You may disagree with them but they have the conviction of their argument, which explains why the same people crop up time and time again in punditry.

But what if you could choose your entry point into a news item via a multimodal point - the absence of a definitive visual linear hierarchy.

Think of an ensemble in a play etc.


The Future of News?

That's where I feel news has new areas to develop and why video hyperlinking will become a powerful model

This multiple strand look is the bed for Vantage Point starring Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker and Sigourney Weave.

As with most trailers the art is in the promo editing - breathless seemless palate of cuts

This is kinetic stuff.

Their site also introduces an interesting level of interactivity

Next week I'm giving viewmagazine.tv a make-over in expectation of a hugely important experiment being shared world wide, which I'm loking forward to sharing with a talk at the World Editor's Association in Sweden and Cultural Exchange

NB. No where near frenetic or even comparable, but the roll tape back effect is something I tried in a short piece Y-Generation, joining the CIA which you can see here.

Wait for the pic to load and click.

How the effect was made?

Make a mask in photoshop from any photo> gray scale> aply halftone effects and > radial Blur and import to your film timeline.
Process your film by 1000% speed deleting every other frame.

You'll get the juddering effect > then wash the tones through After Effect.