Masters students - how to get that job

ex-Student site click here

It's one of the most frequent questions, of course, because whatever it is we're learning, the conclusion to that is finding a nicely paid, decent job, and yes YOU can influence the process.

So it's that part of the year again. Exams coming to a head and thoughts of what comes next looming large.

If you found this blog last September and have dropped by on occasion, then one of the posts looked at gearing up for the job. By that I meant the time to look for a job is, or should I say WAS in August last year for the next May, June, July.. which is about now.

If you had it would all make sense now, but understandably you've just joined a Masters programme, with a year to go and the last thing on your mind is the anxiety finding a job. It should, but it doesn't, and each year I talk to cohorts about this plan of action.

I have seen some students put it into practice and it's paying off. They spent the first few weeks engaging with potential employers in a long-tail process of conversations, which put pressure on neither party. Come June they've now developed a solid relationship over a couple of months. It worked for me as well.

Remember no hirer, editor has a job in their desk waiting for you, when you send in that spec email. The best you can hope for is serendipity - right place, right time, but even then, the game of chance comes in.

Otherwise if you're applying for a job now, then you and 20,000 other media students are part of the mass migration and less we've forgotten it's a rotten time to be job hunting. For any manager to make a judgement from an intake of 100 down to one, is almost a lottery.

Getting that job
This year one of the world's top broadcasters and hirers, knowing the work load that goes into prepping applications, interviews and selections, asked us to do main selecting for them. It's a difficult task, because we're not in the business of discriminating, so we widen our criteria to show the broadcaster where their work is.......online!

Can I say that again.. we lead them to their work ONLINE.

How to get that job? What I'm about to say is not the definitive. There are no grand theories, but this is one narrative that works, and if any of my students doing docs have done this then they have increased their chances ten fold.

Firstly having an online presence is not worth debating the whys and wherefores. If you haven't then its the next thing you want to do.

Secondly, having a professionally laid out online presence is crucial. Your reputation online is how you are judged in the flesh. Shouldn't be, but the same way you see those shoes, suit, art piece in a shop window and walk in to enquire and buy, is how YOU online works.

The question then becomes: blog, facebook, website or whatever. While all of these work, the website is your manageable, bespoke stylised YOU to a potential employer.

Blogs are great, but there is a reason blogs never usurped the website. The website is both the intro page and direction-giver to any thing else worth knowing about you, including your blog.

If you're intending to be a daily journo then a blog as a front-of-window will suffice. If you're intending to be a polymath, given your many skills, a website.... A WEBSITE.

In some cases blogs mimic websites, that's fine so long as you can control the assets you want everyone to see. In other words if you've written a great post three weeks ago and its fallen below the page fold,  you'll want to find a way to keep it in full view

The other reason why YOU so need a website is this. As a lecturer and on my travels I love bigging up student work, particularly those who have put in the hard grind and are perceived as deserving of that transactional break.

Last month I was with some execs at the world service, the week after that in Cairo and soon I'll be at Sheffield doc. Also like other professionals I tend to to have the odd unplanned conversation with editors who say.. David do you know anyone who does this?  And I instinctively go.... oh yeah here's this person's work.

Being online also means you've a a chance to attract attention once you've sorted your SEO out. My areas of interest include "multimedia journalism" and "videojournalism" and I have a number of conversations with people who want to share an idea or job.

If it's travel writing you're into, Podcasting, or Documentary, make the area your own by engaging with that ecosystem. Makeit your own and then conduct the 5 percent strategy.

[ 5 percent of speculative letters tend to work. It's a numbers game]

There are a number of talented souls, who have also consolidated their space by being online and I bet if you asked anyone of them, firstly there was no golden job, waiting for them; they made their own.

Secondly, it was hard work, but good work,  as they, slowly built up portfolios.

I can't think of a single person, perhaps apart from Nick Clegg, and yes a few more, who made it because the had a shoe-in.

If you want that job, engineer the process. What I talk about to students is geared to that process. Start now, and if you don't, you've only yourself to blame.

People that should inspire you, because as brilliant as they are, they've used the online space to carve out their careers.

• Denisa Morariu  A former westmin Masters grad. Speaks five languages and has an insatiable appetite to learn. Small wonder that when one of Romania's top journalists saw her work, she was immediately invited for an interview and then given a job. If you look at her site, she's presenting from outside downing street. Great Product placement, or as I've told students get the action shot. If you want to look like a journalist, show us a shot of you at work. This is what she wrote about her time going through the mill at the University of Westminster Under 30.

• Adam Westbrook - still under 30, blimey sounds like he's been around for ages, but you could spot the genius in him from his blog ( the only one during his time at City University) four years ago.

• David Lee - In the first few months of his Masters programme, (2006)  his blogs started getting into the Press Gazette. Also under 30.

• Alex Wood. Like the aforementioned another genius, who knows how to work the online space and has designed his own career path. He came to speak to students and the feedback from those that were there was.. "I can see now why you talk about him" Also under 30.

• Murielle Gonzalez  And finally Murielle, one of our Master students. So long as she continues o get this work under the noses of professionals she'll continue to create good work. She made this as part of her final project and has made such projects for others. Also under 30.

There's no reason why you can't be like anyone of the aforementioned.

The art of saying something with nothing - Videojournalism's cinema

Picture it if you will. I'm in my study, at least 30 books are strewn across the floor opened on their reference pages. Perceptual sensory !  PS is a £@^!!&.

Then I reference one of a kerzillion videos. This one is a favorite. The opening sequence to True Blood - Vampirish going ons in a fictional Louisiana town.

If you've played it. Chances are you're play it back again. It's a kalediscope of images unrelated, yet their sequencing creates a series of impressions. discursively unkempt, even er yurk!

Even with the track down that adds that southern comfort, there's a deep allure, for in many ways it reinforces what you might have thought, and if not creates a set of impressions that are bewitching; a fox decomposing in time lapse, a series of flutter-cuts, twitch cuts, non sequential, deeply saturated colours unnatural in real life.

The taboo (sex) diametric to the religion, purity and debauchery. it's a classic fable trick, but its composition barely need not shout it.

Deleuze, a geezer of a philosopher intercalated images like these worked on the subconscious. When you're paying no technical attention watching them ( only media petrol heads like me might) , they're triggering thoughts, emotions, reinforcing stereotypes, and the rest.

They're non-linear and rely on affecting you. You could have assembled it any myriad ways but done really well, it erodes time film time. You know that feeling you've had when you watch a good film and someone tells you it was 3 hours and your go.. "really, it was like 5 mins". "Er really!"

That's why you might play it again. But the truth if you tried to explain it to someone. It's just a bunch of images; it's kind of nothing, but its saying something.

Learning the semiotics of video, not in an academic way as there are millions of film makers who are naturals, gives you a window in creating artifacts.  Speaking to BBC TV and World Service execs I shared some of those ideas.

Now these books on the floor....



The Wire - same thing. The images are not as abstract except in their individual composition.

The victorian Laptop - Ode to the type writer

The type writer's last rights - a device of the analogue age. A laptop which did not use electricity and had no luminance screen.  A device that required 15lb/in of power to work. Thud!

And with it, the curt swipe of the paper, with the unfinished sentence.
The waste-bin in the corner strewn with scrumpled papers that didn't make it in.
The illusion of being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the plastic B-ball mount - Lakers rule!
The stuck "w" which you always had to pull up.
The "A" whose label had all but disappeared. Which key again?
The ribbon that annoyingly became a twister in the spool.
An aesthetic impulse where an idea lingered that much longer before it was pounded on paper.
Films that were defined by it as prop and part actor: All the President's Men, The Shining and a host of Noir.
The thunderous sfx of its keys guaranteed to have the neighbours banging on your wall at 3 a.m in the morning as you fought writers' block.
And the literally "medium cool' effect it had on friends of the aspiring screen writer.
Happy retirement

48 hours in Cairo - Art, Journalism & Reflections Tahrir Square

Click to Enlarge - a POV of Tahrir and some landmarks

48 hours later in Cairo and I'm back in London marking masters papers and prepping my own phenomenology of personal cinema. More on that later.

On occasions things can get a little bit hectic this end. Last week was one such time. A client had asked if I could present in Cairo some new ideas surrounding communications and video.

Three days earlier I had presented something to executives at the BBC. The response was very warm. Thank you to all for your feedback and email ( below)

In Cairo, we flew out Monday at 5pm to present at 11 the next morning and then catch the 5pm plane back to London, except the client very kindly put my flight back by a day.

Thanks to the assistance of former vjs and trainees, now firm friends, we set out to make a reflective piece about around legacy art reflecting Jan 25th and Tahrir Square. I have put a 1 minute trailer on viewmagazine.tv

Friends Salma and Ahmed helped me speak to some extraordinary people that include:

• A medical doctor who was exhibiting his extraordinary Dream- realism pieces
• Sarrah, (@sarrahsworld) a remarkable social networker and activist followed by among others Bianca Jagger
• And a group of artists marking a government building with Jan 25th slogans, just by Tahrir square.

In conversation with Salma as art snakes on in the background

And yes, the police looked on. I was shooting film and unlike the last time in December where I had a plain clothes policeman all over me, now nothing.

Reflections
My plan for the piece, shot on a 5D is to project it onto a whitewalls wall after I super 8mm it and run it off a reel, hopefully to house somewhere at the Southbank Centre. It's called "Reflections" and I just was so deeply fascinated with what I heard.

They ranged from one reflector ( I won't give names till I have finished the piece) who says her parents now consult her for her opinion.

An artist who had no idea her strongest calling would be to exhibit and share in Tahrir and one who watching things unfold in the US packed his bags to come over to ensure what he was witnessing was real.

Some gigs coming up though nothing confirmed. I'm back in Dublin in July. I might be at the Sheffield Docs and then looking at something in Ghana.

Photography mourns

Where to start!

I had in mind to share events over the last two days shooting a reflective piece in Tahrir Square with friend Salma, a local TV Journalist and Ahmed, a videojournalist. Last time I was in Cairo, we got stopped by plain clothes police. Not this time.

Or even explaining some more thoughts about discombobulating videojournalism.

But that's all irrelevant in light of the news of two photojos killed Brit Tim Hetherington, and American Chris Hondros, in Misrata. Two other photojos, Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown, escaped serious injury.

I knew none of the aforementioned, but Tim is someone who's work I and thousand others deeply admired. Having worked in hotspots myself e.g. South Africa, Ghana and known personally other photojos such as Yannis Kontos, you build a healthy respect people like Tim.

He spent many years working in West Africa documenting conflict. I mean, that's a huge feat. Having experienced a couple of coups myself in Ghana I had revere respect for him.

It's a reminder, as if we ever forget that there are some people who seek out the truth; they're not reckless and value life. They keep us in touch with this conflicted world from the comforts of our suburban homes.

In 2008 Hetherington wrote a piece that I tore out from the British Journal of Photography in which he mounted a robust defence of the image in visual journalism.

I'm reading it again By any means necessary

Photography et al mourns.

A Philosophy of Videojournalism

If somethings not done yet it’s waiting to be done.

If the idea you have isn’t recognised, because it’s not been done before, you might be onto something.

If you seek professional mischief making over popularity, you represent something.

If the task at hand represents an embodied experience, in which you wrestle with subjectivity and objectivity, aesthetics (kantian) versus aesthetic (corporeal), you represent something.

If your representation, is questioned and you’re prepared to listen, you represent something.

If you move with your camera as a haptic device and your words envelop poeticism, you’re saying something.

But often the question is who’s listening?

Something’s happening. We seek doors to enter in believing adventure is on the other side. And you are helping to shape that key for others.

Your audience is committed, ambivalent or not interested. You cannot bask in the glory of finalities. Because there are none.

Each task begets another and another. The only thing fulfilling is to be unfulfilled. But that’s what you love — the chase!

If your glass is never empty, but you know how, and choose whether you want it filled, you’re onto something.

If the road less travelled, is the road you’ve taken, then often you’ll find the solo traveller awaiting you. Here you’ll share ideas that pass by the mass consensual dogma.

To you there are no masses. There is no mass media. The media delimits the message. Your message is unbridled. Meta. But your path is your own.

If you believe it so much, and the air is dark, and the naysayers make their point. Listen, but excuse yourself, because you’re onto something.

Shhh (quietly) I believe you represent something. BIG!

Developing a heurestic for videojournalism
David Dunkley Gyimah
PhD SMARTlab, University College Dublin
Artist in Residence at London's SouthBank Centre
Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster
Royal Television Society Juror, 2011-12 Innovation in Media
www.viewmagazine.tv
10th - April - 2011

Danfung Dennis' Media Revolution for Film makers and Videojournalists

My Freedom Or Death - Condition ONE Beta from Danfung Dennis on Vimeo.


Award winning Photojournalist Patrick Chauvel in Libya road test's Award winning filmmaker/photojo Danfung's Condition ONE app out mid 2011

He's done it!

The IPad, a portable screen on the cusp of being a haptic device and a 3D viewing technology which yields  a panoramic remmersion vision - touch the screen and you roll the field of view around.

The result is something that fuses game culture in news' paradigm. Danfung Dennis, a photojournalist and now celebrated documentary making with his apocalyptic "Hell and Back Again", has turned the axis of film making quite literally through a revolutionary phase shift.

John T Caldwell, an eminent media scholar coined the phrase "second shift aesthetic" to define an interconnected relationship between offline and online media. If he would allow me to, this constitutes a "phase-shift aesthetic"; 3rd, 4th...

Similarly my thoughts go to "Yellow Bird" a filming revolution, which provides 360 vision.

Revolution in film making
In the early last century French film maker Abel Gance, did something revolutionary in the use of camera mobility. He wanted to make "actors out of the audience", so he found a revolutionary way then to use a boxed camera that you needed to crank to work.

It was the Debrie Parvo, an unwieldy beast that in scenes of his seminal film Napolean, explained by Film Historian Kevin Brownlow, inflects a "being there"perception.

Depending on which generation you are we've come to marvel at immersion/remmersion and the POV. It's what binds the Gaming Industry. It is the revisioning of that gold- at-the-end-of-the-rainbow "reality".

We see it in Avante Garde films, Westerns, Hollywood flicks like, The Lady in the Lake(1947) and more recently in video  Dan Chung's Mongolian Racer (2010). One of my favourites is Point of View a short film by Doug Smith

Being there is part of the quality that the great French philosopher Roland Barthes explained so comprehensively in his Rhetoric of the Image.

Newer Media (Video Journalism) Break throughs
A hundred years on, the scope of media technological advances are to numerous to note, but breakthroughs in miniaturisation, Canon's filmic mode, 3D viewing and the zeitgeist of the tablet in the Ipad are key to what Danfung has now achieved.

Pulling it all together, one prefigures though was no easy task. Often it's a big itch that comes from working in a field long enough to see its flaws and weaknesses.  Just ask Garret Brown, a cinematographer who invented the Brown-Cam, that would be renamed the Steadicam.


The article A New Way to Photograph War on Time Magazine we can be assured will be one of a plethora of pieces. There we learn that celebrated Photojournalist Patrick Chauvel in Libya is road testing Danfung's Condition One, claiming:

"It's not easy to use, you have to watch not to get your shoes in the frame of your shadow or your face... But the result is worth it".

The film maker himself quote here from  Film maker magazine sums up everything:

"This disconnect between the realities on the ground and the perception at home shaped the course of the film ( To Hell and Back). By using advanced technology, I hoped to create a powerful experience that would shake people from their indifference to war"

Last year I had the pleasure of interviewing Dangfung in a detailed conversation for research I'm conducting as part of a study and for the SouthBank Centre and for a revisit to Apple Store presentation below ( Youtube Link here)

 He mooted the idea, but what's emerged is truly deserving. Having reworked war-doc making, he's now fashioned an app which will have ramifications far beyond Wars film making.

This June I'll be appearing at the Sheffield Doc festival in a panel as follows, where I'll be contributing to a discussion on cinema journalism. I'll also be previewing my latest IMVJ project Tahrir Memento

Moderator: Charlotte Cook

Participants: Tom Happold, Danfung Dennis, David Dunkley Gyimah, Inigo Gilmore

I

End++

Former BBC and Channel 4 News journalist David Dunkley Gyimah is the recipient of a number of awards in innovative journalism. His worked in the journalism since 1987 and is presently a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, PhD Candidate at SMARTlab, University College Dublin and Artist in Residence at London's cultural hub, The Southbank Centre.

New Wave War Movie docu-cinemmaker

The Hurt Locker

One is a film, which was lauded at the Oscars winning its director the highest fictional film accolade. The others are documentaries by film makers, two of whom are photojournalists.

Reality is, or has been a key feature of documentary film making. How do you capture unmediated that which would have happened without unintentional influence.

Yet our literacy towards reality plays out in a strong theme we've grown up on: Cinema. Ever seince DW Griffith fashioned an understanding of how to capture re-enacted scenes of war on camera.

No more. Yet watching these new doc-uramas I'm struck not just by the visceral hacceity of the films, but the thought of the mortality of the film makers. Given a canon 5d who, how many would dare to enter a conflict zone knowing this could be it?

It's an unspoken issue. But it's a real one. THese film makers do something admirable because they risk their own lives.

And there have been countless examples when things did not emerge as they would wish.

Many years ago, living in Ghana, a coup enveloped the country. Rawlings took power in a bloody over throw of the regime. I was there, remember it well as friends and I got caught up in the cross fire as cadets.

Years later it fuelled a desire to record conflict. In 1993 in South Africa I took a night drive - just one day only - into what was then the murder capital of the world. Many things happened, but the signing of a document absolving the Peace Corps of any responsibiliy, brought it home.

These film makers live through that thought for lengthy periods. Sobering thoughts.

Armadillo

The latest award winning film which shows the viscerality of war

Restrepo 

Photojournnalist Tim Hetherington's award winning documentary

Hell and Back Again

Photojournalist Danfung Dennis' award winning documentary





In

Lost and found in translation

Sunday morning. 930.


My task this morning is to review pages from my thesis. Chapter 1.

Blimey it's 30,000 words and only needs 10, 000 at most.  So I'm taking a large blade to the passages.

In so doing, I'm having to bridge sentences to link rather harsh edits. This makes me reflect some more and sometimes contradict what I already have.

In effect, the writing process is taking me through a series of "Inceptions"- the film. Reflection, through reflection, through reflection. Sometimes I don't know what state I'm in. As one door opens, that path leads to ever more fascinating and problematic areas which require new connections.

Sometimes these exist, sometimes they require new engineering; cue the library. In this case the first chapter has all it wants, the journey has become a metaphysical one. How do you know what you know?

And how can you teach that in a manner which instills critical thinking on the party receiving it.

In effect then this, what could be described as a rather tedious practice is all about self evaluation through enquiry in a chosen field. There's no eureka moment here. Just because it's being stated the first time and in print doesn't mean it's not he first time one has thought or recited it.

But something did make me sit bolt upright. Our penchant for the image, the moving image e.g image versus text, moving against print has been recycled over many centuries. We, myself too, might revel in the exactitude of the moving image, but for how long before the beautiful word makes a come back?

But more importantly, that is, that grand narratives are perilous. They reveal truths and mask flaws - often through a deficiency in knowledge. Enlightenment- industrial - electronic - Internet.

Our birth place in any one of these supplies us with want we want before some brilliant sage reveal patterns, flows that can be ascertained and corrected by arthroscopic surgery. Here comes Everyone, We Media, etc.

And on that note I'll return to my text. Now where am I again?
  

The credo of Cinematic space and silence for video

Two very different videos; one a true event, the other fiction. but the cinematicness overlap.

Kubrick was the director par excellence and this sculpted this scene in camera (spatiality), sound, scene ( luminosity) subject combine to reach into that place where demons lurk - the sub conscious.

David Couzins, the train passenger who took this video from London Undergrounds 7/7 terrorist attack, couldn't have known, or perhaps he did, but what emerges from his camera is Kubriesque. 

I apologise of I have offended any Kubrik fans and I in no way seek to diminish the events of 911 by comparing it to a film.

But the point, whether by default or design is how the mesmeric effect of Couzin's video, the context, solemnity, are housed in the world of cinema ( spatial immersion).

Without denigrating the professional, if you were to emerge from a scene marked by tragedy, how forceful would be the need to speak over and to the camera. I figure I might be sorely driven to enunciate and capture the ambience. The two indeed might have worked, but......

Perhaps a mark of respect or the sheer ocassion in itself yielded what you see, but if anything this video and its psychosis points to something we could all pay attention to; the power of silence.

It is journalism, that can't be taught because it negates what we need to learn about providing information. Couzin's non-professional training, or not has produced something we return to in capturing the moment and not just physically.  And silence has a currency in other more recognisable areas.

A nod to videojournalismweb for sparking this post

Meta data video and videojournalism cult of talent

Yannis Kontos - World Press Photographer and Greece Icon

Been having a whale of a time with some practical and theory work; just when I thought it time I'd like to go back on the road and share ideas, work with groups, a couple of projects have cropped up.

One of the precursors was reliving some work from 1991-94 to illustrate to a group terminology thought to be from a web 2.0 age which was just as in vogue in 1992 e.g. Metadata and camera movement c.f DSLR shooting

Image stream one below from the BBC's flagship programme: REPORTAGE  shows how metadata was used pre-internet sans the reporters voice. That is it was used on the music arc.  More importantly too this was the era of MTV current affairs, a video journalism (directors often shot on hi8 or drop in shots) that  would appeal to Netizens.

This was one of the programmes I cut my teeth on after 4 years before focusing on that theatre of the mind - radio.

Image stream one - the BBC's 1992 national flagship programme which pioneered its own form of videojournalism in so far as directors shot drop-in shots for this network programme

In photography, I went into my recent archives and pulled out a two hour face-to-face interview I had with Danfung Dennis - who is the ONE at the moment, with his Dante - award winning movie To Hell and Back.

Danfung like World Press Photographer Yannis Kontos  remind us of the image and non-conformity towards artistic practice. I have been using a technique I call reflexive-flaneurism- mapping, and what's obvious is in spite of all the codes, loosening of semiotics, genius or at least talent, something ( I don't know, call it what you will e.g. Dasein) something is difficult to grasp.

Besides the physicalness of being in that place and time, the essence of good visual making; there is the continuing invested self-resources, and then the Dasein.

This isn't new, but in the leveling of creativity, where the lack of books, knowledge, opportunities was once the norm, we can comfort ourselves that there is this other thing - a bit transcendental.

Where one group sees a formula for method and exhibit that modernist formalist bent; it's all in the form, others see each new task as an artistic odyssey replete with the torpid, sleepless, brain-thumping thoughts it induces, or not.

That's not to suggest training and pedagogy have no value, otherwise what's the point.

A student today hit the wall. He looked fairly relieved when I said the internal fight he was having with himself was part of the route to discovery. History is littered with tortured souls. We've come to realise though that there is genuine talent, that finds its way irrespective.

Kazuo Ishiguro was talking about his time at University of East Anglia's creative writing course. For a whole year there was no module, but the ocassional meet in the pub and talks with his lecturer Malcolm Bradbury about writing. Bradbury would later say, those who wanted to write, wrote.

I'm hoping to convene our next meeting at the BFI with the David Hayward from the BBC and Paul Egglestone from UCLAN, where we can exchange more data

The photojournalists' Photojournalist-The Bang Bang Club

BangBang Club - a must see film

South Africa 1994. Elizabeth Ohene, the South African correspondent for the BBC World Service's Africa division is recounting a story to me in the BBC's bureau. She's just come back from covering Tokoza, a township in South Africa.

A BBC Producer had a gun pointed at his head and the assailant looked ready to pull the trigger. "What would she have told his mother?", she tells me of her friend and much loved journalist.

I presented a programme for BBC Radio in London called "Black Londoner" hence the play on the title from a harrowing but life-defining assignment in South Africa in 1993

Below, after 15 years, last year I returned to South Africa to train African Journalists at Rhodes University, working with Miami University and had a couple of hours to visit where I used to live and produced this videojournalism - meta report.



I knew of the aforementioned demo; it could make my next report and earn me some money, but I decided not to go instead. But I also remember that day for another reason. Ken Oosterbroek, one of the members of the famed Bang Bang Club was shot and killed.

I didn't know Ken personally, but I had friends who I would visit at the Star newspaper where he worked. My landlady, Lyndsey who also edited Living Magazines, would take phone calls late in the night for two hours at a time from one of her commissioned photojournalists.

His name was Kevin Carter. Kevin had just returned from a haunting assignment in Sudan. The picture is now legendary, but it was Lindsaye's retelling of Kevin's story and how he came to take the shot which kept both of us talking to the small hours of the night.

Some months later Kevin committed suicide. His picture had won him the greatest honour in photojournalism, but Lindsaye told me he found it difficult to square that with the plight of the young child in this picture.

When I became a videojournalist a couple of months later in 1994, this picture adorned my cubby hole. It was one of the few pictures that inspired me to apply to the UK to become a dedicated videojournalist.

Kevin Carter's award winning photo/Corbis Sygma.. The film Bang Bang Club retelling the true story of Kevin et al will soon be on general release

There are countless aphorisms about photojournalism. Soon The Bang Bang Club, long revered amongst photojournalism aficionados may well turn out to acquire wide common use.

The story of a band of brothers who attained rock star like status from covering  South Africa's trenchant apartheid-induced killings, is as inspiring as it is tragic.  Joao Silva, one of the four, incurred severe injuries in 2010  from a landmine in Kandahar.  Greg Marinovich blog can be found here  He co-authored with Greg the book, The Bang Bang Club

Alongside them another name a synonym for exceptional photojournalism can be found, James Natchway

In itself this film will bring much reflection and awe at a professional set who often dare to go, where those considered fearless would. Look at Danfung Dennis today, whom I had the pleasure of inviting to share his life for a PhD study and then there's Yannis Kontos who I have worked with on a number of projects.

Bang Bang needed to be told. For me as a freelance journalist reporting the townships the film will bring back  personal memories of reportage and my next phase into videojournalism.

More on viewmagazine.tv

Three other incredible films that inspired me into journalism

The Year of Living Dangerously


Salvador


Frankie's House


Click here for insight into major new findings on 

What is videojournalism on the web, in multimedia and offline - a major study and film - and why it matters

Top ten tips for video making and videojournalism

Our penchant for lists, for formulaes often reduces the extent to which we might seek to uncover fresh approaches.

Arguably you could question whether there is anything in the world of video/ film to unravel anew.  We simulate the work of others and adopt their signatures.

Name a visual narrator who built a career in isolation of the industry. Everyone borrows from someone. We crib books, comb blogs, analyse video.

We listen to presentations. Sometimes we marvel at the work that confronts us. Then we stop and think. How did they do it?

I'm reminded by a presentation I gave a while back in Berlin on videojournalism.

Good film makers know how to copy others without you noticing the tracing paper,  really good visualists know when to break free of their idols, without the need for tracing paper

The list works to an extent, but then fails because it's no longer enough. It's too prescriptive.

Sometimes we'll just give a nod to a style which transfixed us:  Turner Prize Winner Steve McQueen was influenced by Buster Keaton films and then Renaissance paintings to achieve the look in his critically acclaimed film on Bobby Sands.

I chose McQueen because he proves another point about cross-creativity: when in doubt go to the Masters of the genre and deconstruct.

For those learning the art of film making this can often be testing. The magic pill is extraordinarily alluring. But  I would caution. Look, learn and leave it.

Better still there is no pill. The swan syndrome disguises the hard graft many of the people we admire put in. 

Interrogate the form, ask questions: lots of questions and then leave the top ten tips to those who want to proficiency over originality.

Good stories have a habit once they've been stumbled upon of finding good story tellers who do it justice - eventually. Though I accept you're now counting the many that got away.

But each story has its own internal dynamic; a metronome, a dream-like quality where those top tips may help and also constrain.

Oh my top ten tips:

• Be passionate
• Seek knowledge - far and wide
• Feel involved with the work
• Find good characters
• uncover a story line that is strong; it wows you
• Find the narrative- remember stories untold are messy
• Use strong pictures
• Be reflexive - review, review, review
• Fail quickly, so you fail less often

We'll talk about the last one when we go for drinks.

WebVideojournalists defining a future trail

Capturing the zeitgeist

In 2002 or thereabouts Futurure Publishing behind one of the most successful creative magazine's Computer Arts launched a magazine around video. 

 It lasted about 6 issues before it folded. I was so taken  I rang and spoke to its editor who lamented  the economics of it were unsustainable.

There are other specialists mags around today e.g. VideoMaker, but online is where you can get really excited. For videojournalism there are several blogs and mags offering a wealth of info; I started to mark them up and realised I'd be here all day.

The latest and an emerging behemoth from within the UK capturing the zeitgeist is the videojournalismweb blog: Online Videojournalism blog put together by eight Masters students from City University.

Its range of profiles and studied material across the breadth of video is a welcome addition to the genre. I hope they managed t sustain it after their degree.

Last week I was interviewed by one of their contributors Will Teddy - for what turned out to be a two hour chat, though admittedly a good percentage of that was me on subject.  Mention video and I'm off.

Will I learnt has a good knowledge of French film's - part of his grad degree  -which affords him the added heuristics to deconstruct film language from a nation that redefined European film in the 60s.

And since film language imbricates videojournalism of sorts, that's good knowledge.

Will's question's covered how much the web has changed videojournalism, what it is and where it's going. My response broadly took up the philosophy of videojournalism and a constructivist/ intepretism approach to story telling.

That means, given the term videojournalism cannot be approached as a metanarrative,  that is a grand theory which covers everything (Really!)  its difficult to be understood via orthodoxies.

It is part of the reason your notion of videojournalism might be fundamentally different from others.

Videojournalism
On Mrdot.co.uk I wrote some time back:

"Videojournalism is an advance on television news production - a shift away from the predictable approach television has stuck to doggedly since its inception".

This definition is fairly easy to comprehend and as videojournalism matures, it'll require deeper definitions

Take storytelling, simple to some, but a messy practice to truly master. I mean to the point that it taps into the psyche. But when we do tell stories, they're invariably linear and uniperspectival.  The news you watch about Libya comes from a correspondent. And why not. The correspondent may consider all sides, if they can access those, and give a considered view. Two things are at issue here.

First you get a a view reduced to simplify the story; it's a craft, but the pre-editing of data could leave you seriously questioning the reporter if you know what they knew. Second, the idea of realism of the story takes a hit.

Realism today is sculptured with respect to dominant parties - at least on television. It's as if Coubert, the founding father of modern realism has been erased from history, though yes we are influenced by the filming of ordinary folk.

But take the story of the Libyan crisis, we see UN governments, Libya's political apparatus, Gaddafi, but little of how people e.g. Libya's are living, or the views of the French whose government has taken the lead

We accept these limitations because that's the way we do things; they are problematised indeed. Tradition and convention are powerful shapers of how we are fixed to systems that mean we blithely unknowingly refuse to question any other way of doing what it is we do.

The only time we tend to see other methods it's because technology e.g. Twitter,  and or new social values smack against the old order or that sometimes methods adopted for one system are transfered to another. Ford Motor Car's system of divisional work which Hollywood adopted with the formation of specialists, adopted by broadcast networks. A system transferred to another.

The 3min or whatever report adopted from television is so (linear et al), because, why that's the way it is - at least by western influences. When I was in Chongqing I had a great discussion with a Chinese scholar who spoke to me about multi perspective Eastern art. Many stories in one plane staring right at you.

In other words, in Chinese art it's not uncommon to have multiple perspectives, rather than one - which is the Cartesian model here - which fits with the idea of single perspectives in photography, art and video.

A prevailing question at the moment suggests videojournalism is actually bankrupt of ideas. That's not to say all the noticeable films you see online aren't by universal standards great, but that the notion that videojournalism, as a mode of news film teleology would end up reworking news practices hasn't really happened.

There are many questions still to be asked, and those answers lie in a multiplicity of disciplines e.g.
experiential learning from our own individual journeys, and of course the work of new researchers and writers.

Future of Journalism ~ when does journalism intervene ?

A little boy lies cowered in the snow, destitute, cold without visible means that might help him survive the day.

Along comes a man wearing a coat; tucked in his pocket a number of energy bars. He talks to the boy, even takes some pictures before moving on. We don’t know what happened to the boy.

This may seem improbable that anyone could be so callous to abandon a child in need, but on TV screens, this is an exigent default act.

On  BBC's radio Media Show which analyses media events, Television News officials were questioned over the number of reporters and presenters sent to Japan to cover what one TV reporter described apocalyptically as a visit from three of the four horsemen.

Executives defended their positions. Yet there's something else lurking as the big question.

It's a philosophical statement whose time requires a rethink.  To what extent should the man described above be morally responsible to help the child?

Contemporary philosophy
On a macro level, today scores of reporters tread the scared streets of Japan doing what they’ve been trained to do; find and communicate a story.

There are more than enough. The mood is itself all the more difficult to comprehend - a show of the Japanese temperament to a Western society of how orderliness, respect can still be exercised at a time of deep crisis.

But do the media have a moral obligation to do what they can to help a desperate people? No, if an aged and mummified tenant of journalism is anything to go by.

Back in the 1960s, ITN reporter Alan Hart reporting from Nigeria’s Biafra war filed a piece, which for his bosses exemplified ITN’s prowess, however hart was angry.

Their feedback while laden with praise exalted Hart not to show any emotion next time, that is not to cry. Hart says he’s eyes welled up during his piece to camera.

The 60s and the shaping of media would have made such distinctions between reportage ( its role)  and media participation in extenuating affairs. The lines were divisible and stark.

Impartiality, objectivity, truth, realism, fairness – these were held to be unequivocal in framing the profession against the scourge of propaganda.

You could argue rightly so for a media finding its feet then this was not to be breached. The media like a wild-life camera person observed life, abject of any participation.

But what about now in an era of the world village, inter connected societies, shared experiences - the prevalence causality of the butterfly theory?

Can we be so sure that common sense overrides at all costs tradition?  ITN's Tom Brady (he clinched the William and Kate royal interview) speaking to students recently shared his concerns over journalists and photographers determined to get a picture of an injured Prince Diana,  rather than attend to her wounds.

Questions of Journalism
The question needs to be revisited. To what point in human suffering should the media seek to do more than its intended role of reportage.

This is not to say those who provide a special window on events in the world down their tools-of-the-trade to become rescuers, but to consider that the power they possess in exposing events brings collective consciousness together- at particular times, specific instances.

Again, the obvious response to this Luddite and ill-conceived thought of mine is: "That's what we do, we are journalists. We remain impartial in executing our work".

But could we fault any of the world media broadcasting with visible on air links to donate funds, or provide an accommodation so journalists reports are re-packaged to assist acts of charity. Does there lie a mechanism that facilitates a call to action?

Again the natural response is that's not the job of journalism. However look hard and there are signs editors and journalists are already complicit - albeit in limits.

From Libya yesterday, BBC Correspondent Ian Pannel gave a platform to an interviewee on a mobile phone awaiting the fearful arrival of Gaddafi's forces in Benghazi :"If you could speak to the international community what would you say?"

In the changing dynamics of journalism within social networks is there a new responsibility that renders traditional journalism's position arcane?

A former Masters student of mine from Ghana was adamant this was so: the media should not just report on issues, he said, but seek a way to instigate change.

It was, I remember thinking, a naive thought at the time.  But coming from Ghana, his experience were different, that is different to me - and I have lived and worked for the media in Ghana.

Fifteen years ago, in a ground breaking videojournalism co-production, Ghana TV sent reporters to South Africa to share, report on issues, common for each state.

Fresh look at journalism
Consider this within traditional journalism philosophy; how the act of  ITN's  Michael Nicholson a veteran journalist touched by a young girl in Sarajevo's war resulting in him adopting her.

Such deeds are to be eschewed. Why? Simply because journalism provides a voice but not a face that may in the minds of those that hold its divinity undermine what it stands for.

In a new age, a new era, I suggest we look further, that to start the news extolling independence followed by an announcement that if viewers want to help in anyway they can a link - which hold in perpetuity on screen is one that can be done.

In the long term, the profession requires Baroness Warnock figures, a fresh look at journalism, in a completely, radically different age from whence it came.

NB This author is not a broadcast journalist. He spent a fair few years in the profession and is now an academic. Yah! what does he know!

Future Journalism - trainee journalists go beyond the blog

Designed Journalism- Image Valeria Testagrossa

It's the holy grail of the future of journalism.

The pub talk is it's less about another app, but a generation with different needs and social wants from their previous lot. What's more they're working to an evermore info-literate populace.

At a recent Westminster University PR event: "Have PR and spin undermined trust in politics?" former No. 10 communications man Lance Price made that point.

Today, the audience knows what's duff, spin and good media, he more or less said.

The pen might be mightier than a sharp nudge to the kidneys, but today if you're looking to a career in the factual-story telling business you'd do well to consider options that scale the blog.

Pathways which strictly defined whether you were print or broadcast have overlapped. Words morph into images - graphically. Does Sassurean's signifier and signified mean anything today?

It's no longer a contentious point; the future is screen based, but the disappearance of classical media such as Time Magazine points out might be exaggerated.

New Journalists

Yet on the one hand it's still a listing trade; BBC et al cutting back on jobs. Then on the other side as shown with a new phenomenological group of journalists e.g. Alex Wood and Adam Westbrook playing online makes for a longer, even richer play.

To that evolving troupe, new cohorts, new journalists armed with their CSS, xhtmls, SEO continue to emerge.

It seems an eternity now since Anthony Moor, board of directors of the influential Online News Association, spoke for a generation on the OJR: "Go to the Web, young journalist.

Now its go beyond the web, enveloping jobs online once reserved for the techie heads.

Here then is the  the work of Masters students 2011. Share your thoughts.

http://www.StreetsLondon.co.uk

StreetsLondon.co.uk

http://www.london-performers.co.uk/index.html

London-performers.co.uk

http://www.whereislondon.co.uk

Whereislondon.co.uk