The new videojournalists changing the world - really this isn't a hoax

Firstly and swiftly, a disclaimer, I loath those PR messages and articles proclaiming primacy of knowledge. ..."Follow me, I am the best videojournalist in the world". We do videojournalism like no one else" . That videojournalist there is a numpty saying the same things I said".

Oh really and when did you hang out with me 24/7 since 1994 when I became a videojournalist?
Yes a respected videojournalist who thought he'd become the repository of all knowledge, having discovered videojournalism through the 5D, said I'd taken his idea.  Shrug your shoulders. I did.

So this post then is not a vainglorious attempt to grab your interest. The poster at the top is designed merely to catch your interest. Apologies if its worked. Everyone has their Warhol moment's but they're transient.

I work as a senior university lecturer for the University of Westminster. It's a fairly decent school for media coming 19th in the world according to the QS rankings. I tell my students the measure of you is to be better than what you think you can be, understanding you need everyone else.

Doesn't that threaten you, some students ask. Why? I reply. As trainers if we didn't set out to make those we're looking after, better than what we've tried, why are we trainers. Why would Ivan Lendl want to coach Andy Murray.

Incidentally, the top universities in the aforementioned rankings are: The university of Berkeley which came first, so if you're listening Berkeley - nod nod and in particularly to Richard Koci, (@koci)who over the years knowing him have developed a great deal of respect for his work. It was followed by University of Texas and Columbia.

Prelude - Back story to MIV
As a lecturer my job involves exchanging knowledge and I take it seriously and within an institution that respects and protects its brand. So what I am about to talk about in MIV should be taken in that spirit.

I have strong views on knowledge, but then again so do all university lecturers. But my approach stems from my ethnicity, cultural leanings and an abhorrence to elitism and ignorance.

Elitism in that state of mind that suggests you're better than others. You can be an elite, such as Dynamo, who without a shadow of a doubt is one of the most extraordinary magicians, you'll ever come across.

He levitates five feet of the ground in Brazil against the statue of Christ. Onlookers think he is the second coming. In Time Square he does the Neo thing in the Matrix and everyone phone starts to ring. He approaches a group of young basketball player and in his self effacing Bradford accent says "can I show you something". Cue. 20 seconds later, no edit. the boys look on aghast as he has squeezed their ball with minimum effort into an America football ball.

Yet Dynamo is the epitome of humbleness. The best athletes, dancers, creatives, videojournalists are aware that humility is a pre-requesite of who you are.

Today you're on top and might have clambered over your colleagues to get there, to realise tomorrow someone else's 15 minutes has come and that apple pie, you're not so much as having to eat it is being rammed into your face.

Ignorance, is the pretence you know, or the sheer ignorance that you don't know. Yes there are unknown unknowns. Poor Rumsey. His replicating of Jahori's philosophies, there are some things you know and some things you don't know you know, is  a well worked aphorism.

Rumsey, then Defence Secretary chose the wrong time to regale his audience of press people.

My ethnicity and cultural leanings power me. Black, grew up in Ghana until the end of high school. Returned to Britain to complete my studies. I chose Applied Chemistry. but when I graduated and wanted to become a journalist, it would have been easier to arrange tea with the Prime Minister.

Journalism, rightly so guards its values, but it invariably ignorantly and in elitist fashion, believes it must be the judge who can become a journalist and who can't. This may be axiomatic to some, but denying access to its operations because of colour, sex, creed is untenable.

Videojournalism
The days of writing 300 letters might be behind me. The Internet has liberated the stranglehold the few had over the many. The institutions that once validated whether we could be considered journalists are no longer the abriters.

I read somewhere yesterday that Television still rules as the source of news, followed by the web. But the point is for how long.

If South Korea's market is anything to go by millions of people are successfully taking to personal television. And television has rebirthed but in new ways that takes advantage of our post-millennium behaviours.

This is then where I tell you about MIV. The concept has come from 6 years studying the media and literature to find out mine the intricate detail to make sense of. I am nearly there but in the process have recorded interviews from China, Cairo, Chicago, the UK, South Africa and many more places that paint a picture.

Here I need to be careful, but it excites me none the less. Somethings emerged from those interviews and in the process maps a future which is radically different to what we do at present. It all sounds mysterious, but for the moment, bare with me.

Robert Stam an eminent professor in film and media from New York says the place we are at the moment is much like the 1920s when anything was possible. And indeed that's where this research starts and makes its claim.

But what is MIV?  I'm about to post something on viewmagazine.tv pretty soon.

Twitter and the lasting chaos theory. breaking news. Give twitter a miss

If you don’t like the chaos of breaking news, you should probably stay off Twitter

That's what the article from paid content was titled.  It's a good read, but here's my take on why news and you should really stop using twitter if you find it annoying for false information.

 

Interesting that we measure Twitter’s discursive impact by how it works within or around the periphery of news.

We’ve become so accustomed to the higher authority of this media form, that it’s a perennial yard stick.

But news had its own huge problems e.g. dwindling audiences circa 1980s before twitter and the social avalanche came.

I like the title of this “If you don’t like the chaos of breaking news, you should probably stay off Twitter” , because twitter never signed up to be a news service. If you want one of these policed by journalists, who are limited in number etc, you’d do well to subscribe to an agency.

Philosophy students will chuckle at all of this. Foucault’s discursive formations at play again.

Here an institution takes on a form and makes it its own. In ten years time a generation will think Twitter was built by journalists. Really !

What’s the evidence? Another discursive form videojournalism. Many think it was created by TV news broadcaster. It wasn’t. But Foucault turned in his grave again.

In 1994 when videojournalism was launched in the UK, it took at least ten years before the sniping stopped. Twitter, the CB Radio of teletext is only doing what it's designed to do.

We sentients attach conventional values and misplaced meanings, when perhaps we shouldn’t.

A third way to knowledge and media interpretation beyond Structuralism vs Post structuralism

David Dunkley Gyimah talking to news executive at the Chicago Sun Times from a week of teaching videojournalism

There's what you want to do and that which you have no control over.

Our world is driven by both. On BBC Radio 4's Today programme Professor Susan Greenwood was pitted against Emily Bell,  director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

The former argued a structuralist approach to technology. It's purpose must be determined as  Radio 4's tweet  states [BBC Radio 4 Today ‏@BBCr4today7m] Susan Greenfield says: "We need to learn to harness technology. We can't sleepwalk into this and assume because it's new it's 100% good."

Emily Bell's approach was post structuralist. We use technology to create our own realities and we do it without necessary knowing, what we're doing.

As a videojournalist, a former BBC producer completing my PhD into news production, I know both sides of this argument and they are separated by pragmatism and theory.Yes ! That old hoary chestnut.

Our schism with knowledge is predicated on this, a state of play which emerged  from a necessary reboot  of academia placing a higher emphasis on theoreticians in the 1970s.

If you live in this matrix world of socially connected networks, you're inclined to ask what's the fuss?
In 2006 I interviewed Dan Gilmore in San Antonio, the start of my peripatetic career.  Gilmor's populist We this Media constructed is a sound rhetoric how technology was changing the way we connect. Why was this happening I asked Gilmor? His answer was pithy, "because it can".

As with many intellectual arguments, whether in politics,  BBC Radio 4, or the work, there is no right or wrong and the outcome is a matter of hermeneutics. Without structure , we blithely leave life and our businesses to chance.  Yet our history has demonstrated how chances has been responsible for our livelihood e.g. penicillin, the motor tyre, going shopping.

Every single social app you know of has a structural beginning which was inconsequential to the creators in so far as becoming a media beast. Facebook, Twitter, the telephone, camera have histories of intention. Yet co-opted by others in a non-structured way they find renewed meaning.

The discourse on radio provides a means to hear learned arguments from both sides. But the real winner is to be able to see through this and understand the interconnectedness of these positions.

If anything the next generation of academics may have to be steeped in both pragmatism and academia, bridge the divide between rhetoric and neo-sophism. Acknowledge more explicitly  there's what you want to do and that which you have no control over.

Then again, that would nto make for good combative radio.

David Dunkely Gyimah of  viewmagazine.tv is a former BBC  and Channel 4 News producer with media experience spanning 25 years. He's worked for Newsnight, ABC News and is an academic and filmmaker currently competing his PhD. He has presented at ONA, SXSW and Apple. 

To contact David email him at David (at) Viewmagazine (dot) TV

How video journalism will be shaped by a future of journalism by Cinema

DAVID DUNKLEY GYIMAH

David Dunkely Gyimah of  viewmagazine.tv is a former BBC and Channel 4 News producer with media experience spanning 25 years. He is an academic and filmmaker currently competing his PhD. He has presented at ONA, SXSW and Apple. This article explores how one of the most prevalent forms of media making is up for grabs, but it will need a shift in our cultural thinking. 

It matters less whether its twitter, or Facebook, Tumblr or You Tube, important as they are because sharing comes after we have something to share in the first place.

What makes great content? An idea and then its execution.  Execution is how you go about creating and that itself is dependent on an array of influences.

Your approach comes from the environment you've grown up in, its cultures and what's in and out of vogue. The USA of the 1960s was a different creative environment to today. If you've grown up in China creative concepts, say in design our the polar opposite to western values. The West treats design as two dimensional, a space to be filled. Chinese through Origami see space as 3-dimensional and negative space as aesthetic.

It is no coincidence at all that middle class parents encouraged their siblings to go on gap years, take in the world, see new things, expand the horizon of their ideas. As a lecturer with international Masters students, I see it time and time again, how transformative entering a new society can be.

But creativity is also predicated on behaviour which is contradistinction to trends today. Creativity best comes from collaboration. The late Steve Jobs knew that, and any designer or great filmmaker recognises that too.

In an age of meism and self-aggrandisement, when we no longer wait on our peers to critique us, but believe in our own grandeur, we're prone to abandoning or not engaging with one of the most powerful assets we have as people.

We're social yes, but not as Twitter after thoughts. The idea though we're better of doing things ourselves is plainly flawed, though yes you could count individuals who have risen by their own will-power.

How Hollywood can teach us to communicate

David Dunkley Gyimah

But sustainability is about a creative pursuit.

One industry second only to the US defence budget spend knows this all too well. They've developed a trillion dollar industry creating stories.

The manner in which they do this appears simple in the execution of an idea. Boy meets girl and they fall in love. The end.

But it's a complex matrix involving philosophies, creative thinkers, blaggers and knowledge that comes and decomposes. Yes it involves businesses too, but I'll park that to the side for the sake of this post.

Hollywood and other related international industries created cinema, stories that tap into our very psyche so that we respond in ways that are personal. We cry, laugh and get angry.

Great content comes not only from what's in the frame, which needs to be produced, but then how it plays out. Inside that rubric is the gem of cinema and its constantly mutating. Cinema is one of most dynamic non-systemised languages.

Cinema is different from the cinematic. The former is an internalised concept, the other is an add on. The story acquires a cinematic look because of the 5D you're using. It may induce the feeling of cinema, but not necessarily so.

Why ? Because the cinematic is dependent upon technology and related ideas to that technology. That 5D you have with its extreme shallow depth of field will be out of vogue in less than ten years time. It's happened before within the period of the 1930s to the 1950s and will do so again.

Cinema is deeper than that. It exists to be found, before the application of a recording device makes it available to others. Great directors see cinema, not as fictional entities but as symphonies of visual matter and sounds colliding in a doppler effect of the two-step.

Have you ever worked with an editor who tells you the cut needs three frames less? I have and there is a great scene in the making of Jaws where Spielberg marvels over his editor's choices of a couple of frames less to make the scene work.

Cinema's renewed zeal
For the last 6 intense years and tacitly 25 years within the media I have been working on this trying to explain cinema is a way that is exemplified through a number of essences.

That means how any content can acquire a sense of cinema and as things stand at the moment and its likely will be in the future cinema is the apotheosis visual and aural art. Note even Baudrillard's hyperreality could not escape the clutches of the framework that is cinema.

But why should this be important? Simply the power of cinema communicates ideas in ways that proven to be lasting. Yes, you still remember ET, or John Ford's Stage Coach and Ozu's Tokyo Story.  But do you remember yesterday's news? Or the CEO's speech? Or that lecture.

Acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh puts it succinctly, cinema has nothing to do with the movies. It can be about movies, but not all movies are cinema. Just as when we say what we want are great stories, philosophers like Deluze might suggest you're referring to a specific visual and aural pattern.

Why does this matter even more? Because as video floods our social and private spaces, those who understand cinema, not necessarily theoretically, will produce artifacts that are eminently watchable and memorable.

The most shocking thing is this, many news managers will feel angered by this last comment. News, has a fixed and sustaining way of working. But in all likelihood,  traditional news structures while they'll be influential will not be able to guarantee audiences come to them.

Not with what lay ahead. If the web continues at its pace, the new cinephiles will usurp the constrained order of other forms.

Lest we forget, television came from cinema; video art from cinema; and documentaries from cinema. The last statement bears the scars of years of infighting over which came first. If you see cinema does that mean you're documenting it as well. If you're documenting are you making cinema. The two are not the same.

A firmer pedagogical understanding of how to match 21st century storytelling to the sub conscious lay in wait. It sounds like science fiction, but its here now and taking hold.

David is presently gearing up for training a new breed to cinema makers in Turkey. He's recently presented in Denmark to Journalists and photographers. This blog of his will soon migrate to a new home, together with a new website. You can find more of his work on his knight batten award winning site www.viewmagazine.tv

David is available for talks and consultancies.

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Express yourself in the story. Well known videojournalists show how they tell their stories - Denmark

David Dunkley Gyimah's research into video making

As part of a six year research into video storytelling and videojournalism, which will be submitted soon, I was invited to Denmark, alongside a host of internationally well known storytellers e.g. Bombay Flying Club, to talk about what's emerging.




Presentation as part of an international line up for #Videoplay  (Video Playground) at one of the prestigious films schools The European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark

In two 2-hour slots I mapped out the varying different styles used to create different feelings in stories in videojournalism. I also proved to delegates who gathered in the auditorium below that cinema does not necessarily mean fictional films.

Darren Dutch, a US Emmy award winning solo videojournalists tweeted.

Darren Durlach ‏@DarrenDurlach10h

@viewmagazine: cinema is the spectacle, it's what draws you in #videoplayground

The seminars over a week are aimed at predominately mid career photojournalists, photographers and TV Camera men and women.

My presentation was entitled: Express Yourself - Doing as theory, the reflective practitioners. The goal was to show how new ways of working are becoming theory and that its the crafts person reflecting on what they do will yield fresh interpretations.

I have enormous respect for anyone doing video, particular those calling themselves citizen journalist, but here I argued that unless you can begin to read media, you're somewhat handicapped.


If you've seen editions of Dr Who this illustration above of how I think, might be familiar.

I also wanted to ground the theory by stating there was no such thing as a unitary future of journalism. Why? because our ideas are as diverse as they are disparate and post modernism doesn't facilitate one big idea any more.

That was evident at Newsxchange in Barcelona, when Kenji Kohno, Deputy Director, International News Division, NHK spoke about a story they were covering which to us seemed like a cold case.

According to Leonard Shlain, in the East, the concept of time and space is fundamentally different to the West. Their Sarin gas story that happened nearly 20 years ago was not the past, it was present.

Can you think like a videojournalist?
I ran a few cognitive experiments, but here's one that was a favourite. If you want to play here goes.

1. Look at the balls and see if you can detect a pattern

No? Ok look at this one

Any luck yet?  If you saw this. Well done.

But what about this? Did you get this? Prime numbers versus even.

Effectively I have demonstrated how we read media from patterns, but because we go for the obvious, journalism becomes predictable. There are various reasons why, such as News agencies sell footage to broadcasters and to increase their sales they go for generic and easy to understand stories that anyone across the world would understand.

We looked at several videos and I talked about how some broadcasters were changing from the traditional package to a DSLR trope, but the delegates detected some short comings. 

Look at this incredible video from Alleppo from Channel 4 News, which will likely win awards and see whether you can come up with a critique.

I reccommended books like this one that gets you into the headspace of understanding how to reflect on what you do.

And played through several videos deconstructing with the audience why they worked, or not

I demoed some of the kit I use on stories, such as the pocket rig, a small devise that mimics those huge shoulder rigs using the 5D, expect its much smaller.

There was a good degree of audience feedback on personal films I have made, and it was great to see critiques which acknowledged and challenged what might be acceptable or not. Great questions start the thinking process to reinforcing reflective thinking.

I summarised that it was neither my job nor my intention to claim to teach you my style. By showing tow different films and a range of commercials I wanted to prove that the best way to become a film maker or videojournalist was to pick a style and hone that, before moving onto another.

Thanks very much for the generous reception. Here's the image that underpin my practice.

And we end with these two pictures and my thanks to Martin Ramsgård and Søren Skarby two formidable practitioners who are driving various projects in Denmark to increase the value of professionals shooting video and making films.  

Next up was Daniel Moj, a prolific entrpreneurial videojournalist from Germany who put on a wonderful show, and tomorrow is Darren Durlach ‏@DarrenDurlach  award winning videojournalist from the US whom I really looking forward to seeing. 

And finally it was great to meet up with Henrik from the Bombay Flying Club, photography and Flash producers par excellence. 

You can learn more about the event and the people behind it on their Facebook site aptly called Video Playground. My thanks to all the delegates for being so generous, Leif, his assistant and Michael for taking the photographs of me including these two below.

David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer, videojournalist, filmmaker, artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre and consultant for a number of companies. He has spoken at SXSW, World Association of Newspapers, Sheffield Documentary Festival and Newxchange.  He tweets and can be followed at @viewmagazine

The Videojournalists's Playground in Denmark

Pictures from my presentation as part of an international line up for #Videoplay  (Video Playground) at one of the prestigious films schools The European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark

This is their really nice cinema auditorium we're presenting from

I had two 2-hour slots mapping out how different styles can be used to create different feelings in videojournalism. I also proved to delegates that cinema has nothing to do with cinema. Darren Dutch, a US Emmy award winning solo videojournalists tweeted.

Darren Durlach ‏@DarrenDurlach10h

@viewmagazine: cinema is the spectacle, it's what draws you in #videoplayground

The seminars over a week are aimed at predominately mid career photojournalists, photographers and TV Camera men and women.

My presentation was titled Doing as theory, the reflective practitioners. The goal was to show how new ways of working are becoming theory and that its the crafts person reflecting on what they do, which has currency, and differs from citizen journalism.

I have enormous respect for anyone doing video, i particular those calling themselves citizen journalist, but here I argued that unless you can begin to read media and change styles accordingly, you're very different from those who have spent years wrestling withe their disciplines.

I probably over did the slides running at 53, but I wanted to ground the theory. I stated there was no such thing as a unitary future of journalism. Why? because our ideas are as diverse as they are disparate and post modernism doesn't facilitate one big idea any more.

Can you think like a videojournalist? I ran a few cognitive experiments, but here's one that was a favourite. If you want to play here goes.

1. Look at the balls and see if you can detect a pattern

No? Ok look at this one

Any luck yet?  If you saw this. Well done.

But what about this? Did you get this? Prime numbers versus even.

Effectively I have demonstrated how we read media from patterns, but because we go for the obvious, journalism gets a bit dull. These are called semantic fields and the really clever videojournalists break conventions.

We looked at several videos and I talked about how some broadcasters were changing from the traditional package, but the delegates detected some short comings. Look at this incredible video from Alleppo from Channel 4 News, which will likely win awards and see whether you can come up with a critique.

I reccommended books like this one that gets you into the headspace of understanding how to reflect on what you do

And played through several videos deconstructing with the audience why they worked, or not

And demoed some of the kit I use on stories, such as the pocket rig, a small devise that mimics those huge shoulder rigs using the 5D, expect its much smaller.

There was a good degree of audience feedback on personal films I have made, and it was great to see critiques which acknowledged and challenged what might be acceptable or not. Great questions start the thinking process to reinforcing reflective thinking.

I summarised that it was neither my job nor my intention to claim to teach you my style. By showing tow different films and a range of commercials I wanted to prove that the best way to become a film maker or videojournalist was to pick a style and hone that, before moving onto another.

Thanks very much for the generous reception. Here's the image that underpin my practice.

And we end with these two pictures and my thanks to Martin Ramsgård and Søren Skarby two formidable practitioners who are driving various projects in Denmark to increase the value of professionals shooting video and making films.  

Next up was Daniel Moj, a prolific entrpreneurial videojournalist from Germany who put on a wonderful show, and tomorrow is Darren Durlach ‏@DarrenDurlach  award winning videojournalist from the US whom I really looking forward to seeing. 

And finally it was great to meet up with Henrik from the Bombay Flying Ducks, photography and Flash producers par excellence. 

You can learn more about the event and the people behind it on their Facebook site aptly called Video Playground. My thanks to all the delegates for being so generous, Leif, his assistant and Michael for taking the photographs of me including these two below.

David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer, videojournalist, filmmaker, artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre and consultant for a number of compabies, He tweets and can be followed at @viewmagazine

Hyper Reality Gaming. What it teaches us by David Dunkley Gyimah

Hypereality Gaming.

In a distant memory in London's docklands we gather. A major toy company has laid on hospitality for reporters to test its revolutionary new laser guns heralding a new era in gaming.

If that wasn't remarkable enough, it hired ex royal marines to supervise the day.

Today, in a new generation of gaming, what was back then a surreal moment of Jean Baudrilard's   hyper reality, a blending of the real and fake, has matured into an industry that blends physical and imagination - a new type of hyper reality.

No Marines no lasers, but the expertise of being a professional paintball champion representing your country and thus figuring out how to stage an event. That's the claim for 26 year old Tommy Pemberton behind Go Paintball London.

As a videojournalis and casual geek, there is no doubting the impact of video in gaming, so eruditely put by Guardian journalist Keith Stuart and howvideo is changing games, but nothing beats the physicality and adrenalin rush in the field.

Today I sat this one out today, but I couldn't help but be transported into the world of cinema videojournalism. Cue these images I took and produced that evoke the dystopic world of Children of Men (2006).

Hyperreality II

In recent years from reporting within Nato's War Games and  and filming the Special Forces working in Africa and I couldn't help but think if I had my videojournalism kit with me, I would have had sneaked a run at making a film about the day.

My reasons aren't merely frivolity, but that gaming teaches us an attribute that can be found lacking in collaborative work: trust and team work.

And it gives me a chance to work aesthetics (I am writing about for a newspaper) for work I'll be doing in the field about a new type of cinema in journalism. BTW cinema does not mean movie. I have posted some new stuff on viewmagazine.tv.

I'm certain some of our International Masters students, who have to work in teams to problem-solve would echo some of this. I put together these images for a presentation I'm delivering in Denmark next week, before a gig which involves going to Turkey to train videojournalists reporting from within Syria.

Close  Hyperreality 

Tommy Pemberton 

David Dunkley Gyimah reporting from West Africa circa 1997 on the Special Forces. David, a senior lecturer at the world's 19th best media institution, The University of Westminster. He is an artist in residence and consults for a number of companies in digital. He is a recipient of the Knight Batten Awards and does digital on his site www.viewmagazine.tv

David Dunkley Gyimah reporting on Special Forces training in West Africa

David interview former CIA chief James Woolsey. Trailer on Viewmagazine.tv