A Flash journalism experience

For the second blogging assignment in Journalists’ Toolkit II, I spent some time with Lebrow Jones and the Death of Micki Hall, an on-line feature of the Times Herald-Record of Middletown, New York. The feature is a true multi-media package, with text, photographs, video segments, and interactive graphics combined to tell a complete story.

When I look at packages such as this one, I’m always fascinated by how (or even whether) the journalist is able to lead me through the story. I’ve seen many multi-media presentations that don’t so much tell a story as present bucket-loads of information for the reader to sort through. In the first seconds of looking at this story I was afraid this was the case, but I fell back on our cultural organizational standard — I went to the top left of the screen — and I was led logically through a compelling story.

We’ve looked at many on-line article packages that told their stories through video or a combination of photographs and text. For me, one of the most successful parts of this particular story was the addition of interactive graphical elements like the on-line time-line shown here:

This story has a correct understanding of the sequence of events as a critical part of the narrative, so the time line with buttons at crucial junctures is a very useful tool to help the reader understand the flow of events — versus the flow of the narrative that came out in the trial.

While I felt the overall organization and layout of the story package was superb, not every piece of the story worked equally well. For me, one of the pieces that worked most poorly was a video of the Elk Hotel, a downtown hotel that was one of the last places Micki Hall was seen alive. The video, reached through a link in the text narrative, has no voice-over, no interview, and ultimately nothing to provide context to the images that we see. It is all atmosphere in a story that is very direct and straight-forward. The image here is one frame of the video, but it provides no less context than the entire piece.

I found this video especially puzzling in light of another video clip that I found incredibly effective. Lebrew Jones, as it turns out, is the son of a well-respected big-band drummer, Speedy Jones. In one video segment, clips of the father and son are intercut to great effect and substantial exposition. I was taken with the production of this piece, and moved by the extent to which it rounded out my perception of Lebrew Jones as a complete human being.

Overall, this piece worked for me because it combined the traditional methods of leading me through the story with facilities that allowed me to dig deeper into the information on points that I wanted to explore. In many ways, that combination exploits the strengths of the Web and leads us in the direction of a complete on-line, interactive journalistic package.

With that said, I don’t think it’s a perfect story package. There are things I’d like to keep exploring (it would be great, for example, if there was a way for the site to let me sign up for updates as the story of the possible re-opening of the case proceeds), and individual pieces (like the video I mentioned above) that don’t move the story forward. Those pieces should either be improved or jettisoned. Taken all together, though, I think this is a piece of journalism that is very good. Very, very good.

A few Vista Movie Maker discoveries

I’ve been playing with the various settings in Windows Movie Maker for Vista, and I’ve found several things that might be useful:

1. Movie Maker CAN create clips automatically when importing from a video camera.

When you bring your footage over, the default behavior is to break it into (roughly) five-second segments. You can go into the Tools –> Options menu and change the length of the clips. You can also tell it not to break the imported footage into clips.

2. Movie Maker WILL NOT create clips automatically when importing an existing video file.

The only behavior I find (or find any reference to) is importing the existing file as one large piece of video. Now, once the file is imported, you can go to the Tools –> Create Clips menu and have Move Maker break the video into clips for you. As with the clips you import from a camera, you can change the length of the clips in Tools — > Options.

3. Movie Maker doesn’t make ANY CHANGES to the original video file.

This is important: Movie Maker brings a COPY of the original file into memory, and works on the copy. The project file, and any edits or changes you make to the video, are stored as a set of pointers to the original file. If you want to keep track of the changes, you have to save your project. If you want to have a video file that reflects your changes, you have to export (create a movie of) the project. This can be a fine thing to do, but be careful: All the video that we’re working with involves compression. If you continually export a video from your work, then re-import the saved video and work from that (then export your work, and start the whole cycle over the next time), you’ll eventually degrade the quality of the copy you’re working from with highly unpredictable results.

If you’re working from a USB-connected hard disk, you’ll want to make sure that the disk always attaches with the same drive letter designation. If it doesn’t, then the pointers to the original file can be messed up. If anyone’s interested, I can find a tutorial on how to do this, or catch me before class, and I can show you how.