Learning to tell stories in video

This has been an interesting term in Journalist’s Toolkit. On the one hand, I’m convinced that the things that we’ve learned are essential skills for journalists in the opening decades of the new millennium. On the other hand, I’ve been frequently frustrated as I’ve tried to keep up with learning these new skills. Some explanation is obviously in order…

The essence of “story” is something I think I have a decent handle on. I’ve been telling stories for a long time, I understand the concepts, I get the structure — the essence of the craft is something I “get”. In general, this term didn’t change my understanding of story telling, though it did help me attach a new word — the “train” — to a concept I’d worked with before.

The train came from our textbook, Documentary Storytelling: Making Stronger and More Dramatic Nonfiction Films, which was an interesting piece of the experience. Most of the points made in the book were on-target and useful — it was the scale of the examples that made things interesting. There were plenty of suggestions on topics ranging from story to scripting to financing the production, but they were aimed at longer-form documentaries. A section on developing the arc of a story through a 3-scene structure, for example, seems a touch over-engineered for a 2-minute video. With that aside, I’m not sorry that we worked through the book, and I plan to keep it on my bookshelf.

Now, the best part of the course was, I believe, the time I was able to spend with my hands on a video camera or editing tool. The worst part of the course was, I believe, the (lack of) time I was able to spend with my hands on a video camera or editing tool. While I understand the structure of telling a story, telling that story through video took me well out of my comfort zone. Yes, I had become much more comfortable using photographs with text to tell a story, but video was something else — I think the best analog would be if I had been told to tell a journalistic story through rhyming verse. On the one hand, I understand both story-telling and the basics of rhyme, but I don’t have nearly enough experience actually doing it to let me feel comfortable putting them together.

That could be, to be honest, the point of the course. I don’t feel like I’m coming out of the course with a mastery of telling stories using video. I do, on the other hand, feel that I’m coming out of the course with enough knowledge to allow me to keep learning from a rational starting point. I’m fortunate — I have a video camera that I can use to practice, and further develop my skills. If I didn’t have that equipment access, I can imagine becoming quite frustrated with a new set of skills that I couldn’t build upon.

One portion of the course that I greatly enjoyed was working on the final team project. I have a very small number of people with whom I collaborate on articles in my normal work, and it was fun working with a new partner on the final video. A partnership is always an interesting relationship in which the members have to bring their skills, judgement, and opinions while realizing that the final result won’t be exactly as it would have been had they worked on it alone. In my case, my partner has a great eye and a story-telling sensibility that is different than (though completely compatible with) my own. It was a very good experience.

So, do I think I’ll use what I’ve learned? Absolutely. I’m on assignment now, and I anticipate producing at least two video segments during the next week. I know that I’ll use the video skills for my primary job, and I am confident that I’ll be able to build freelance business based on video, as well.

What do I want to do with the skills? I want to improve my ability to tell stories through video, and I want to work on combining video, photographs, audio, and text into complete story-telling packages. For that, I’m certain that I’ll need to improve my Flash skills — another area in which I’ll be building on the initial exposure we received in class.

What’s my overall impression of the course? As I said at the top of this post, I’m absolutely convinced that any journalist who wants to earn a living in the next few years will need to know how to tell a story in a number of different ways. Video, Flash, photography, text, and all of these put together will be part of the job description of working journalists. For those of us who want to teach and train young journalists, being able to use these techniques to tell stories will be essential to preparing the next generations of journalists. My only significant disappointment is that our department isn’t moving in this direction more quickly and completely. We need the theories, the skills, and the tools to become complete modern journalists — not the modern journalism equivalent of the master button-hook maker.

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.

A Quick Technology Note

Today in the lab, I discovered a problem when I tried to copy the .AVI file of my raw video from the workstation onto my portable hard drive. While the file was a bit over 5 gigabytes, and my hard drive had 232 gigabytes of free space, when I tried the copy I got an “Insufficient Space” error message.

The problem, as it turned out, was in the way the drive was formatted. Most USB hard disks will come with a FAT32 format applied. This format is used because virtually all versions of Windows can cope with it, and Mac OS from about 9.5 until current versions can load the disk without much trouble. The problem is that there’s a file size limit in FAT32, and that maximum file size is 4 Gigabytes. Obviously, some of the files we’re going to deal with can be larger than that.

The answer is to reformat the drive to use the NTFS file system. This is the latest Microsoft file system, and it has a lot of advantages for a disk that doesn’t hold the basic operating system. Now, it will take a while — on my 250 gigabyte Toshiba drive it took almost four hours for the format to complete — but it should get rid of the file size limitations.

If you need to go back and forth between Macintosh and Windows with your drive, you can find instructions (and a link to a simple program you’ll need) here at lifehack.org.

That’s it. I’ll head back to the lab tomorrow to pick up the raw files, and the process of turning that into a video can begin.

Thoughts on the Journalists’ Toolkit

My first thought (and, I think, the most important) is that this has been the sort of course I hoped I would have in graduate school, but didn’t expect. I am a practicing journalist who wants to get better at his craft, and this course has helped me do that. How? Let’s look at some of the ways:

The Course Gave Me Permission

There’s no news value in the fact that photographs can tell a story. There’s no news value in the fact that audio recording can be a useful journalist’s tool. In the early weeks of this course, though, the assignments gave me permission to practice both still photography and audio recording from a journalist’s perspective. It was important for me to have a reason to carve out time to practice these when I didn’t have a paycheck riding on the results, and when the feedback I received wasn’t from someone who saw me as a content-creation asset.

The Course Gave Me Tools

By the middle of the term, I was being introduced to tools and techniques I hadn’t used before. The SoundSlides package was a revelation, a structured way of telling a story using still images and audio. I had used each piece alone, but I was shown a way to use both together to tell a compelling story. I’ve already begun using SoundSlides in my professional work, and I have a feeling I’ll continue to stretch with these tools as I move into the next course.

As we moved toward the final package, I gained another new tool in embedded Google Maps. I knew it was possible to embed these, but I hadn’t done it, and was bowled over by the simplicity of the process. I’ve had the first discussions with an editor about using these techniques for stories, and can see great possibilities for the future.

The Course Gave Me Feedback

Notes from Mindy and comments from my fellow students were critical to my improvement. In a fortunate turn of events, they were also enjoyable. Honest feedback from people with judgment you trust is invaluable for progress. I’m indebted to my colleagues who took the time to talk with me about projects and provide comments on this blog.

The Course Gave Me Ideas

I knew, before the first day of class, that on-line journalism is a significant part of our profession’s future. I knew, before I stepped through the lab door for the first time, that audio, visual images, and text working together could tell a powerful story. As I’ve worked with all the elements of the stories, though, I’ve begun to think about how I can use these techniques and tools to tell better, more complete, and more compelling stories in the future. I’ve started to think about whether I can build a studio at home to help me with story production. I’m looking forward to telling new stories in new ways — that’s a result you can’t count on from any given class.

The material in this course is a collection of survival skills for anyone who wants to be employed as a working journalist in the coming years. For the vast majority of us, the days of toiling over words — just words — is over. The good news is that we get to keep telling stories under the same contract to people who want to hear the news. The more difficult news (I won’t say it’s bad) is that we have to become proficient in new ways of telling those stories. I am already using the skills taught in this course to pay my bills. I can think of no more ringing an endorsement to give the course.

Now, on to Toolkit II…

Why Journalism Must Change or Die *

Reading Adrian Holovaty’s blog post from 2006, it’s almost impossible not to start thinking about one of the most critical questions facing journalists today. “What can we give readers that makes them want to read our publications now, and at least once more in the future?” The same question from a different angle is “What can my publication give readers that they can’t get anywhere else?”

Publications have always been pushed toward relevance, but in the past the primary competition for readers’ attention was often nothing at all — at least, nothing in the form of another publication. Sure, big cities had multiple daily newspapers, but in smaller cities and towns the competition generally consisted of the morning paper versus the afternoon paper. Today, competition comes from every direction, and a dizzying array of media types. Given that reality, what can we do to make our publication critical to the reader’s life?

I think the first thing we have to do is figure out why the publication exists. What’s the mission of our publication? Back in the dot-com bubble days, people were always asking for your “elevator pitch.” That is, if you got on an elevator with a venture capitalist in the lobby of a skyscraper, what could you tell him about your business before he reached his floor? Think about your reader — what would your elevator pitch to them sound like? If you can’t get the mission of your publication down to a sentence or two, then you need to sit down and do some serious thinking about what you’re trying to do. You (and all the writers and editors of the publication) should have a crystal-clear idea of who you’re going to reach, and how you’re going to do one thing better than any other publication.

Once you know what you’re trying to do, you can set out to do it using the best technologies and techniques you can muster. Keep your stories fresh and meaningful, base them on information that isn’t well-aggregated anywhere else, and give the reader plenty of ways to deeply explore the issues on their own. I’m convinced we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of how the Web can be used to tell stories: go out, define your mission and tell your stories. Your readers are waiting.

* With apologies to Bishop John Shelby Spong. This title is based on the title of his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

"We’re Packaging for Google"

Once upon a time, we designed pages to draw readers into a story. There were story meetings, then meetings with the art department, all intended to create a page (or a two-page spread if the needs of the well and the advertising budget allowed) that would convince a reader to spend time reading the story. Sometimes, you would get to see illustration proposals that the art director had commissioned from an artist. It was enjoyable, and the layouts created were occasionally spectacular.

Recently, I took part in a conference call for a publication I write for. The editor outlined a process much like the one in the last paragraph, then told us it was no longer the case. Instead of packaging articles for readers, he said that we’re now packaging for Google. He meant that studies have shown that getting readers to your story is far more critical than precisely how it looks once they get there. I’m still trying to figure out precisely how I feel about that.

It must be said that, in a very important way, how I feel doesn’t matter at all. The research is there to support the view that high search-result placement brings more reader. Full stop, end of story. Still, while I understand the importance of putting your story in front of the reader (and that’s what search engines do), I can’t help but be uneasy about all the ramifications of designing pages for search engine optimization, even the sort of enlightened SEO discussed in the reading for Week 12.

I’ve taken part in SEO training classes presented by people who seemed rather more expert in algorithms than in English. They told us to do things like put every key word associated with the article into the headline, with the more important and commonly-searched-for words placed earlier in the hed. Under their tutelage, the headline for his entry might read something like:

Google Blog and Article Optimization Packaging Successful On-line Publication Makes

You’ll excuse me if I don’t buy it. Now, I absolutely do buy that we should do more to make headlines meaningful (even if I dearly love the obscure hed to make readers curious), and that tagging has to be part of a meaningful scheme to help readers search for and find particular articles. These things are critical to making our on-line publications easier to read. What I will resist is the notion that the search engine is more important than the reader. We must continue to write clear, accurate, compelling stories that readers will love once they’ve been found. I’ll work hard to make that part of my craft — but I practice the craft for readers, not search spyders, so the readers will get the bulk of my effort.

Preserving Handcrafts

What happens when the last practitioner of a traditional craft dies or retires? We think of the loss in cultural or aesthetic terms, but with craft as the foundation for much of our technology, future innovations may be lost or delayed, as well.

The International Kumihimo Conference provided an opportunity to see the point where traditional crafts and modern technology meet. The value of the craft — and the potential magnitude of the loss — were clearly demonstrated by the participants from both sides.

I tell the story of preserving handcrafts through a lens of kumihimo braiding. It is, I think, a modern story told through a very old language. Click on the hands of the braider to get the whole story.

Handcrafts in Kyoto

In the U.S., we tend not to lack for things. We’ve become quite adept at creating the machinery to make things in bast quantities. In many cases, the rise of an industrial process has meant the end of traditional hand-craft methods of making things. I went to Kyoto two weeks ago to accompany a participant in the first International Kumihimo Conference, which was sponsored by and held at the Kyoto Institute of Technology. Kumihimo is the traditional Japanese craft of braiding, a craft that had significant uses in many aspects of life in Japan before the industrial age. At KIT, they study traditional kumihimo as an end unto itself, and as a source of inspiration for structures and designs used in making products from a variety of materials, including the latest carbon-fiber threads.

I spoke with a number of conference attendees in an attempt to answer the basic question, “Why”. When every participant acknowledged that machines could produce many useful braids, why did they consider it important to preserve the craft and improve their own skills. Some of the answers they gave are in my soundslide presentation on Preserving Handcrafts.

I’m looking forward to completing the full project, and to seeing your comments on the soundslide.

Disc Golf at Northside Park

I like urban parks. Central Park in New York City, Forest Park in St. Louis, and Kapiolani Park in Honolulu are three example of great urban spaces where people go to enjoy friends, family, activities, and just a little bit of being outside. Gainesville doesn’t have an urban park like the three I mentioned, but it does have some nice small parks. Northside Park, near the intersection of NW 34th Street and Highway 441, is one of Gainesville’s city parks. Northside is notable for a couple of things: it’s the site of the city’s only disc golf course, and it is apparently the ideal place to put a large retail center.

I decided to make my second soundslide project about Northside Park, with a particular emphasis on the disc golf course. The project was interesting to put together. I focused on the disc golf for two reasons — it’s a large part of what makes the park unique, and I wanted to try to get some “action” shots in. I ended up getting a few pretty good action shots, almost all of which were left out of the final project. I’ll post a few of them here over the next couple of weeks.

The sound, especially the natural sound on tape, was an adventure in itself. There’s a blog post coming on that, too, in the very near future. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Northside Park in Gainesville, Florida.

Thoughts on "Journalism stories: A multimedia approach

I enjoyed walking through Mindy McAdams’ tutorial on multimedia journalism. I absolutely agree that starting off with a list of questions you want answered is the right beginning. Too often, we begin with a list of points we want to make, rather than questions we want answered, and the result is a screed rather than a work of journalism. After working through her steps, though, there is one point one which I’d make a modification: I think her sequence may be limiting.

Here’s what I mean: Mindy writes about asking questions, putting them into modules, and managing the size of the modules, all before you begin the reporting. I know you can do that, but I think you should also be quite open to re-organizing the modules based on what the story tells you. If we’re starting with questions, we have to be willing to go where the story takes us, in form as well as content.

One of the points made in the second part of this story (yes, I read ahead…) is that we have to consider how best to tell each part of the story. That’s new, and represents one of the most interesting parts of being a multimedia journalist. The tricky part, in my experience, isn’t in telling the story in various places, but in getting the reader to follow the story across the different media. When every part of the story is on-line, it’s somewhat easier — hyperlinks can take you anywhere — but when a piece of the story is in print and others are on-line, then you’re faced with the dilemma of how much of the story to tell in each medium.

Knowing that, even on line, many readers won’t pick up the entire package, I think it’s critical that each module (or story element) stand alone — if a reader is going to come into a single piece of the story (through, for example, a link from a search engine) they must be able to get meaning and a complete story experience from that piece alone. This goes counter to some strategies for giving readers an incentive to read the whole package, but it’s the only honest way to deal with the readers — and honesty has to be at the center of everything a journalist does.