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.

Video Storytelling at the Toronto Star

The assignment was fairly simple: find two videos at any one of several newspaper web sites, then compare and comment upon them. I looked at some of our options, but was impressed by the very rich (and easy to find) options at The Toronto Star.

The first video I chose at covered the opening of a snowboarding venue in downtown Toronto.

Urban Rail Park

You expect plenty of action in a video about snowboarding, and there is a lot here, with different angles and points of view. The snowboarding action is interspersed with interviews of snowboarders, and the very static setting of the interviews plays nicely against the movement of the snowboarders.

Does Urban Rail Park tell a story? I’m not sure it does, in the classically-constructed sense. It does, however, report nicely on a new venue in the city.

The next video I chose covers the process by which an animated character was created.

How Laurie Maher became MMe. Tutli-Putli

This is a very deliberate video that does tell a story of an actresses process for creating a character — from emotion to eyes to costume. The music behind much of the video increased the deliberate mood of the piece, and enhanced the connection between the video and the film. This is a much slower-moving video visually, concentrating on two characters, those of the actress and her animated creation. It was interesting to see a recurring artifact in the video screen behind the actresses head during some of the interviews: it’s almost impossible to synch the video refresh rate of a video camera and a monitor, and the moving shadow we see is the result. It doesn’t distract greatly, though, and the video we see with the actress is worth the bother.

Now, the very first thing I looked at on the Star site didn’t really qualify for this assignment, but it was very powerful, nonetheless.

Airsick: An Industrial Devolution

Airsick is the work of Lucas Oleniuk, a Toronto Star photographer who, we’re told, took 20,000 images in a span of 20 days. The images were used to make a stop-action video. The music behind the images and narration through titles give the video a Koyaanisqatsi feeling that’s very powerful. It is astounding to see what can be accomplished with a camera, a computer, and the commitment to a vision. It’s not like either of the other two video presentations, and doesn’t tell a well-formed story, but the overall effect is quite powerful and completely unambiguous.

The Very Short NFL Documentary

During the Super Bowl, we watched for the commercials as much as for the football game (hey, none of the Florida teams made it), and finally saw a great NFL commercial in the fourth quarter.

The ad, titled “Mr. Oboe”, is the story of an NFL lineman who didn’t play football until he reached college. It’s a complete story told in about 55 seconds, and a great example of cutting video to tell a compact story.

You can see a “Making of…” video here, at the Houston Texans’ web site. It does a good job of describing just how much work (and how many minutes of raw footage) went into the commercial.

Together these two are a great example of telling a solid story in a brief time — a good lesson for on-line video journalists.

New Tool to Start the New Term

Boy, the break was good. Now, though, it’s time to get back to work, and the folks at Lifehacker just introduced me to a very cool (free) tool that should help in a bunch of different situations. MediaCoder Audio Edition converts to and from a whole bunch of different audio formats — this should make moving files back and forth from various sources much easier.

Given the work I’ll be doing this term, I’ll probably also play with the full MediaCoder edition, which converts to and from a huge number of video and audio formats. You can get rather fine control on the encoding parameters (which should come in handy when trying to balance quality/size issues) of various formats, and it seems a very well-supported package.

I’ve found some other great tools I’ll blog about soon…ahh, the fun of talking about gadgets, tools, and toys.

The Power of Images

Over at the PhotoJournalism blog, Mark Hancock interviewed Ken Burns during a recent lecture stop. The first video on the page covers his ideas about photography. I think Burns’ thoughts on the power of still photography are fascinating given both his work in film and his heavy use of still photographs in those films. It’s obvious that Burns has given this a great deal of thought, and his thoughts — especially on the importance of "trust" in photography — make a great deal of sense to me.

The second video covers his latest film, and there are some interesting thoughts there, too. Burns has been such an incredibly influential film-maker that it’s fascinating to listen to the way he thinks about the subjects and his work.

A New Toy

I have to admit it: I love tools and gadgets. This week I did a little bit of extra work and justified buying something I’ve wanted for a while: I got a Zoom H4 Handy Recorder. I think we’re going to be very happy together.

The Zoom is much smaller than my earlier digital recorder, and the sound from the on-board microphones is super. Why did I go for the H4 instead of the smaller and cheaper Zoom H2? It really boiled down to a couple of things. First, I remain unconvinced of the utility of the H2’s mid-space mic capsules. I know that you can, with a little work, record 5.1 surround sound using the device, but I really don’t need to do that much work in surround sound. I hope that, when the day comes that I need to be reporting in surround sound, I’ll be able to buy a Nagra (and hire a grip to carry all my equipment). Next, I like the fact that the H4 can work as a high-quality A/D converter for my mics. The sound card in my laptop isn’t awful, but the H4 is better, and it will provide phantom power to two microphones, greatly increasing my audio options.

Carol says she’s going to put a string mouth and googly eyes on the windscreen. Until then, I’ll just look like I’m going to Tase my interview subjects…

New Blog for a New Media Era?

The new MediaShift Idea Lab blog features a bunch of folks blogging about "reinventing community news for the Digital Age." The participants are people who’ve won the Knight News Challenge to create local news communities, and the early posts are talking about the projects they’ve begun or are beginning. There are some very interesting posts there, like Gail Robinson’s description of a site that will use games to cover and explain New York City politics.

I’ve been involved with on-line communities since 1984 — I’m looking forward to seeing innovation in using them to further community news and interests.

A Lesson in Photo Sizing

When Mindy wrote me about my post on photos for SoundSlides, she ultimately asked about why the photos had been cut off. I was traveling when I received her message, and looked at the post on my laptop. Sure enough, the photos were trimmed on each side. I figured that that the center column was narrower than 800 pixels, so I planned on re-sizing the photos and creating a new post.

Tonight, when I began working on the new post, I looked at the post once more…and the photos were not cut off at all! Why the difference? At my desk, I use a dual-monitor setup with a laptop screen and a 22″ wide-format flat-panel display. When I look at this blog on the wide screen, there is no photo cut off. It’s only when I bring the sides of the browser window in as I reduce the size that I begin to see photo cropping. Here, then, is the question:

How wide should I assume my viewer’s screen will be? In class, we discussed the reason for the size of our finished photographs, and the fact that they should fit on most screens if displayed as a SoundSlide project. That’s fine, but we have to acknowledge that there will be some viewers who set things up in ways that lead to the photos being cut off or shrunk in various interesting ways. I work for one publication that still insists that all screen shots accompanying articles be captured at 800 x 600 resolution, a resolution far lower than most people currently use. In my case, the large monitor is displaying 1680 x 1050 pixels, while the laptop is displaying 1280 x 800. Who’s right? In a technology environment that sees rapid changes in product capability, what do we assume that our readers can use to see our photos, videos, and stories? It’s an interesting question, and I look forward to various answers. Me? I’m still making up my mind…

On Media

First, a confession: While I’ve lived in or near both great cities, I lived in Boston before New York, and so I generally prefer reading The Atlantic to The New Yorker. There, I’ve said it, and I’m sure that heartfelt excoriation will soon fill the comments. So be it. (There are, of course, notable exceptions: I will happily read anything John McPhee writes — I’m in awe of someone who can successfully turn rocks into compelling characters.)

In September, The Atlantic featured excerpts on essays covering the media that have appeared in the last 150 years. The articles are part of The Atlantic’s Ideas Tour. I was taken by the way in which some issues have been around for quite a long time. We’re told that the media of today has reached a nadir of accuracy and fairness, but H.L. Mencken’s essay from 1914 contains statements like, “I know of no subject, in truth, save perhaps baseball, on which the average American newspaper, even in the larger cities, discourses with unfailing sense and understanding.” In that same essay, Mencken is dismissive of the newspaper’s audience. In a section on crusading journalism and the way it must create villains, he writes, ” In brief, he knows that it is hard for the plain people to think about a thing, but easy for them to feel. Error, to hold their attention, must be visualized as a villain, and the villain must proceed swiftly to his inevitable retribution. They can understand that process; it is simple, usual, satisfying; it squares with their primitive conception of justice as a form of revenge.” On the off chance that you miss Mencken’s true feeling about the reader, he amplifies it a couple of paragraphs later. “I assume here, as an axiom too obvious to be argued, that the chief appeal of a newspaper, in all such holy causes, is not at all to the educated and reflective minority of citizens, but frankly to the ignorant and unreflective majority.” It’s a very condescending view of the reader, and I feel that this condescension is as significant a problem as any faced by journalism today.

The significance of the problems and their modern-day sources are addressed in an extended essay by James Fallows. When you strip away the examples (provided from a late-1990s perspective) you’re left with journalists don’t have the same concerns as most citizens. It’s a damning criticism for those who would be the reader’s surrogate in the halls of power. A compelling argument can be made that the situation hasn’t improved since Fallows wrote his essay. The critical question for journalists is whether we have time to address the issues and fix the problems before the audience decides that it no longer matters.