Post 4: Video day at the workshop
The video clip above (shot with a Flip Ultra with the .avi file compressed in iMovie to a .mov file uploaded to YouTube and linked to this blog in WordPress) is just the first five minutes of an Al Tompkins-led Poynter session about the essentials of working with video – writing, picture, sound, light, location, interviewing, character, storytelling. The still frame that shows is misleading; the video quality is much sharper. I’d like to know if someone can tell me how to improve on that still – probably not possible since it’s an import from YouTube. (Oh, yeah, and I didn’t get a well-composed, closer shot of Al due to the camera’s grainy zoom and my position in the classroom.)
Years of real-world experience have given Tompkins a great background and he knows how to tell it all well. He is known to many for his regular “Al’s Morning Meeting” column on Poynter Online (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=2).
Following is a briefing from his entire morning-long Multiplatform Journalism session, missing only the excellent video clips Tompkins used as examples:
Don’t be so drawn to the big action that you miss the extremely important aspects of the story going on in REACTION to what’s happening.
Examples of vital reaction visuals can be found in all of the great coverage of events of the past, including the death of Martin Luther King (the image of people pointing toward the scene of the assassination), the funeral of JFK (John-John saluting), the turmoil in Manhattan after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center (shock and horror on the faces of ash-covered people as they flee the scene of the burning, crumpling buildings).
Tompkins said: “Think. Where do you need to be and when do you need to be there to capture the peak action? At a fire, you capture the flames first because they might go away, but turn around and get the onlookers’ faces bathed in the light, the truck, the firemen. It’s not the action that gets the winning shot, it’s the REACTION.”
He talked about what makes a great video story. Some of the points of discussion were Characters, Conflict, Tension, Action, Surprises, Relevancy, and following a Journey of some sort.
He used the acronym COOL – colorful, outgoing, opinionated and lively – to describe the type of person who makes a great character to follow in video storytelling.
He covered the storytelling basics that hold true across platforms – for instance, the creation of tension and a later resolution, the analogy of spreading of “gold coins” along the way, little treasures for your audience to pick up as they go along as a reward for sticking with your tale. “You (as a communicator) NEVER have permission to waste my (the audience’s) time,” he said.
He listed “five motivators for consuming news,” saying audiences are compelled to consume storytelling that has to do with:
1) My money
2) My family
3) My safety
4) My health
5) My community
He added that one more motivator is innate curiosity.
Showing video examples to illustrate his lessons, he discussed natural (nat) sound and capturing the best soundbites. One clip showed a dog chasing a stick across snow and ice with vivid sound of its breathing and scruffling along the cold, hard landscape captured by a wireless mic attached to its collar. “Mic the dog” became shorthand for the seminar participants when talking about assuring that you get the best natural sound for all work you do. “You can NOT get too close to the sound,” Tompkins said.
(Point of interest: the photo at right is a still grabbed using iMovie from a .mov compressed version of a file that was originally an .avi shot with a Flip Ultra camera, and I think it looks pretty good online.)
He divided sound bites into two types, subjective and objective, and said most bites should be subjective, allowing characters to share opinions, thoughts, emotions and observations.
“Emotional content makes it all hang together and mean something,” he said. “Ask better questions and you’ll get better answers; don’t ask questions that get only objective responses.” You can use objective copy to set up the bites, but generally allow the characters to carry off the emotion and tell their own stories as much as possible.
Another favorite Tompkins line: “When your ears and your eyes are in competition, your eyes win.” He said you have to think about the visual and the aural experience and make them work effectively.
The best bites have OTPS – another Tompkins acronym – one thought per sentence and one theme per story. The copy says something and the sound bite proves it – writing that sets up the bites perfectly. Reporters need to stay out of the way and let the people tell their stories.
He shared a technique learned from Pulitzer winner Jon Franklin, finding the focus for a story in three words: a noun, a verb and an object. Tompkins breaks it down this way:
Who = noun
Did = verb
What = Object
This also breaks down to the S-V-O pattern all writing teachers employ – the use of subject-verb-object order in storytelling to maintain clarity.
He added that the verb you use when you describe how a story is going to be put together or has been put together shows your angle. “The verb you use exposes your bias,” he said.
The man is a sound-bite machine when it comes to learning about communicating messages. Here’s another one: “There’s a difference between the ‘point-you-there’ story and the ‘take-you-there’ story,” he said. Adding that we all need to show and not just tell.
He talked about his idea of the three types of story “shapes” used in most storytelling.
1) Breaking news employs the inverted pyramid
2) Narrative form uses the “hourglass,” generally introduced through a single instance or single character representing the big picture, setting up tension and context, with a “Kaboom!” about two-thirds of the way into the story a surprise or big action. You can actually see this employed in the TV series “House” – there’s always a tragedy about 40 minutes in; it’s like clockwork.
3) The form with many emotional peaks – he calls it a “Christmas tree” – with many points of interest introduced followed by a huge payoff right at the end of it all. Examples of this type of work include Ira Glass on “This American Life” (http://www.thislife.org/) on public radio, episodes of “Law & Order” on television and John Grisham’s legal thrillers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Grisham).
Tompkins suggests communicators should shoot video as wide as they can and get as close to the subject as possible to get the shots needed. He reiterated the need for wide, medium, closeup and supercloseup shots, talked about getting plenty of B-roll to cover and using cutaways and avoiding jump cuts in the editing process.
“You want to keep the eye (of the viewer) in the frame,” he said. “Jump cuts take the eye out of the frame. You want to move the eye around in the frame.”
He strongly recommends against using music as background in video storytelling. “Only use it on the rare occasion,” he advised.
