I attended the June 13-18 Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at the Knight Digital Media Center at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. It was a phenomenal experience. I met 19 fabulous journalism professionals and a great group of knowledgeable and skilled trainers; I learned new photo, video, audio, and web skills; I listened to stories of multimedia successes in the newsroom; and I ate one tasty meal after another, gaining three pounds during the workshop.
Oh, and a 10-year-old gymnast accidentally jumped on my head while I was under a trampoline, setting up a video camera. But I’ll get to that in a moment.
Our class of workshop fellows. An amazing group!
Most of the things I learned at the workshop were fairly technical – how to shoot a variety of pictures for an effective slideshow, how to set the white balance on a video camera, how to create a Flash interactive graphic. I loved all these skills and am already working hard to apply them on my own this summer so I can teach them to my colleagues and in my courses this fall.
However, instead of writing about all those things that others have already discussed in great detail elsewhere, I’m going to tell you the five quick, easy things I learned that can be implemented in a mere moment and that are already helping me produce more interesting, better quality photos, audio, and video. These are probably going to be obvious to some people, but they weren’t to me, since my focus has always been writing.
Soaking it all up.
1. Audio: it’s all about the audio. Despite a lifetime of NPR listenership, I truly never realized how critical it is to ensure that your audio is high-quality and aurally intriguing, whether it’s standing alone or part of a video, and how hard it is to make it work. I learned at the workshop to organize the video I edited (see my team’s project; I edited the video about Cairo, the superstar gymnast) around the various topics interviewees discussed and the ambient sounds we’d recorded. I also learned to not just have constant loud noise in the video, but instead to include “breathing room” so the viewer could relax into the setting and have a deeper experience. I know this video, while it still has room for improvement, is far better than anything of its type that I’d created before.
Not so thrilled about being on camera.
2. Being onscreen: limit the gestures. When I teach in a classroom of 120 or more students, I need to be physically expressive. However, one of our sessions at the workshop was about doing standups on camera. I was terrified of this, but apparently did not completely embarrass myself. One reason? With a mental effort, I kept my flappy hands under control. The coach for this session, Marilyn Pittman, instructed us to make a gesture to accentuate each of the main points of the copy we were reading, then release our hands and relax them by our sides until the next gesture. In other words, no constant gesturing, and no frozen hands and arms in front of your torso. After returning from the workshop, while doing a video Skype interview, I applied this strategy by consciously reminding myself to gesture only rarely and then to relax my hands in my lap (I was seated at my desk). Those lecture-hall-sized gestures would have been horribly distracting in a tiny onscreen video.
3. Video: for the love of all things multimedia, use a tripod. USE A TRIPOD. Or something, anything, to stabilize the camera. Richard Koci Hernandez, who lectured on video storytelling at our workshop, strongly emphasized the importance of not letting shaky hands diminish the quality of your video. I’ve broken out my little Gorillapod tripod that had been gathering dust, even though for now I’m only using it with the video setting on my still camera because I don’t have a better option at home. The image quality may not be HD, but because it’s much more stable, the video that results is far more watchable than what I’ve made without a tripod in the past.
The iTalk app. Yes, I have a clip about goats.
4. Tools: my iPhone has its limits, but if I know them, I can still do some cool stuff with it. And this is my lowly 3GS, not the new iPhone 4, which is even cooler [fangirl alert]. I recently attended a fiber festival in Oakland to indulge in my love of all things yarn-related, and decided on the spot to attempt to produce an audio slideshow of my time there. I walked around and interviewed people using the iTalk app on my phone and just the built-in microphone. I figured if the sound didn’t work out, I wouldn’t be too disappointed. The sound quality turned out to be remarkably good, and I hope to finish the slideshow and post it when I get back from traveling next week. I did pretty much put the phone right up in my interviewees’ faces, but they got used to it. Hernandez has a new post on his blog detailing other great ways to use your iPhone for multimedia production.
Contact with my head in 3...2...1...
5. Storytelling: it’s worth getting slightly injured to get an element of the story that grabs the audience and makes them persist through the rest of the story. My teammate Fenella Saunders and I clambered down into a dusty pit under a trampoline at the nonprofit gymnastics school our team profiled for our project. There among the lost socks and spiderwebs, we shot video of our star gymnast bouncing on the trampoline – from below and off to the side. It made for a great shot, but on a whim, I said, “Let’s put it right under her!” I lowered the tripod and camera, then ventured out to the center of the pit – only to have the gymnast bounce right on top of my head a moment later. The minor neck pain I felt for the rest of the day was made completely worthwhile by the awesome video we got. Everyone who’s watched the video has commented on that shot.
What are your quick and easy solutions to make better multimedia? Share your tips here so I can pass them along to my students and colleagues!
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Tags: iphone, journalism, multimedia, storytelling
