One can never get enough of “easy” tricks to improve multimedia reporting.
Dr. Susan Currie Sivek, a mass communications professor at Cal State Fresno, has blogged about her recent Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at UC-Berkeley, which was sponsored by the Knight Digital Media Center in the Graduate School of Journalism. [The Knight Foundation has been funding initiatives at a number of universities to retrain print reporters and journalism professors in multimedia. Cal and USC are prominent recipients, with Cal specializing in bootcamp skills.]
Sivek detailed five easy tips. One was obvious — the damn tripod (“damn” is my word — easy to use for interviews, but hard out in the world, especially since a tripod makes people in public places nervous, and evokes security guard attention. By the way, ditto video cameras. Guards put my video camera into a locker at the entrance to the Taj Mahl, but still cameras, which of course shoot video, passed through with no take-over.]
Here are briefs of what I learned from what Sivek learned–her full stories are worth reading.
1) Audio: Don’t have “constant loud noise, include ‘breathing room’ so the viewer could relax into the experience.”
2) In Front of the Camera: Limit gestures when you’re being taped. Use only one gesture to accentuate only a main point. While gesturing hands look normal when you’re talking, they are distracting onscreen.
3) Tools: iPhone has limits but you can get reasonable pix and video and the iTalk app records decent sound if you put the phone right up into someone’s face during the interview. Sivek quotes instructor Richard Koci Hernandez, Cal professor, and links to his page on the tools you need for good video with an iPhone (and this was before the 4.0 came out with a better camera.) Hernandez’s page includes links to buy such gadgets as grips to hold your phone/camera steady and little tripods with wrap-around arms. Wonder if they’d work with my new still camera (Panasonic’s Lumix, which has a Leica lens) which I bought to use for video.
4) “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.” Um. Maybe ;-))