Video Training for Print Journalists
By David LaFontaine
In March, as part of the "Digital Future of Journalism" program at the University of Kiev, I teamed up with documentary producer Lynn Kessler-Hiltajczuk to teach newspaper journalists how to conceive, shoot, edit and post video news stories onto the internet. This project came to me through Inovation Media Consulting -- and watch this space, because I have a very special report in the Innovation in Newspapers 2008 report on how papers all over the world are using video content to grow their online audiences and (gasp!) make money.
Newspapers and news organizations, huge and tiny, have all realized that if they want to stay relevant and compete in the global marketplace, they are going to have to start including multimedia content on their web pages. The problem is that it is not as easy as just tossing a few DV cameras at their print reporters and still photographers and saying, "Presto change-o, you're now videographers. Congratulations!"
Companies that think of this as a hardware problem to be solved by buying cameras and editing workstations have found that they've poured huge (and increasingly scarce) resources into something that is producing precious little in the way of results.
What I try to do is focus in on what it is that newspapers need in terms of video to add value to their existing stories. This requires a change in thinking; a totally different way of looking at news information that has to gradually be integrated into a news operations' DNA.
The short reports described below may not be perfect, but they are important first steps for print journalists trying to build their multimedia skillsets. The videos are not translated, so below I've written short descriptions of what each segment is about, and a bit of the "story behind the story."
about the reports
Until quite recently, autistic children in Ukraine were treated pretty harshly. This report focuses in on the changes in the way mental disabilities are treated.
Pay attention to the way these fresh-minted video auteurs use blur effects and low POV camerawork to bring the viewer into an autistic child's world.
Babka is a diminutive for "babushka" or "grandma." This piece is one that really showed my students' natural skills in "thinking on the fly," which was very gratifying, because I made a special point of encouraging them to adapt their plans to fit the reality they encounter in the field.
This team set out to do a piece on how all the construction in Kiev is changing the face of this ancient city. But then they encountered this poor little old lady, crammed into an unheated room above the elevator shaft. She used to have a nice apartment in the building, but apparently her daughter lost it in some kind of a Ponzi scheme, and now she leads a desperate existence.
Thus, this piece evolved from what could have been a static and obvious piece about architectural change, to a heartfelt close-up of a real hot-button issue in Ukraine right now - there are apparently thousands of pensioners who lived their entire lives under the old Soviet system who are adrift in this new world, unequipped to deal with its complexities.
Ukrainians, like Russians, have a real ongoing love affair with the printed word. Maybe it's those long, severe winters stuck inside with lots of time on their hands (and Kremlin-enforced vodka rationing).
Anyway, bookstores are very popular, and as this clip shows, they are stocked with all kinds of very modern-looking paperbacks. Towards the end of the clip, watch how the camera takes a very nice POV of a clerk handing a book over a shelf. This is the kind of camerawork that makes a segment visually interesting. I tried to steer the students away from too much static framing, i.e. just bolting the camera to a tripod and hitting the record button.
This is the funniest segment here; this team used a mix of archival footage from Soviet-era romantic comedies (wonderfully cheesy stuff, with campy performances and grainy film stock), mixed with Kievite-on-the-street interviews.
The whole basis for this segment is that it is so much more expensive to attract and keep a girlfriend these days. One disgruntled subject gripes that "back in the Soviet days, if you showed up at a girl's door with a pork chop, you were in for a week. These days, these women demand clothes, flowers, perfume. Who can afford that?"
The week I was in Kiev was also their yearly "Up With Women" celebration. The funniest sequence in the whole piece is an interview with a drunken would-be Romeo, hanging around outside the stadium filled with 60,000 women. He had a cigarette dangling from his lip; in one hand, a beer bottle, and in the other a bunch of flowers with the dirt still on the roots from where he yanked them out of a nearby flower bed. I guess he figured the odds were in his favor.
This last piece is one of the most disturbing, and cries out for a more thorough investigation. More than 15,000 Ukrainian girls are sold into sex slavery every year. Here in Los Angeles, we see the results of this trade -- for a period of months, young, beautiful girls were turning up dead in dumpsters, as the factions of the Russian Mafia fought for control over the slave trade.
This team managed to get interviews with girls who had escaped. One girl (her face is blurred out - an effect that is apparently easier to do in Avid Liquid than in Final Cut Pro) talks about how she had been sold for $300. They took her clothes, and she was locked in a room. She managed to pry the window open and ran naked through snowdrifts to escape.
Most girls aren't so lucky. They are recruited from small towns throughout Ukraine, with promises of modeling or singing careers. Then these naive girls find out that they're being shipped to whorehouses, where they are locked up and fed drugs to keep them docile. The problem is hard to get a handle on, because of the shame these girls feel, not wanting to admit what they had to do to survive -- and to the fact that their captors will kill them and their entire families if they do blow the whistle.