shooting by numbers

Beyond objectivity - the future of videojournalism

In the late nineteenth century after 400 years characterized by the relentless pursuit of optical accuracy European painters turned their backs on realism almost overnight. Why? Because the Holy Grail of capturing likeness had been made available to all with the advent of chemical photography. Are the current slew of technological advances about to wreak similar changes in the way we document the world with video?

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Articles

7 editing tips for videojournalists

And then: “When is the edit finished?”
The traditional answer: It’s never finished, but after a while they take it away.
Walter Murch responds: It’s finished when I can no longer see myself in it.
The VJ answer: It’s finished 60 minutes from when it’s started.

7 web video myths

It’s not the content of the video that generates the return, it’s the ability to integrate the video into a larger information loop where value feeds back to the producers. And that involves getting a commitment to more than 3 minutes. Without appropriate context the content has limited value. Context is king.

Ideal length for web video

Nothing too surprising about the numbers. They seem to support the notion that “shorter videos work better on the web”. But that conclusion depends on us using a metric that is based upon “complete views”…supposing we add another metric - say “minutes watched”

New Media

Breaking the linear straightjacket

Surfers scan, they don’t follow dutifully along the path we lay. For a linear medium like video this creates a problem, and explains why “Text remains King of the Web”. Two approaches to this conundrum, one from the BBC, one from MSNBC.

Video 2.0

The Zen of Videojournalism

If there were ever a search for the historical prototypes of modern videojournalism then surely Michael Apted’s 7-UP series would figure large. A brief description from MA of his epiphany with regard to video and objectivity: “…it occurred to me that maybe what I was doing was something quite different from what I thought I was doing…”