Wire & Lights

It’s been roughly a week since I returned from the NPPA’s Multimedia Immersion workshop in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was a week of intense multimedia training from smart leaders in online journalism from around the country.  I didn’t post nearly as much as I wanted to while in Vegas due to a combined lack of initiative, sleep and Internet connectivity.  But as I return to work in DC, I find myself applying a handful of tips that I picked up from other coaches. The top ten in no particular order:

1.  Keep a journal

Emmy-award winning multimedia guru, Richard Koci Hernandez formerly of the San Jose Mercury News was often seen in the back of the room scribbling in his journal.  He advised that we all keep one close at hand at all times.  I loved this idea.  Inspiration and strokes of brilliance come when you least expect them. Consider your journal a net for your good ideas and jot them down as they come to you so you don’t lose them as quickly as they came.  I picked up a couple of moleskine journals this weekend.

2. Take a sound walk

Rob Rosenthal of the Salt Institute was passing out this piece of advice.  Grab an audio recorder and silently walk from one end of the building to the other.  A couple people tried this in the casino, and I tried with fellow coach Jody Sugrue as we finished editing at 6 am in the morning.  It’s amazing what sounds you pick up on when you just walk and listen.  While listening to the reverberations in a ballr0om we heard the faint sound of a cricket.  The cricket was hiding in a hamper in the service hallway.  When out on a story, take a moment to stop and listen to your surroundings.  Who knows what you will hear that might make it into your piece.

3. Wides and Tights

Nearly every coach who spoke about shooting video and visual storytelling emphasized that you can never have enough close ups when you get into the edit bay.  NPPA award winning solo-video journalist from KUSA, Dave Delozier, said that when he goes out on stories he still tells himself “wides and tights, wides and tights.”  He is dead on.  In teaching shooting technique, many give equal weight to Wide shots, medium shots and close ups.  But all shots are not created equal.  When editing, I can do a lot more with one wide shot and 10 close ups than I can with 3 wides, 3 mediums and 3 close ups.

4.  The Five shots

Scott Anger of the LA Times had this nice breakdown of how to easily approach building sequences.  I’m trying to recall them all by memory, but I believe the five were:

1.  Close up of the action
2. Close up of the reaction to the action or who is conducting the action.
3. Point of view shot by the person conducting the action.
4. Shot establishing where the action is taking place
5.  A creative beauty shot that ties into the action.

It’s a good starting point for building those sequences.  After getting your 5, you should probably throw in a few more close ups for good measure.

5.  The untapped power of photoshop’s photo merge

David Stephenson, formerly of the Lexington Herald-Leader and now a staffer at the University of Kentucky, was showing us all the fun stuff you can do with photo merge in Photoshop.  Even the crappy camera on my 1st gen iphone created this nice artsy rendition of our mid-workshop lunch.

Another stitch of the coaches by David.

6. Garageband can do more than you think.

Pam Chen of the Open Society Institute did a short lecture on using music in your videos and she blew my mind with how simple it is to put together a custom composition in Garageband.  With all the complications of rights and licensing music, the best way to go is original music.  But if you are like me, your musical skills are basic at best.

Garageband is much smarter than I expected.  If you pick a beat and a loop or two, Garageband will automatically match the key and tempo.  Then you can change the loops sound to any of the instruments in Garageband and Presto! you have a subtle music bed that no longer sounds like the out-of-the-box music beds everyone else is using.

7. Better Branding

Multimedia ninja Mike Schmidt threw on his Sham-WOW headset and schooled us on the importance of having a portfolio site and building a brand. If you look at the names I’ve mentioned in this post, nearly every one of them has a portfolio site. (And most of us seem to be using WordPress with Thad Allender’s multimedia themes) So if you don’t have a portfolio site, maybe you should be asking yourself why not?

One strong point: The most common item people see about you online is your email, yet many of us use some variation of myName@gmail.com.  You are essentially promoting your name and google’s gmail at the same time.  Buy a domain and then very simply setup an email address for your site that uses gmail on the back end, but shows your websites domain to the people you communicate with.  If you have any questions on how to do this, you can reach me at matt@mattfordmedia.com

8. Moving beyond templated graphics

A lot of us tend to use the lower thirds and text templates that come with Final Cut Pro for our texts and graphics.  Jody Sugrue and Mike Schmidt showed us some really easy ways to spice up your texts and graphics.  Anything you do in Photoshop can be easily imported to FCP to be used as graphics, and you can even jump back and forth to your PSD file from within Final Cut.  After Effects, LiveType and Motion also offer a whole host of tools for creating text and graphic elements that will be unique to you or your company’s brand.

9. Tweak that depth of field.

Josh Metzler tweaked his Canon HV20 by adding a lens adapter.  It makes the tiny little camera a bit front heavy, but it’s a small price to pay for getting that beautiful shallow depth of field that is more common in Hollywood cinema than on prosumer video pieces.  And if you own Canon’s Mark II 5D you already have a whole host of lens options.

There is an old joke that the difference between a filmmaker and a videographer is a filmmaker chooses his lens first and then puts the camera on the back of it and a videographer chooses his camera first and puts the lens on the front of it.  Now more than ever, there are low cost solutions for lens flexibility when you shoot video.

10. 10 days in Vegas is exactly 8 days too many in Vegas

The first 48 hours in Vegas can be exciting.  The bright lights and over the top structures and decadence can certainly get the adrenaline pumping.  By the third day, you begin to long for a place absent the constant ringing of slot machines.  You smell stale cigarettes at just about every turn and you’ve learned the exact proximity of every coffee shop in the four neighboring casinos.

Fortunately, I spent roughly 75% of my time in a conference room. So over the course of the 10 days my mind, body, bank account and liver were spared entire annihilation and I managed to get out alive.  By the final day I was ready to run across the desert to get out of Vegas.  So if you are planning a trip to Sin City and you are thinking about staying a couple more days “to catch a show,” think twice.  You have been warned.

I am told that a lot of the handouts from presentations, and the final pieces will be available from the Multimedia Immersion website. I highly recommend checking them out once they go up.  Lots of good stuff there.