Stay tuned for more updates and educational multimedia goodness from the NPPA workshop this week.

DISCLAIMER: We burned newspapers and covered them in chocolate syrup because we thought the effect looked cool in the Jay-z video we parodied.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM1RCh…
It should not be construed as an attack on any individual news organization or on newspapers in general. They just happened to be the papers we had in the house (Yes, we do actually subscribe to the “dead-tree” edition) But we do support the move to less combustible news delivery methods that don’t stain your fingers.

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.

Multimedia Immersion 2009 is well under way as we enter into day 3.  The students have learned a lot about storytelling methods and techniques for shooting video.

Today gets a little intense as we introduce most people to Final Cut Pro for the first time.

Of the roughly 50 students, most paid their own way in an effort to make themselves more competitive.  This seems to be a growing trend.  A friend of mine, Maya Alleruzzo, AP photographer in Baghdad, recently finished the Platypus video training course in Portland, Ore.  She had little experience with video before going in.  Digital Journalist did a story about her training in their latest issue, and you can see from the video, that she is definitely a threat with a video camera now.

DOWN AND OUT IN PORTLAND from Digital Journalist on Vimeo.

I’m off to Vegas today for a week of non-stop multimedia fun at the NPPA conference in Las Vegas.  I am one of 25 coaches for a Multimedia Immersion workshop. The other coaches are some of the top multimedia minds in the country.  Vegas hasn’t seen this much talent in one room since the Rat Pack last played the Sands.

Check out this cool documentary about the history of Vegas from the folks at the Las Vegas Sun.

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I’ll probably be posting often as the workshop develops, so check back often over the next week for nifty multimedia nuggets of knowledge, and inspirational work people involved in the workshop.

In the meantime, check out some of the really great work from other coaches at the conference.

Uprooted – San Jose Mercury News – Richard Koci Hernandez

Will Yurman – Round Rochester

Bill Kaufman – FREEP

Smiley Pool – time lapse for houston chronicle

Black Friday – Evelio Contreras

Tonight is game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals series between the Detroit Red Wings and the Pittsburgh Penguins and some of the video guys from the Detroit Free Press have put together a couple of fun videos during their visit to the ‘Burgh.

Speaking Pittsburghese – Free Press reporter Ben Schmitt learns the language of Pittsburgh

Squid hunting – Buying a squid in Pittsburgh is easier said than done.

And finally, Pittsburgh and Detroit share one thing in this heated rivalry – A real lousy economy

Doing a presentation on visual storytelling for our weekly staff meeting, and I thought I would post some links that correspond to some of the basic topics I am covering.

For starters, lets talk about the very core of storytelling, montage theory.  That’s right, welcome to film school 101.

Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (and a whole bunch of other Russians who didn’t get quite as much credit) believed that the juxtaposition of independent images will create a sum that is greater than those individual parts.  Confused yet?  Lets say we start with a shot of the sun, followed by a close up of beads of sweat streaming down a man’s forehead.  The viewer, taking these two images in succession, establishes for him or herself that a guy is sweating on a hot sunny day.  But lets think about this for a moment, the sun looks the same on a cool day or a hot day.  The associations between these images only exist in the imagination of the viewer because of the juxtaposition.  To not make an association, is to allow these images to exist unrelated in a chaotic void.  But we can’t help ourselves from trying to make order from chaos.  It’s in our nature.

This theory is often represented with the Kuleshov effect.  Kuleshov showed audiences images of a coffin, a plate of food, and a small child, all followed by the same neutral expression.  The audience then imposed their own emotional response on the protagonist, saying he was sad when viewing the coffin, hungry when looking at the food, and happy watching the child.  Hitchock demonstrates this theory here.

Knowing how this effect works should force you to put more thought into your shot choices.  Each shot should build on the shots that came before it, being consciously aware of the information you are giving to the viewer, and the emotional and narrative associations the viewer will impose.

Now that we have some theory under our belt, lets talk about telling stories.  A story is essentially conflict in search of resolution.  The subject of the story wants something, and the story concludes when that want is met (or tragically is not met).

In this video piece by the Detriot Free Press, it is established early on that former Steelers footballer Courtney Hawkins wants to reclaim the glory days of his football career.  The story then unfolds as he rebuilds the football program from his youth and provides those same opportunities to a new generation.

In this award-winning piece “Intended Consequences” by the folks at MediaStorm, the conflict is immediately apparent as a girl points out her dead relatives in a photo.  The conflict has been established, but it also raises a lot of questions.  Why are they dead? Who killed them?  How did the girl survive?  The storyteller then keeps you engaged by slowly unveiling these answers like tasty morsels to wanting baby birds.

As journalists we have a tendency to lay all our cards on the table.  We are trying to inform, and we want to get as much information on the table as quickly as possible.  Most important stuff first, followed by sequentially less important information.  Inverted Pyramid style.  All this information up front makes for pretty boring cinematic storytelling.  Why bother watching the entire story if the you get the gist of it in the first few seconds.

Check out this video from the academy-award winning director of “Born into Brothels.”  In the beginning, you know very little about what story is unfolding.  Only an intriguing title to guide you, but bit by bit the director reveals more information to help complete the picture, always leaving a reason to keep watching up until the final seconds.

And that is the big secret right there.  You need to find a way to engage your viewer.  You want people to be quietly cheering for your protagonist and feel invested in the outcome.  And don’t worry if your protagonist is a hardened criminal or a seedy politician.  If you tell your story well, and you are honest in your portrayal, your viewers wont be able to help but associate with the protagonist’s mission.

Here are a couple other good stories that utilize these principles.

LA Times – master calculus teacher

Getty Images – Coney Island

Hungry – Howard County Times

The Associated Press has officially launched its database of Guantanamo Bay detainees today.  The flash interactive features a sortable database, an estimated timeline of Gitmo populations, chart based on country of origin, and information pages for most of the detainees.

the Globe and Mail takes an interesting approach to the GM story here. A couple of text slides go by without enough time to read, but its an interesting backgrounder on a story, without a lot of time to turn it around.

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Don’t read anything about this story, just watch the video and let the mystery unfold.  It’s haunting and told with a sophisticated simplicity.  The video is from Ross Kaufman, the Academy Award winning director of “Born into Brothels.”

An incredible story about a father who loses his deaf son, but breathes life into his son’s music as a tribute.  The music helps bring the story together, and the reporter inserts himself to narrate only sparingly.  Just enough to convey some necessary information.

A nice use of graphics in this NYtimes video on the Mexican drug cartel. I particularly like the 3D movement of the video elements, treating them like another graphic assett.  If only there was an interactive option in addition to the linear experience.

Erik Olsen has posted another batch of videos worth watching.  I hope this becomes a weekly habit for him. I particulary liked the Boston Globe’s great piece on Ted Kennedy. It’s a fitting opening salvo for what will be a flood of multimedia coverage as the “lion of the Senate” winds down his storied career.

A bit jingoistic, but still a pretty cool idea with some skillful video work.  The crew of the US Abraham Lincoln recite the Gettysburg address on his 200th birthday.

A great study in natural sound by Ben Garvin and his coverage of the Fargo floods for the pioneer press.

MediaStorm has a new project, Driftless: Stories from Iowa, that is tied to a photography book by Danny Wilcox Frazier of the same name.  The entire project and its many chapters are in black and white, a choice I assume is meant to match the black and white photography of the book that is inter-cut throughout the pieces.  There are some places I wish there was a come to Oz moment where all the rich colors poured in. (but I guess that’s Kansas not Iowa.)

Another strong showing by MediaStorm.  Be forewarned, there is some nudity in the videos, so I would recommend against watching it in your office, unless you work in a place that doesn’t mind having a large phallus across your monitor.  Apparently Iowans really like to get naked when a photographer is around.