In Week 1 of class, Mindy gave us an overview of the work we will be doing for this semester. This semester we have two shooting assignments as well as two editing assignments. Unlike Toolkit 1, we will be doing three texbook assignments from the second edition of Sheila Curran Bernard’s Documentary Storytelling: Making Stronger and More Dramatic Nonfiction Films. Athough the text discusses shooting techniques for full-length documentaries, Mindy emphasized how the book’s messages about storytelling and structure are appropriate regardless the video’s length. Also, this semester we will work in teams on the final group project.
During the first class meeting we discussed how today’s newspaper newsrooms are using video, especially after the success of YouTube broadcasting. For example, some newspapers were having photojournalists to use video first (or only giving certain journalists video cameras) while other newspapers try to get all reporters to capture a little bit of video for every story they cover. Mindy said there are also certain times when video is appropriate to capture: 1)movement and action, 2) emotion, 3)something people would understand more with a visual, and 4)exciting footage of breaking news. We also discussed some of the differences between online newspaper video (which has longer interviews with subjects, cuts out the narration of the reporter and sometimes creates mini news broadcasts for the Internet that won’t appear on TV) and broadcast TV news ( where stories are called segments, interviews are short, and images are just background to the reporter’s narration).
For this week Mindy directed us to Angela Grant’s News Videographer blog, which is discusses topics for journalists producing online news video. The blog also provides critiques of work as well as tips for storytelling, shooting, and editing.
