Photo Venture Camera Club, September 22, 2011
Who Needs Multimedia Skills? You Do!
James Brown is executive associate dean emeritus and professor emeritus of the Indiana University School of journalism-IUPUI. He was chair of the photojournalism sequence at the University of Minnesota and was President and CEO of Brown, Jensen and Garloff, a Minneapolis multimedia production company. His productions have won Gold and Bronze medals in the International Film and Television Festival of New York. If you want more, read this.
Visual Journalism
Here is my short essay on visual journalism. The course the essay refers to is Introduction to Visual Communication I taught at the Indiana University School of Journalism at IUPUI.
As you get into multimedia you will find some new ethical considerations. Be sure to have an ongoing dialog with your editors about what your organization expects.
Journalism
Journalism is gathering information, synthesizing it and publishing stories formatted for various mediums. Before the Internet became useful for displaying words and pictures, the primary means of distributing stories was ink on paper. Television has been a small player in story-telling due its forte as an entertainment medium.
Several technical innovations have changed the way we seek and receive information. One is simple the maturing of the Internet from a system by which researches move data to one another to the full array of services you use on a daily basis. The development of web browsers and the accompanying programming languages made possible the integration of words and pictures in a way never before possible.
Paralleling the development of the Internet was the development of the microcomputer. The Apple I computer first came to market in 1975. The first IBM PC was available in late 1981. The Macintosh, introduced in 1984 revolutionized microcomputers by introducing the Graphical User Interface (GUI), which are the icons, folders, etc. that seem so natural to use now. In 2003, Apple Computer introduced the iLife suite of products that empowered users to easily produce stories in any form they wished and at very low cost. The Internet was there waiting for the stories to be published, again at very low costs.
Newspapers were slow to catch on to how they could use the Internet. At first they waited until the print product was delivered and then began to put stories on their websites pretty much as they appeared in the paper. New websites of the day were referred to as "shovelware" sites because content was shoveled from the paper to the Web. Now, again though Apple's innovation with the iPad, magazines and news publications are designing to the device with user interaction a prime consideration.
Dana Achtley
In about 2000, I met Dana Achtley who made an indelible impression on me. He described himself as a "digital story-teller" and story-teller he was. He had a traveling stage show that merged his on stage commentary with a sophisticated projected multimedia show. I brought the show to IUPUI to benefit our students. I was disheartened when not a single student or faculty member attended the show. If he were alive today, I am sure the auditorium would be full because journalists need to learn multimedia. He taught many, many people how to tell their own stories using digitized family artifacts. His pioneering efforts along with the development of the Apple iLife products changed story-telling forever. His website is still up. Take the time to explore a few examples of his story-telling method.
Story Telling
I have been a multimedia producer since the 1970s yet I still learned from and became enthused by Achtley's ideas. Back in the day, multimedia consisted of two or more Carousel slide projectors in which the slide tray advances were controlled by a dedicated electronic controller. The controller would take its instructions by a four-track, reel-to-reel, tape recorder deck. Two of the channels were used for stereo sound, one for the control signals and one could be used for additional sound or not used at all. The most number of projectors that I used in a production was six. Those projectors are no longer made having been supplanted by LCD digital projectors driven by a laptop computer.
My definition of multimedia in the journalism context is using two or more of our senses in telling a story. A video uses moving pictures and synchronized sound. Still photographs can easily be synchronized with a sound track using video editing software or a product developed by a journalist for journalists–Soundslides. Photojournalists used to carry cameras and lenses. Now their cameras are capable of shooting HD quality video and they carry digital sound recording gear as well. At National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) meetings invited speakers are radio reporters from National Public Radio. Why? Radio reporters know how to tell stories with sound and photographers now need to have those same skills. News websites want "rich media." That is videos and still pictures with sound that tell compelling stories.
Declining advertising revenue have caused dramatic personnel cutbacks in the news business. Fewer people are asked to do more. I am not saying this is good; it is just a reality. Therefore, to be successful in the job market, you cannot have a limited skill set. Just as carpenters have many tools specialized to the task at hand, so should you have as many story-telling skills as possible. Words are very important but also in a way limiting. By adding pictures with an emotional soundtrack, you can take your story to a new dimension. You are inviting your audience to use more than one of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. So far, multimedia story-telling involves sight and sound. That leaves smell, touch and taste to future technical innovation.
My students have historically complained about having to spend time to learn software. It just doesn't interest them. If that is what you think too, get over it. In order to produce digital stories, you need to know how to use a number of different software packages. What if you are about to graduate and still haven't learned Premiere or Final Cut Pro? What if you haven't had the audacity to learn Audacity? What is Lightroom anyway? Will my newsroom pay for me to learn? Any newsroom will hire the person who can already demonstrate software proficiency over someone who hasn't taken the time to join the computer age. Training dollars are scarce. Over your career you will have to continue to learn and train yourself if you want to excel.
Brown's Tips
Learn vicariously. Study good multimedia stories. A very good and continuous source of good multimedia stories is the NPPA Monthly Multimedia competition. Check out the past winners using the links along the left margin. These are stories that have been judged as excellent by NPPA judges.
Here are some other websites worth exploring:
- Knight Digital Media Center
- Knight Digital Media Center–Storyboarding
- No-Fear Guide to Multimedia
- Top 5 Multimedia Journalism Websites
- Interactive Narratives
- Journalists' Toolkit
- Innovative Interactivity
- Multimedia Standards
Equipment and Software
It doesn't make sense to buy a camera these days that doesn't shoot both still photographs and video. Realize that the audio from your camera will not be very good. Record audio separately with a digital recorder and sync that audio track with your video using DualEyes.
Get a good quality digital recorder with a Redhead Windscreen. Be sure to view the demo videos at Redhead. I currently recommend the Zoom H1 for the most bang for the buck. It will be about $100. You should acquire the microphones that fit your work. Certainly a small clip-on mic is a necessity. A wireless mic is very handy but much more expensive. If you already have an iPhone, you can turn it into a pretty good recorder using an adapter that will allow using professional microphones with XLR cables. There are numerous recording apps available for the iPhone and some allow e-mailing the recording. This is an easy way to get the recording into your computer for editing.
Get familiar with a video editing package such as Final Cut (Mac) or Premiere (both Mac and Windows). If you have a Mac, you already have iMovie.
For preparing pictures for publication, I recommend Lightroom 3. It is cheaper than Photoshop and will do everything you need to do. For learning Lightroom, I recommend Scott Kelby's book.
What about sound? Audacity is an open source sound editing program available for both Mac and Windows. You will also need the LAME MP3 encoder for Audacity.
Soundslides is an easy-to-use program for make stories of still pictures with a synchronized sound track. Make your sound track first and prep your pictures for the web (instructions on the Soundslides website). Soundslides make a web-ready folder. FTP the folder to your web server and you know the actual URL. Using the actual URL, you can get the code to embed your story in another page on the site here.
Use FileZilla (Mac or Windows) as an FTP program.
What laptop should I buy? Get the MacBook Pro that you can afford.
What if I already have a Windows laptop? I'm sorry. But don't let that stop you from doing multimedia. You can still do it.
Soundslides
I first began working with Soundslides while it was in beta during the 2005 Boy Scout Jamboree. It is a very easy tool to synchronize sound with still pictures. It has a very low learning curve but it assumes you already have a completed soundtrack.
Ray generously lets me brings classes of students to his hair salon so that I can demonstrate how to to multi-media shooting and sound recording.
I did the sound and the editing on this story. No one knew what we were doing but we knew we wanted to do a multimedia production. So we grabbed some equipment and headed to the field. I was figuring out the recorder on the way to the gate.
When Lew, Clint and I started on our motorcycle trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, none of us knew it would be Clint's last ride. He died of a heart attack about a month after we returned. I was experimenting with an inexpensive Olympus digital recorder, without manual sound level, on that trip. After Clint died, I quickly put together this piece. The family loved it. I was really glad I had the audio.
When I was asked to take pictures at Camp Healing Tree on the first weekend after fall classes were to begin, my first reaction was to decline. That is a busy time in a professor's schedule (and student's too). I asked, "What is Camp Healing Tree?" The answer, and my subsequent participation, was a transforming experience. All the campers have one thing in common-they have all experienced a traumatic experience and are grieving. About 15 percent of the children have discovered a parent who have committed suicide or who were murdered.
I was asked to not make sound recordings of the counselling sessions, all led by experienced grief counselors.
I ask a professor of guitar to play some out-of-copyright soothing pieces for me and he was delighted to do so. I did the recording on an Olympus LS-10.
Brownsea Island is considered the birthplace of Scouting. At the 2010 Boy Scout Jamboree at Fort A.P. Hill, Va., the camp and its activities is recreated by scouts and scouters in period dress. It was here that General Baden-Powell worked out the basic structure of Scouting, including patrols with games and competition between patrols that persists to this day. Scouting is celebrating 100 years in the United States. I have been involved in Scouting for 54 years of that century.
The religious service presented some problems. I had to get IDs of the people for use in the daily newspaper, Jamboree Today, but I didn't want to intrude. I wrote what I wanted in my notebook and handed it to the subjects. All sound was recorded from one wireless mic. People were close enough that I could adjust sound levels in the track. I wasn't the best situation but I got something usable.
At the Jamboree, some Scouts have to march three and a half hours to reach the arena shows. As I was photographing the march, a group of Scouts was showing exceptional spirit. With a recorder in one hand and a camera in the other, I soon had a piece for the web site.
Here is a little Soundslides I made for made for my granddaughters as a memory of our visit to the US Space and Rocket museum in Huntsville, Alabama. The sound is from an exhibit at the museum.
On a motorcycle ride to northern Indiana, I passed this man in a small town city park. I did a U-turn and pulled out my camera and recorder. I asked him to play and sing a song for me and I recorded it with my Zoom H4N. I then did a short interview with him. I laid his comments over his singing by antennuating the song in the parts where he was speaking. Titles were done as text layers in Photoshop.
Student Work
Student's in my sophomore level Introduction To Visual Communication course do still photography, a Soundslides story and a video story. Here are several examples.
Leslie Anne Hulse by Loree Scheske
This is a particularly strong story that brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. You may ask if it is appropriate to do such stories that intrude into a family's time of grief. It is a good question but I think it is how the journalist acts in the field that is important. This story is sensitively done, unlike the behavior of the minister from Topeka that brings a First Amendment issue before the Supreme Court for projecting his beliefs at military funerals.
Bret Neylon by Becky Schwepler-Wojcik
This is good story by a person who had never used a camera before the course. She used a consumer grade Canon and the inexpensive Olympus without manual record level. It is desirable to have manual record level. This is a good story done with inexpensive equipment.
Judge by Hoosier State Press Intern group
For the last two years, I have guided a group of college writers through a half-day multimedia experience. They get a little instruction and then head to the field to gather sound and pictures. They come back to the computer lab and start sound editing. By 4 p.m., they have a finished story. Here is one from the workshop in the spring of 2010.
Still Photos
I have enjoyed photography since my father showed my how to mix photographic chemistry when I was about 10 years old. Here are some examples. I did my first commercial job when I was eleven years old.
Advice
At the 2010 Indiana University graduation ceremony I had the honor of presenting a former graduate student for an IU honorary doctorate. At my last formal address to my students, and my introduction of Chris Johns to our students, I wanted to leave two central thoughts in the minds of the graduates--always be thankful to those who have helped you and always strive for excellence. Here are my remarks.
Keep an open mind for what you may have to learn. I recently finished web redesign project. The client, Hoosier State Press Association, asked me if I could implement a searchable directory of contact information for Indiana newspapers. It turned out to be a complicated task. I had to refresh my memory about Microsoft Access, a program I have not used for 15 years. I had to learn MySQL queries to normalize the data. I wrote a password protected database update system in PHP. Finally, I had to learn a little Jquery to implement the search window. Try it out.
Thirty years ago, I would have never thought a visual communicator would have to write computer code. Today, it is a near necessity, at least at a basic level. You will only be successful in journalism if you are a life-long learner.