Hypercrit » Online Courses

The BBC Guide to Good Shooting

Michael Becker — Fri, 01 May 2009 21:38:36 +0000

It’s been a busy Friday, so unfortunately only one update today.

I was able to to go through one of the BBC’s excellent tutorial/training courses online, the “Guide to Good Shooting.” I recommend the course because it provides interactive exercises to help you figure out some of the specifics of setting up good video shots and provides diagrams to help explain some of theories behind lighting and composition.

Some highlights:

Like with everything else I’ve read so far, the emphasis is on planning, on knowing what you’re getting into before you start filming or recording.
The course emphasizes the importance of having a checklist and getting all the shots you came for — but it also advises that you keep an open mind and adapt your plan when you notice the story changing.
The course goes through tutorials on focusing, composing shots, capturing movement, setting up interviews, adjusting white balance and lighting.

No doubt, plenty of this material will make it into the final presentation.

Telling stories with sound

Michael Becker — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:50:23 +0000

There’s plenty to be learned about storytelling in just audio — like NPR does, and I think that there are some lessons there that we can import into our video production techniques. (Who knows, we could also look into producing audio-only content or podcasts, so these techniques might be valuable.)

These lessons once again come from a News University course, this time on “Telling Stories with Sound.” This course takes us through some of the practical considerations that come with recording usable audio at an interview. The big takeaway from this lesson — apart from the constant and valuable repeated message of being prepared ahead of time — is that we need to start being aware of the ambiance, the soundscape and images that surround a story.

This awareness can help you identify troublesome white noise before recording your interview, thereby saving yourself problems in the editing stage of the game; but this awareness can also help you start to look at locations and interviews as potential treasure troves of sounds, each of which can be used to punctuate or to enhance the story that’s being told.

My advice to you on this front would be to go to NPR.org and listen to a few of the stories there to see how those radio reporters and producers put their stories together. I’ll give you a few links to interesting stories (not just NPR) to get you started, but I encourage you to explore and find stories that you think are well-told using just audio.

Your homework would be, of course, to deconstruct those recordings, identify the sounds in the background versus the narration and interview and talk about what each sound adds to the whole story and, importantly, how it adds that value.

A five-step program

Michael Becker — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:41:20 +0000

One of the big things I’ve done so far is to look into News University courses, offered (mostly) for free from Poynter. I’ve completed one of the courses, “Five Steps to Multimedia Storytelling,” by Jane Stevens.This course is mostly focused on the kind of multi-media stories that revolve around a Web page — sort of like the features the News Service does with Mountains & Minds — but there are some good tips here for planning a video-oriented story too.

First and foremost among those tips: Get ready beforehand.

When you’re using just print as a medium and adding photos or other visual media as an accompaniment, it’s easier to go into an interview or tour or field experience without much in the way of preparation, knowing that you’ll have time to massage the words later on.

Not so with video or audio. The more groundwork you can lay down ahead of time, the better. Pre-interviews, planning, gathering visuals and resources ahead of time — these are all suggestions that Stevens offers. We can integrate elements of her tips into our daily video-production routine, but not all of them. The kinds of stories that Stevens is producing are bigger stories, the kind that have months or weeks of lead-in time. We won’t always have that luxury.

Still, it can never hurt to be prepared, so I want you all to get one big idea rolling around in your heads as we go into this video adventure: storyboards.