Chuck Fadely has a great post with tips on how to shoot video stories. [via Mindy McAdams]
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Head-of-state vlogging
I just caught up with this wonderful video with Lyssa Bochert teaching Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, to vlog (auf Englisch). It’s a tad long but imagine George Bush doing this. Now that would be a hoot.
The hunt for good video continues
I’ve become a quick fan of Kevin Nalty’s funny videos and blogging about video. Today he reports on YouTube’s “customer-support fiasco;” the other day, he put together a good list of video predictions:
1. Online video and television collide then converge. . . .
2. Consolidation of online video sites will increase exponentially. . . .
3. Viral video creators will “cross over” to television. . . .
4. Many television shows will develop online manifestations. . . .
5. Consortiums will form for economies of scale. . . .
6. Select amateur video creators will begin to make a full-time living without “crossing over” to television. . . .
7. A major news story will break via live (or close to live) footage by “citizen journalists” holding cameras. . . .
8. Marketers will get smarter about how they gain consumer mindshare through online video. . . .
9. Real vs. fake will be a major 2007 theme. . . .
10. The “big boy” sites are going to start sharing advertising revenue with select creators like some smaller sites (Revver, Metacafe, Blip, Brightcove, Lulu). That means Google, YouTube, Yahoo and AOL will finally realize that good content means eyeballs. And eyeballs means more revenue.
I’m no fan of year-end top-10 lists and predictions, but that’s a good list.
Appropriate to the meta-ness of Nalty’s video-on-video existence, one of the most entertaining video on his site is a local Fox video about his videos. The best part is is wife complaining about how everything he does is on tape.
A tale of three tapes
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the infrastructure, effort, and expense of big TV v. small. Lately, I took along my video camera as I did a few things with ABC 20/20, Frontline, and CNBC.com and, as a demonstration, whipped together this little video. I tried to show the effort that goes into a simple interview in network news: four pros who spent hours setting up and taking down a shoot and who put great effort into getting it just right (and they were all nice enough to put up with me taping them). I wanted to make fun of the TV convention of B-roll, in which they get allegedly casual footage of you being yourself so they can use it in editing (and then I made two seconds of my own). And I was fascinated by CNBC.com’s smaller TV for the internet. My video quality is crap (something to do with getting video off my old camcorder, since replaced) and my editing is amateurish — but then, that’s the point.
Go here to get shareable links.
: LATER: A commenter thought I was being snarky about the guys having to wait between shoots. Not at all. Want to make that clear. As I say in the video, these guys are real pros and they do their jobs extremely well and they were also terribly nice explaining some of what they do to me. Ditto the Frontline people. It’s not their fault that the form has come to expect B-roll. What fascinates me is the contrast between the time-honored way to shoot TV and the new possibilities. That’s my point.
How to make a newspaper talk
At Online News, Chet Rhodes of WashingtonPost.com gives an inspirational talk about how he is turning the paper into video, training print reporters to take video (it takes 55 minutes, he says) and how it is working. Why do this? he asks. Because you have to. When we looked at video from a number of news sites in my CUNY class, the students liked WashingtonPost.com’s video best because it was still somewhat raw, not overproduced. And that makes it easier for print people to learn how to shoot good video, I say, as the definition of good shifts away from the priests of the tools.
: Pankaj Paul of DelawareOnline tells about utterly reorganizing his paper’s newsroom to be platform agnostic. He said that a few years ago, only four people could post on the web but now 50 can and the number of web updates skyrocketed. They are a small paper and so they are not throwing staff at this; they are throwing simplicity at it: They are using iMovie and GarageBand to produce multimedia. He said that they have had four people leave because multimedia is not for them. I see that as a very good thing. Welcome to the future, newsroom. Says Paul: “There is no online department. It has ceased to exist. We are the online department. The newsroom is the online department.”
