Quiet video for a quiet subject

In the sometimes-less-is-more department, I give you this video from Kate Penn on Darnell Rias, the former Marine that she and Mike Argento have been following as he rebuilds his post-war life. Rias suffered a broken back and brain injury in Afghanistan, and has PTSD, but he is moving forward by going to college and getting his own apartment.

Rias is quiet and soft-spoken, but you can hear a lot inside his words. Kate's video is quiet, too, and paced to let you hear Rias' determination and hope.

An ex-Marine reflects: Two stories in one

As part of the national online project American Homecomings, photographer Kate Penn and columnist Mike Argento are following West York's Darnell Rias for a year as he builds his post-war life.

Recently, Kate and Mike went with Rias to Camp Lejeune, N.C., where Rias welcomed home his good friend, Lance Cpl. Harley Philhower.

Because I'm working with Mike on the text version of the story, Kate's video is always fresh to me. I'm always fascinated at how a writer and a visual artist work together-but-separately -- they're on assignment together, so there's a teamwork aspect to it, but neither wants to tell exactly the same story as the other.

In this case, Mike's story focuses on the (mild) suspense of Rias meeting Philhower, exchanging scenes of anticipation with background that fills out the military friendship part of their story. Kate's video has the reunion, too, but it left me thinking about how wistful Rias is when he's talking about his time in the Marines (even when he talks about feeling like he had to cut his hair to go back to Camp Lejeune).

They are complementary pieces, each of which tells an important part of Rias' story.

'Dragged by the claws of civic duty ...'

Lauren Boyer and I started by wondering how people deal with being blindsided by victory when they find out they've been elected, by write-in votes, to a position they never intended to fill.

We ended with this probing look at this vexing political problem:

What I learned: Kate Penn on sound

More shared wisdom from York Daily Record/Sunday News staffers whose work was recently honored in the Keystone Awards. Photographer Kate Penn won first place in the video storytelling category for her video "Equine smile restoration." From Kate:

This video reinforced the knowledge that sound really drives video. "Equine Smile Restoration" features the sound of grinding horse teeth, whinnies and coaxing. These sounds layer with the subject's smooth voice telling his compelling story of being laid off and changing careers. This video reminds me that if you slow down and take the time to capture compelling audio, the story can tell itself. Also, people love weird animal stories.

Maybe that last line is all you really need to know about this one. But seriously ... you can see how Kate's attraction to the sounds she encountered, and her decision to use that sound to help build the video, paid off. What sensory things do you encounter in your work that you can use to help tell stories?

For Veterans Day, a video package brings together veterans from America's past and present

From our AME visuals Brad Jennings this morning:

If you're growing weary of Penn State stories, here's something a little different you can check out. For Veterans Day, Kate Penn profiled veterans from the current wars, all the way back to World War II, and conducted video interviews with them.
Sam Dellinger created an interactive presentation that you can see here.
This is a great example of multimedia storytelling. You'll notice few printed words, and short video clips. But if you watch them all, you'll come away learning a lot about a diverse group of local people.
You can see George Eyler get emotional as he remembers getting shot at in Korea. You can hear Michael Janis talk about having blood and excrement thrown at him when he returned home from Vietnam. And you can listen to Dawn Hicks describe how woman in Saudi Arabia must eat in a separate room at their local KFC so they can uncover their faces to eat.
I'm glad we were able to meet these veterans and let them share their stories in this way.

Really cool effort by Kate and definitely worth your time to watch the videos and meet these people.

Thoughts on 'Carrying Darisabel,' an Emmy award and a journalist's choice

We got news last night that YDR visual journalist Jason Plotkin won a regional Emmy award for his documentary "Carrying Darisabel." A 2-year-old girl had been viciously beaten, and Jason told the story of the people who tried to save her life, and how Darisabel's death haunted them.

It's a huge moment for Jason and for the YDR: As his editor, Brad Jennings, noted, it's the first time a newspaper organization has won a mid-Atlantic Emmy, as the competition is made up mainly of television news organizations. Historically, newspapers take still shots and TV gives you video. Not anymore.

The Emmy award is fantastic news. I was privileged to see Jason at work on this film from beginning to end, to see the daily devotion. He believed in the story so strongly he practically willed it into existence. His focus never faded or frayed, and yet, where some journalists by their nature would have resisted too many voices offering their best advice, Jason invited people in. He listened, and, through a combination of skill and personality, took the best of what others had to offer and still kept the film true to his vision.

I've been a reporter and editor for 25 years. I've never seen anything like it.

But it is odd to celebrate a "victory" in the Emmys because -- and I know Jason believes this too -- this film should never have existed. Darisabel should still be here. There should have been nothing to make a film about.

And that is where a journalist stands at a crossroads.

Do you turn away from something so painful to a family and to a community, so fraught with damage, so incomprehensible to so many? Do you decide we're all better off if we don't look for too long at what happened here? Do you pull up short because, to do the story, you will be seen as taking advantage of a tragedy?

Or do you tell the story and draw your community in? Insist that they look? Embrace others' pain as part of the storytelling? Understand that some will see you as an opportunist, and do it anyway?

 For a journalist like Jason, there really is no choice. You tell the story. You tell it because you know it's real. Darisabel died. Her family was devastated. The people who tried to save her life have holes inside. Yet they go on. When they tell their story, we come closer to knowing how -- and maybe we walk away a little bit better equipped to make our way in this world, to understand what's going on around us, and to decide what, if anything, we would like to do about it.

Watch and listen. It will hurt. But you will see both darkness and light.

'Carrying Darisabel' a finalist in national competition

Congrats to Jason Plotkin, whose 'Carrying Darisabel' documentary was a finalist in the American Society of Newspaper Editors' awards, a national competition. I'm attaching the note below from Jim McClure's e-mail that gives some context to what it means to be a finalist in this competition:

The ASNE Awards judging was held late last week at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg. This was an especially competitive year, with a 30 percent increase in entries over last year's contest.
Jason Plotkin was a finalist in the Online Storytelling category. The staff of the Washington Post was also a finalist, and The New York Times was the winner, so your organization's achievement is quite impressive.
... Congratulations on your outstanding work.
Best regards,Richard Karpel

Time-lapse of N.E. snowstorm: Do you need anything else to tell the story?

From the Providence Journal's Tim Barmann:


A little bit on how he did it is here.

Katrina 5 years later: Great multimedia from USAToday

USAToday used a lot of cool ways to tell the story of Katrina 5 years later -- virtual neighborhood tours and computer-animated explanatory videos of what's been done to the levees and waterways, for example. You can spend a lot of time on this, but it's worth it.

Overcoming obstacles in video storytelling

As part of Living's 'Senses' project, Kate Penn produced a video about a deaf couple raising a hearing child. Brad passed along this note, which talks about challenges Kate faced and how she dealt with them:

"The video that goes with this week's Sense/Ability story had some cool challenges involved.

The Drawbaughs answered Kate's questions with sign language, and Kate had to match up their responses with the interpretor's translations. (The interpretor doesn't speak as they are signing, she gathers their statement and then repeats it afterward.) So once Kate assembled the video, she reconnected with the interpretor, who came here and helped her place the responses at the right moments during editing. 

Another challenge was showing "B roll" while still keeping the Drawbaughs on screen so their signing could be seen.

Some interesting obstacles, but she put it all together well."

Carrying Darisabel: Police, others can't forget murdered 2-year-old

Echoes of Katrina

What's happening in Haiti evokes what happened in New Orleans in 2005. This is a powerful video storytelling project, called "An Unnatural Disaster," about what's happened since '05 and what's happening now in New Orleans.

The main video includes some then-and-later photos that really bring it home. For example, in 2005, Katrina left a blasted Days Inn sign at a 45-degree angle over a small pool. Two years later it looked like the sign hadn't been touched.

Why can't we resist finding out what happens next?

You gotta watch this (scroll a bit down the page to see the video). You can watch the whole 30-minute video, of course, but if you fast forward to the 10:45 mark, you'll see/hear Ira Glass, brilliant storyteller on the radio show This American Life, tell a story about a story.

In between playing snippets of the story, he reveals why TAL stories are so damn compelling -- no matter what they're about -- and even better, he dissects why.

The story he's playing gets to a point of what's going to happen next when Glass turns off the tape and says, "At this point, nobody turns off the radio." And then he asks why. If you think about the facts in the story, he says, "This is actually not that interesting of a story. ... And yet, suspense has been created. Why? How does that happen?"

He breaks it down until about the 20-minute mark. It's gold.

39 steps, 10,000 words

Some pretty cool thoughts on what you can learn about storytelling -- mainly visual, but print too -- from Alfred Hitchcock films, courtesy of a blog called 10,000 Words. It touches on everything from dialogue to foreshadowing to streamlining your storytelling.

And there are video clips, too.

Here's another writer's take on Hitchcock and storytelling.

Journalism prof's guide to multimedia journalism

... and, of course, to multimedia storytelling.

Mindy McAdams of the University of Florida blogged on how journalists can "transform themselves," as she puts it, into multimedia journalists. She collected those 15 posts and put them in a PDF. It's available here, but it's long, so I thought I'd do a quick abstract, based at least in part on Mindy's text, to help. If you want more, see the whole document; it's pretty good stuff.

1. Read blogs and use RSS -- Read blogs, especially ones about online & multimedia, to help you understand changes in media, keep up with the changes, and adapt. Set up an RSS reader (e.g., Google Reader)

2. Start a blog -- Helps, or in some cases makes, you search for new information and connect with other online/multimedia sites & people.

3. Buy an audio recorder and learn to use it -- In our case, see Chris Glass. A number of you have added audio to your reporting/storytelling already. Anyway, audio adds another level to your work.

4. Start editing audio -- Again, some of you have done this here. Great. And you know it can be time consuming. But it's similar to editing your notes or notebook as you turn from reporting to writing ... so you already have some skills. As McAdams notes, this also forces you to broaden your computer skills, a necessity if you're embracing multimedia.

5. Listen to podcasts -- You need to hear good audio stories to have something to model yours on, to have something to shoot for.

6. Post an interview (or podcast) on your blog -- So you're saying, Blanchard, why haven't you posted an interview or podcast on your blog? Guilty. But this is another area where doing this forces you to broaden your journalistic skills.

7. Learn how to shoot decent photos -- Because, as McAdams says simply, every journalist ought to be able to get a basic spot news photo. You might be the only one there.

8. Learn how to crop, tone and optimize photos -- Check in with Chris or Brad on this one if you want to learn. Again, McAdams is approaching this from the standpoint of, if you're going to be a fully-developed multimedia journalist, you've got to know how to work with your own photos.

9. Add photos to your blog -- This is quite easy in Blogger, but Movable Type drives me up a wall. Maybe I'm doing something wrong ... but in any case, if you have a blog, try to get art on it the same as you would try to get art with a story in print.

10. Learn to use soundslides -- This is a different, and usually very cool, way of storytelling, and something that our photographers do very well. Making your own might even be fun.

11. Tell a good story with images and sound -- If you have a story that's worth telling this way, you ought to be able to pull it off.

12. Learn to shoot video -- The natural extension of No. 11.

13. Edit your video -- The natural extension of No. 12. Again, many of you have done this. Chris and Brad and probably others can coach you.

14. Publish your video on your blog -- Tom Joyce seems to have taken to this nicely. Blogs are better when they have more than just headlines and text. (I need to find a picture to go with this post).

15. Maintain/udpate your skills -- To crib from McAdams: Get over your fear, learn to fail, find good tutorials. From me: Keep pushing yourself. You're not going to master any or all of these things in a couple of weeks, or after one coaching session or a three-day seminar. But by making time to work at them, you'll first learn, then get better. That's the point.

See a 'broken narrative' structure unfold

Watch this Frontline video and see what Jacqui called a "broken narrative" structure as it works in a video documentary.

The first few minutes put you in the middle of the most important part of the narrative, the moment when something big is going to happen. Then the story shifts from narrative to exposition -- of characters, of the conflict, of the how-we-got-here background -- and back to narrative. It's fascinating to watch how well-constructed it is.

And what I always think about when I watch this is: Through deep reporting and excellent visual storytelling skills, Frontline has turned a story about pieces of paper and computer screens and people in meetings into an edge-of-your-seat drama. And it's all true.

Cool, unorthodox, crazy and frustrating all at once

Conflict-resolution video narrative? Almost ...

Watch as an adrenaline-fueled tornado chaser drives toward a big tornado. I start thinking:

When is he going to stop?

When is he going to stop?

Is he ever going to stop?

Finally, late in the video, comes his moment of realization.*

The video is not set up to be a narrative, and it's a compelling video, but it left me wondering -- wouldn't a little bit of text storytelling have helped here? What was the building? Was there anyone in it? Anyone hurt? Did anything happen to the chaser or his vehicle? Did the tornado go on to level the town or just peter out?

Maybe I'm asking for too much. But seems to me they had a short narrative opportunity here and missed it.

*This comes a few seconds after, at the 44-second mark, the amazingly timely and helpful electronic advice he receives from whatever Onstar-type device he has in the vehicle. Listen closely. It's great.

The how behind the what

Last night's Frontline on the banking crisis/bailout was classic storytelling.

In big news stories we usually write about what has happened, and the focus often is on the decisions that were made and then announced or acted upon (as in the case of an arrest, for example).

But if you can approach the story trying to tell how things happened, it opens up a whole new world of reporting and writing possibilities -- and not least, allows you to write a story in a way that can result in a whole new level of understanding of what you're writing about.

That's what Frontline does in its piece on the banking crisis. You follow the story hour by hour, decision by decision, and it's riveting -- and it tells you things you didn't know about what happened.

One way to think about it, in terms we're familiar with, is that there's the hard news story that we write when something breaks; and then there's the enterprise story or Sunday story that tells how it happened. (Check the left rail for "Snared, then saved" for a good example). And watch the Frontline piece online and think about a big story you've worked on that could be told this way.

Plotkin speaks

Well, that's not really news.

But as promised, here are some thoughts from Jason about how he put together this video on Black Friday:

Me: How many minutes/hours of video did you start with?

Jason: I filmed about an hour and a half.


Me: How and when (in the process) did you decide how long you wanted the video to be, and why?

J: We always try to keep our videos between 45 seconds and around a minute and a half.


Me: How did you edit that much materal down to 1:41?

J: I knew going in that I was going to time stamp the video. So when I was keeping track of what time things happened, I was able to limit each hour to the highlights of that time period.


Me: What was the story you were trying to tell, and how did that affect your editing?

J: I just wanted to show the highlights of what happens when people stay up all night waiting for a store to open up on Black Friday. The only editing problem I had was that I had more interviews I wanted to use, but that would have extended it more.


Me: Obviously, you left a lot of stuff out. Could the video have been better if it was 30 seconds longer? A minute longer? Two minutes longer? Why or why not?

J: I do agree with the theory that unless the footage is so compelling that you cannot look away, that viewers have a very limited attention span, so I was happy with the editing job I was able to do on this video.

Now see this

Couple neat examples of visual storytelling, one on an unusual subject, one on a subject we all know and love (though no one loves it more than Jason):

• Here's a Washington Post slideshow on a girl born with dwarfism who undergoes a procedure to lengthen her legs.
  
• And here's Jason's take on overnight Black Friday. He spent the night out there, had tons of video, and edited down to this sharp piece. I'll ask Jason how he did that and have his thoughts in a future post: