As a videojournalist who covers politics in Washington, DC – not exactly the most visual topic in the most visual city (well, the city itself is beautiful, but inside the Capitol not so much) – I often have to get creative with my stories. While much of the discussion concerning online videojournalism focuses on what I like to call emotional documentary stories, there is a whole sub-genre of producers creating engaging editing-oriented pieces for the web. In this post I want to describe what goes in to creating a piece that has very little original video.
My latest piece assessing Barack Obama’s first 100 days is typical of the type of video I produce. Such pieces require a mash-up of original video, external footage and creative use of graphics.
The first step involves working on the script with my reporter, in this case CQ White House correspondent Adriel Bettelheim. Adriel wrote a 1,200 word story on the same topic, which is obviously way too long and intentionally slow-paced to directly convert into a video narration. I took Adriel’s story and crafted it into a more script-friendly version, and then sent back to him for his thoughts. We usually do about 2-3 revisions before we’re ready to track (record) his voiceover.
At the same time, I make a list of all of the visuals I need. I start with footage that I already have in house, including a few Obama press conferences and some broll of a protest outside the White House (in fact, knowing that I had footage of the protest I wrote it into the script). Then I look on WhiteHouse.gov for video Obama’s speeches that I need to excerpt. Luckily CQ has a great transcript wire, so it’s easy to search through all of his speeches to identify my clips. I record screencasts of the parts of the speeches I need with an indispensable application called iShowU. Then I look for still photos in the CQ photo archives and Getty Images, where we have a subscription.
Once I have the voiceover recorded and all of the video footage, I assemble it all into my timeline in Final Cut Pro. I lay down the a-roll (narration and speech excerpts) first, and then assemble my b-roll (visuals) on top of the audio tracks. Invariably some images don’t work like I thought they would in the storyboard, and I always have a few gaps so I have to collect a few more. Once I have my Rough Cut (every piece of a-roll with a visual on top of it, but no animations or transitions), I start to tweak. Adding movement and filters and adjusting audio levels is the most time-consuming part of the whole process, and usually takes me a few hours of hard core editing for every 3-4 minute video.
Of course the key to all of this is to make the video interesting. Political analysis isn’t exactly sexy, so you’ve got to dress the video up a bit. MediaStorm recently posted one of the best resources for how to spice up multimedia and video presentations. I encourage everyone to study this list very carefully, as they hit all of the major points about pacing, timing, how to most effectively use the Ken Burns effect, how long to leave images up for and much more.
All told, this video was produced almost entirely in-house (minus a short trip to the White House to film Adriel’s stand up) and took a solid two days to produce. Ten years ago it would have impossible for anyone but a network or a dedicated documentary film producer to do something like this, but with the improvements in digital video editing and the availability of publicly accessible material online, it shows you what you can do with very little of your own acquired footage.
Professional videojournalist Andrew Satter teaches three online-interactive courses at The Compelling Image: Mastering Video Production Basics, Final Cut Express – Taming the Learning Curve and Up and Running with Final Cut Pro HD.
