Newspaper design, visual journalism, and documentary video
Sometimes the journey is the reward. One of the media development partners in Cairo is large publishing house in Egypt - Aakhbar_EL-yom. This short film illustrates the passage from street level to a shoulder-to-shoulder meeting with the chairman of the board, Mr. Mohamed Ahdy Fadly.
CAIRO: This is the final-edited film David produced from the tour we took along el Moez Ledeen Ellah Street in central Cairo. He added voice over narration later on in the edit process and exploded and recombined some of the sequences we shot but, other than that he pretty much had this piece assembled before we even left the scene. Again - all he takes with him is a couple of firelight drives, a $1,500 Sony A1 HDV camera, a 17-Powerbook running Final Cut Pro. He doesn’t monitor his audio with headphones, nor does he tripod any of the shots. This allows him tremendous flexibility to capture video of people and places in their natural environment.
David Dunkley Gyimah’s field reported and produced video report from Cairo. Filmed in three hours - David demonstrates a VJ style of video technique that resonates with younger, web-centric viewers.
David is back in the U.K. and he has my camera’s “making of video clips” with him. He’ll be assembling a version of this news video that illustrates some of the key concepts he uses when writing, shooting and editing in this VJ style.
To demonstrate the range of what the two fully-trained versatile journalists can produce in the field, the next post in this blog will contain a few multimedia story components of a hybrid nature. A podcast and the multimedia variations that can be created using slideshows and video mashups.
This video clip was captured with my point and shoot Lumix LX-2 in 16:9 of David Dunkley Gyimah explaining the differences between the way video journalism is reported from the field: The traditional broadcast model vs the video journalist shooting more like a newspaper style “Photo Joe.”
After working with David all week - my style here has clearly been influenced by fascination with the handheld “Bourne Identity” shooting technique. In this piece, David is so engaged with his audience that I decided not to cut away. What do you think? Would this have been stronger with cut away shots?
Robb Montgomery is the CEO of Visual Editors and an independent consultant.
He has worked as a visual editor for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune and partners with media groups and journalism associations in more than 16 countries to design training curriculum for video journalism, newspaper design and multimedia reporting.
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