The other week while on assignment at Reuters with @sizemore, I was talking to @ilicco about how the more kit i try to juggle the more diluted the content can become.
I was sat at the front of an almost exciting talk from the FSA with laptop, iPhone, N95, Kodak Zi6 and a pocket camera. Back in my bag was a pro Nikon SLR, an audio recorder and yet another laptop.
I joked about buying Shiva Media. I thought a multi-armed kit wielding blogger would make a great logo. Apart from the fact this may be insulting the top Hindu God of Gods.. the name has already been taken anyway.
Then I saw @ilicco link to a blog post from Adam Westbrook
Here’s a guy who looks like he has found a happy medium. Adam is a radio journalist dabbling in video. Using a compact camera, a HD video camera and an audio recorder he may have to juggle a little but by not choosing to live update through twitter, ping gps, and live stream he still has time to script his interviews and get the job done.
Maybe Multi Media does not have to be Multi-multi-media..
In an ideal world, if I were going back into a warzone, or tackling something I only had one shot at, I’d want to work in a team. Much as I prefer traveling alone, I do find a more superior batch of content comes from using a team, who like super heroes, all have their own individual strengths.
Along with Stills, HD video and audio, I also like to (where possible) live stream, micro blog (Twitter, Audioboo) and gps tag as i go. I find so much more value in logging the live progress as ‘news’ which preempts the final edit. This not only raises awareness of the project as it is happening but opens up all sorts of real time resources & conversations, as connections are made as you document.
At the moment to do a multimedia job well you’d need a snapper and a videographer, perhaps an audio guy too but you may be able to manage this between two at a stretch. Both people must also be able to live blog, capture, edit, archive and back up their own content and on top of this, write and do stuff to camera.
When I mean ‘do it well’, I mean suck up and absorb as much of the surrounding content/story/information in high quality for the later edit and lo-fi for live blogging.
As I have never been embedded, a team also offers a certain amount of safety and security. Depending on where you are, sometimes it can just draw attention. Although mainly traveling alone for ease, I’ve often worked with a friend. Someone I would trust with my life.
In Iraq I didn’t really know what I was going to do. There was little planning. I just went to see for myself and apart from moving fast and laying low, I was just taking photos and logging my GPS position, either pinging it back via sat phone or texting when there was GSM. The photos I took went to accompany a couple of news stories my friend was writing and finally to make my first real video podcast.
Not long after my good friend was kidnapped and later released.
On assignment in Jordan for the UNHCR I had more experience but limited time. I decided against video and just worked with stills and audio. Much of what I was going to do was arranged in advance by a friend who knew the area well and acted as a fixer. With a simple hand held Zoom H2 on the floor i could record the stories of the refugees and use my Nikon D300 to take pictures in the pauses, editing out the shutter sound later. During the live video blogging of the project I was contacted by Bill Cammack who ended up editing the final stills and interviews into a film.
I guess when there is less at stake.. Back in the UK, either covering a geek conference or on a job for a corporate client, you can experiment and test new methods of data capture and transmission. This is when we can get silly with our tech. Finding out what works and what is a waste of time and resources. What medium has the greatest reach for the least amount of effort.
If I had a tech lab at my disposal, something similar to what Ironman or Batman had in their gargantuan basements.. I would not hesitate to create the ultimate journalists tool. Some single device that once and for all did everything a blogger/journalist needed.
It only exists in my head right now but would have the video capture qualities of RED.. A 15-200mm f1.4 lens with an integral Binaural auto zooming microphone. High definition stills could be extracted from the film and edited in camera. All the GPS and audio to text tagged footage could be separated into audio, video and stills onto solid state cards or streamed via wifi, wimax, or compressed for GSM, or satellite enabling it to be sent all over the world but also to a sister pod situated within the same city retrieving the footage and archiving live.
Oh.. and it tweets.
Failing that.. I’d be happy for the iPhone to have a decent battery, shoot 5 mega pixel photos even in low light and shoot reasonable video from two decent front and back cameras.
This I feel would be far easier to achieve and may even be with us next year. In the meantime I, along with many bloggers and tech lovers will be carting around small to medium backpacks clanking with lensed gadgets. Always on the look out for an unused plug socket so we can recharge and ultimately.. reconnect.
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I am getting more hooked to S-Media than my coffee, I suggested my IT manager watch you updates and now his addicted too and even Tweets me from the other end of my office – Am I becoming a computer geek?
Christian you’re definitely right about the benefits of working in a team in the field to do multimedia. I’d add that having a commissioning producer who understands multimedia storytelling and how to integrate social media into a reporting project would also help.
As a video journalist I’ve worked a couple of times on the same job alongside pro photographers using DSLRs. I find after a while you reach a happy medium of knowing each others boundaries, when one needs priority over another. It helps if a snapper is conscious about shutter noise or flash when working close by.
Interesting to read Adam’s notes on whether to use audio from a camera for radio. (Thanks for linking to him – his experience is really useful to know about – particularly reporting from a conflict zone.) I think about my Sony Z1 video camera as my digital notebook and find audio captured with a Sennhesier MK 66 shotgun mic and Evolution series radio wireless mic is fine for radio features. Having 2 audio channels also helps but you have think about when you might need clean atmos – camera handling noises can be a problem.
Recently in Nigeria the tables were turned. I set out to do a radio feature and produce an audio slideshow while working alongside a VJ.
In the cramped space of an operating theatre my Canon G10 let me work beside the video camera because I could turn off the shutter noise. I had a Marantz audio recorder running as well to gather audio when it suited me or to record my own interviews. When I get around to producing it I’ll also draw upon the audio gathered from my colleague’s video camera.
A new thing I experimented with was parking my Nokia N82 in a corner (on silent) and using the sequence function to take time lapse photos from a different angle. Hopefully this will prove to be useful too.
I didn’t have the pressure of time/deadlines bearing down on me and did post some tweets and stream some live video. Sadly, the 3G connection speed wasn’t really up to taking questions from live followers.
As you say, there’s so much to juggle that it’s easy to leave one media behind when you’re concentrating on something else. I agree that content can be diluted.
I don’t know about you but whenever I’m shopping and see bags, backpacks, gadgets, tech/camera kit or whatever, I’m also thinking about if this might be just the perfect bit of kit for making multimedia field reporting easier. It’s a bloody obsession.
Anyway bring on your ultimate multimedia gadget!
Congrats on the UNHCR report.
It just goes to show that material and logistic constraints can be used to your advantage.
I found the content/story both objective and moving – add to that very clever editing and you got a killer report.
A world away from geek conferences and corporate piss-ups, you don’t have the largesse to experiment with this or that tool or setup.
You get on with the job with what’s available.
Less, therefore, is more – or: necessity is the mother of invention.
And then, there are gadgets.
Keep rocking
In London you need built-in auto-upload via Sat Phone in case it gets confiscated 🙂
Reading this made me smile as it brought back to mind my colleague’s comment after we had spent hours covering Worthing Birdman.
He filmed everything on an HD camera. I was typing away on my laptop into Cover It Live and Twitter, as well as streaming each flight through Qik on my N85.
We split up during the awards. I had my Flip, he had the HD camera.
For web purposes we covered the event well, but what we really needed was another reporter on the ground using a notebook in the traditional way for the paper.
In the end we were having to trawl through our hours of online and video coverage to get the quotes we needed for print.
The moral?
The more you have, the more you do, but it’s not necessarily everything you need.