It’s helpful to know how long the voiceover is going to take before you record it. A common estimate in broadcasting is 180 words per minute. News anchors read at about 150 to 175 words per minute.
Let’s say you have a sequence of three shots, total 15 seconds. How long can you make a VO to cover that?
Some math: 180 (words) divided by 60 (seconds) equals 3 words per second. To cover 15 seconds, you can’t say more than about 45 words. Never try to speed up your talking — that won’t communicate effectively, and you know it. Notice that broadcast anchors read MORE SLOWLY than 180 wpm.
How long is 45 words? What’s something you know or remember that uses only 45 words?
I happen to know that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is exactly 45 words:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Of course, you might not be able to intone that intelligibly in 15 seconds. (It takes me 22 seconds to do it.) Time yourself and see!
Colin Mulvany of The Spokesman-Review has been writing many great, great posts about newspaper video and online video in general. In his latest, he has just about condensed everything you need to know into one single post. Here is the outline:
- Speed up the pacing.
- Define your story — in the first 20 seconds.
- Start it with a very strong visual.
- Start it with natural sound.
- Stop zooming and panning already! What are you, 12 years old?
- Use a wireless microphone.
- In and out, in and out: Mix nat SOT in with narration.
- Be diligent in the fight against wind noise.
- Shoot creatively.
- Edit to include surprises.
- Leave the viewer feeling fulfilled.
Isn’t that a wonderful list? Now just remember to do all of that!
See this post by Curt for information.
If your external hard drive is formatted as FAT32, it would be better to reformat it to NTFS.
It has been more than a year since I bought my external hard drive and did the research to use it correctly, and I had forgotten about the formatting business. Curt’s post gave me a flashback. (Thanks, Curt.)
Of course, if you do reformat your hard drive, that ERASES EVERYTHING on it. So first you would copy everything to some other location (like a hard drive on another computer) — and then do the deadly reformat procedure.
Watch this example (2 min. 37 sec.) and notice two things:
- Do you feel like you are seeing too much of the interview subject? Her voice and her story are very good, but do you really want to keep coming back to her so many times? (Maybe we should see her only two or three times in total.)
- By the end of the story, you may have been distracted by the owners and the dogs — you may have forgotten what the event was about. The storytelling very effectively returns us to that idea — it is a photo shoot for the dogs — by saving the dog portrait photos until the end. This creates an ending that feels satisfying — a very good ending.
You can obviously make a video like this one!
The wonderful Colin Mulvany explains how this works in a comment on a blog post by Angela Grant:
Avoid putting two mediums or two wide shots together [side-by-side]. Also, tight shots make great scene transitions between two similar shots. I’ve also found that by having a lot of tight shots available, my edits goes much quicker than if I had to cobble the edit together with two wide shots.
Even though the extreme close-ups are harder to get on the site, they will save you in the editing process!
The blog post links to a good example of a bad jump cut. Learn to recognize these so you can avoid making them.
I know I’m overloading the course blog this week — sorry!! But this is really good:
The sequence is the foundation of all video storytelling. Sequences compress time in a video story. Without this compression, what you’re left with are long video clips that visually bore viewers to death.
Proper sequencing gives the video editor a better way to pace a story by using a variety of wide, medium and tight shots. This helps move the viewer through a story efficiently.
That’s from a blog post by Colin Mulvany, the videographer from The Spokesman-Review. He started blogging very recently, and I LOVE his blog! It’s very enlightening!
Make sure that what you shoot this week follows the criteria provided in the Shooting 2 assignment.
It is VERY IMPORTANT that you shoot in sequences, exactly as you did for the Shooting 1 assignment. Even if there are no close-up hand shots (for example, the divers probably do very little with their hands, except climb up the ladder to the diving board), you must still get AT LEAST five different shots of each “thing” you expect to use in the video. The sequence of five or more shots must have BOTH different shot types (extreme close, close, medium, wide) AND different positions (stand here, stand there, over-the-shoulder, down on the floor, etc.).
- Shots should be short, e.g. 10 seconds, whenever possible.
- STOP RECORDING after EACH shot!
- Sequences are composed of shots. Shoot at least five shots for every sequence.
- “Events” are shown as a series of sequences. A 2-min. video probably includes 3-5 events (not including the interview).
- How many sequences should be in an event? The story will determine this. You need to think about this BEFORE you start to shoot. This is what you do while you are walking around without your camera for the first 30 minutes.
The one exception to “short shots” is the interview. Set up the camera, set up the person, start recording, take your hands OFF the camera, and conduct the interview without touching the camera again. When finished, turn the camera off.
One interview should work well for this assignment. As I said in class, you may conduct MORE than one interview, but I want you to choose only ONE interview to use in the edited video. Thus if you interview someone and it’s very bland and factual, FIND SOMEONE BETTER — and do a second interview.
I was thinking about Laura’s cake decorator. What if she is boring? Laura might end up interviewing the bride-to-be about her cake — and what it means to her. That might be more emotional than the cake decorator’s interview, and hence much better audio to match with the visuals of the cake being decorated. We do not want to see a how-to about cake decorating!
Don’t be overly literal: Maybe Curt can match audio about Romania to visuals of ice cream. Just because I am skeptical does not mean it’s impossible. Curt might be more creative than I am!
It’s not just some crazy thing your professor uses:
Few, if any, comparable services exist, and according to the FeedBurner home page, over 631,000 publishers have burned over 1.1 million feeds so far.
Source: How FeedBurner Adds Up Subscriber Numbers
Take a quick look at this package from the Detroit Free Press newspaper:
http://media.freep.com/pitbulls/index.html
The issue: pit bulls — more specifically, are these dogs always dangerous? Is dog fighting (for gambling, for profit) the main reason why these dogs are often negatively portrayed? Why do people keep pit bulls, if the people are not expecting the dog to cause harm?
Note the way the issue immediately yields QUESTIONS. You want to address the questions in the story package. You might not be able to answer them all! But if there are NO questions, then what the heck IS your story about?
Now, think back to the way I constructed your in-class exercise on Thursday. Look at this package about pit bulls. Are you happy, as a reader — as a seeker of information — that the package modules are named:
- Video Gallery
- Photo Gallery
- About This Project
- Join the Discussion
Do these labels help you decide whether you want to spend time with this package, with this STORY?
Here is a good seven-page tutorial for Photoshop. This gets into a few tricks I have not shown you, including the useful “Unsharp Mask” filter. It’s okay for you to use this. Be careful not to overdo it.
However, BE AWARE that I am completely against erasing ANYTHING, even specks of dust, in your images. It is a slippery slope. One day you’re erasing dust, and the next day, you will be erasing a bird or a wire. So, NEVER ERASE.
“Cloning” in Photoshop is EVIL and WRONG, in my opinion.
So, please keep in mind that I hold a very black-and-white view of photo-retouching ethics:
- Never erase.
- Never add.
- Adjusting the lightness and darkness is okay, but within reason. It must still look the way it looked in real life.
- Dodging and burning can really change reality. So if it starts to look better than it did in real life … you are crossing the ethical line into DISHONESTY. Don’t do it!
If any of this is unclear to you in any way, ASK ME.
