Monday, October 31, 2016

Video #1: What Are You Doing?

For the first video assignment, I am asking you to do a news video on the topic of, what are people doing with their semester?

For this assignment, you will have to interview at least two people on-camera about what they've been up to this semester.


The videos must run between 1 and 2 minutes long. Each must start out with some sort of a title caption (sort of like a lede), so that the audience knows what the story is going to be about. The story should include video of your interview subjects talking (sort of like quotes in a story), and those subject shots should include captions identifying the people who are speaking (sort of like attribution).

Of course, the stories should have no fatals -- not in terms of what people are saying (it must be true), and captions should have proper spellings and titles. All because it's video doesn't mean we operate at a lower standard than print. Be sure you do thorough double-checking of the information you gather.

(See? Lots of concepts we worked on are true regardless of medium.) 

Also, the videos should contain B-roll. What is b-roll, you ask? It is video showing what your story is about, that you use to break up segments of the video.

For example, let's say you are interviewing people about what they're doing this semester, and one interview subject is making burgers at McDonald's, and the other is going to the club every day. B-roll would be showing what they're doing: shots of one person flipping greasy burgers, and of the other person clubbing it up on the dance floor, etc.


Then, we would use some of that b-roll to break up the interview segments. For example, you know that standard shot of someone talking in a video interview, where you just see their head and they're talking blah-blah-blah? You would start a segment with that, then while they're still talking, you roll some b-roll over the sound, so that people can see what the person is talking about at the same time they're talking about it.


(That goes back to a print concept: show the audience; don't just tell them. At the same time, it breaks up that monotonous shot of someone just talking).

Then, you return to the head shot and end the segment.

Also, B-roll can be used during transitions between segments, to help illustrate those transitions.


Some good b-roll examples can be found in the following videos from some past classes, where the topic was, "What have you learned sofar in JRN 200?" Classmates were used as interview subjects. Like your assignment, it required two human sources on tape per video. 

Off we go:


Andrea 


Shanin T.


Emily


Julia

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