Shooting multimedia: a lot to juggle

They say multimedia journalism is the way forward; hell, it is the way forward. But sitting on a moving helicopter, flying over the rooftops of Baghdad, camera in hand trying to get a shot out the side, while also checking your audio recorder is working, with your seatbelt barely fastened….well it’s not easy.

That was the challenge I faced during my week with the First Batallion the Yorkshire Regiment in Iraq. On assignment for my employer – a radio station – I was also armed with a DV Camera and digital camera, hoping, desperately to come back with high quality video, audio and pictures.

Juggling kit

Now the obvious question, looking at the picture (right) is why didn’t I just use the audio from my video pictures? A good question, but I felt seeing as my primary reason for going out to Iraq was for radio, I needed to make good rich quality audio my priority. I just didn’t trust the quality from my DV Cam. I think though, in future projects, perhaps not just for radio, I will use onboard audio.

Juggling content

But juggling equipment isn’t the only problem for a multimedia shooter, I learned. The big challenge is juggling content.

It might be easy to say ‘just take a camera out and use the on board mic for sound and freezeframes for images’ but that ignores the fact that all three mediums – audio, video, pictures – have their own methods and priorities. Your video demands clean white balanced shots and considered visual sequences of something happening. Your audio demands to have clear sounds of that something happening. And your pictures want to be well framed and capture a split second, not a moving image.

Voice overs or pieces to camera have to be written differently for video than audio as they demand different styles. The former is written as a slave to pictures, while the latter must cope without any pictures at all.

So, in short, it’s a bit of a mindfuck.

But then if it’s not worth having, it’s not easy to get, right?

So how should the journalist approach multimedia stories?

01. with a good knowledge of each medium

02. with a plan of what the final products will be

03. with a variety of treatments: do some stories in just video, do others in just audio, rather than repeating the same content in different mediums

04. with a good bag which can carry all your equipment, and a notebook for logging everything and planning the final product

05. with a small digital camera- take a photo of everyone you interview in audio, for audio slide shows

06. smaller and lighter is better

07. when you arrive somewhere new, think over your video first of all, as getting the right shots is more complicated than getting the right audio or stills

08. and don’t just think in terms of audio, video or still images..what about interactive timelines, potted histories and discussion boards? If your final platform is online then all these are options  you can bear in mind.

All I will say is it was a lot more challenging than I had anticipated-if anyone has any other practical tips then please, add them below!

Advertisement