In Citizen and Participatory News, one of the biggest problems is the quality of the work from people who have not had training with equipment or gone through school to learn about video composition and editing. But this doesn’t have to be this way! I believe Citizen Participation is an important part of the journalism process, and the legacy media world should embrace it. But it can be said that news organizations are not readily embracing this phenomenon because of the quality of the work. Well, we can change that. I’ve outlined 10 easy tips for video production that anyone can adopt. This will help anyone who’s interested in producing professional quality video projects for the purpose of participating in a news organization.
1. Steady, well-composed: This means, you want to stay away from shaky video, this is very easy to do, even if you’re using a hand-held camera like a flip cam, just try to stay as still as possible, and compose your shot well, meaning, look at what’s around the object or objects that you’re shooting and consider how best to highlight your subject/s.
2. Physically close: This tip helps with keeping the camera steady, and not shaky. If you’re closer to your subject, it’s easier to keep the camera steady.
3. Utilize three channels: Video and two channels of audio, two types of audio, primary sound, secondary sound: you always want to include two channels of audio to go along with your video, so you have a lot of stuff when you get to the editing process, so the primary sound refers to the main sound, the interviewee, and the secondary sound refers to what’s called “natural sound”, the sound that you hear naturally in the background, like birds chirping, or people talking at a baseball game, etc.
4. Shot sequencing: This shows that shots go together logically, and there is a good mix of shots varying from medium shot to tight shots, to extreme close ups, your video should tell its own story without narration or anything, it should tell a story by itself.
5. Seek subjective sound: The most compelling stuff is usually people’s thoughts, feelings, actions, and emotion
6. Single-camera lighting: For this, you want to focus on setting up the light in every instance where a person is speaking on camera, so that you bring out the features and the person pops off the screen. Unlit interviews are one of the biggest hallmarks of amateurism in video production.
7. Interview set-up: Framing the interview: this is an important part of the process, setting up the interview correctly will help you greatly later during the editing process, so important things to remember: shoot the interview subject from the top of the sternum, with a sliver of space above the head, shoulder width, and have him/her look slightly off camera, also remember to have decent background (darker than the skin color of the person you’re shooting.
8. SWAP: This refers to synchronized words and pictures, the action in the video should match up to the words of the narration, if you’re talking about birds flying, you need to see birds flying.
9. Non-video elements: Photos, graphics, and motion graphics, use these things to enhance your story, and when you don’t have compelling video, or when these items will tell the story more effectively.
10. Edit pace: Every kind of story has a “different” edit pace, depending on whether it is a news piece, a feature, or a documentary, they all have different feels:
- Natural pause
- Time it takes for the action to occur
- The beat of the music
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