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Last week I conducted the second Video Boot Camp at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton – as part of Kids College. Well…no longer Video Boot Camp. Now called Digtial Video Camp because the name last year apparently scared some prospective students away – they thought they’d be yelled at in real boot camp style.
In four days, from 9am through 1pm daily, seven twelve to sixteen year olds learned how to shoot, edit, storyboard, and edit video. The class ranged from a few students who knew a bit about video, one returning student from last year’s class, and several who knew nothing but really wanted to learn.
The first day we did a half hour of introductions and then went over their cameras (looking for similarities). Then we were out on campus shooting the basic shots assignment. With this age you have to keep them busy and hands-on, so we went right back to the classroom and they learned basic editing and titling using iMovie. I gave them a quick break for snacks and then it was on to the animation assignment. This one they did in teams of two (I teamed with one student). By the end of the day they had two assignments to show off to parents. They also had homework: bring photos for their autobiography the next day.
This day was a bit slower paced – summer vacation and the teacher actually expected them to write a paragraph!! Oh horrors! They managed to squeeze something out and each read part of their script in front of the camera. Then, as they worked, I moved around the room showing each of them how to extract audio, lay photos over narration, pot music up and down. It was pretty intense and they began to see possibilities as they worked. One young man (a repeat student from last year) did a very creative biography of his dog.
We ended day two with a discussion and storyboarding our script for the movie we would shoot and edit over the two remaining days. They decided on an action cops & robbers format. Of course they wanted to use pretend guns…and I made the call to the campus police knowing they would say no, so we decided on bananas and balloons as weapons.
Wednesday morning our first stop was the campus police station – and they were very cooperative and let one of our actors sit in a police car and pretend to send out a radio call – and they even drove the car off with the siren on (boy were the kids impressed with that).
It took nearly three hours to shoot twenty minutes of tape using two cameras – getting varying angles. I had to keep on them about the basic shots (wide, medium, close up, extreme close up) and pans, tilts and low and high angles…but by the end of the day they knew enough to position themselves properly without hints. We screened the video and captured to computer before they went home.
The final day was all editing…almost. Each student created a DVD menu using iDVD on my laptop (I will be burning those this week). Students edited alone or in pairs, referring to the storyboard on the white board in the front of the classroom. We ended up with four very unique movies – all using the same video and plot line. They discovered the effects and sound effects in iMovie and started experimenting. They were so proud of their work that as they edited, they kept calling each other over to look at edits. We did a walk-around screening at the end of the day and then showed off the final products to parents as they came in to pick students up.
All in all, a very intense week – and the class became so close that they were signing each others workbooks (like yearbooks) the last day. They really bonded. And they reminded me that teaching can be fun and you can learn a lot while you’re enjoying yourself. They also learned that if you plan and shoot properly, the editing is easy and lots of fun.
I think the lesson here for all of your grown-ups out there is that you CAN learn video. If a group of kids can pick it up in four days – think about what you can do over a month of weekends. It ain’t hard. Humans are, by nature, storytellers. And video is the perfect medium for a storyteller.
This past Thursday I ran a trial session for a video training workshop with a Matt Brown, a reporter for the Lodi News Sentinel, my hometown newspaper. I learned a lot from him…and it seems he picked a few things up from me too. In about four hours we went through gear, shooting, organizing a video story (not quite writing – he is already an excellent writer), and editing. The latter seems to be the challenge with reporters and is what I’m going to have to focus on in these workshops.
But I want to focus on “supers” today. “Super” is short for “superimpose.” When you watch TV news you nearly always seen a title across interviews in the lower third of the screen. This title is superimposed over the video and serves a purpose. The top line is the name of the person and the bottom line is their title or a descriptor. A very efficient way to get information out without having to introduce them in the narration. You can use supers over interviews or to identify locations. It is important to keep them concise – if the descriptor is too long, then the lettering becomes too small to read…especially on the web.
And, by the way, Matt did a “super” job on his first package, which I hope to post sometime soon.
Well, I did it – or rather my kiddos at school did/ I have a Velbon 607 tripod…nifty little lightweight piece of gear…and it is officially broken. Figure my abuse plus thirty kids in class taking turns with it. It had to die at some point and I needed a tripod for a gig yesterday so I went out Wednesday to my local camera store to look at what was available.
Two good things happened. Owner Neil Gluskin, who runs Gluskin’s Camera, happened to be available when I walked in and he showed me a new-fangled tripod. The first was a plus because of a conversation we had – the latter I bought.
What’s unique about the tripod? It has a detachable mount – you twist a dial and pull off the head and a block-like mount below. That mount is actually a clamp which you can use to mount the head onto the back of a chair, a window – anything less than about one-half an inch that juts out. I can see lots of uses for it. Here’s what it looks like
VANGUARD AK-4 OS
The second neat thing about talking with Neil Gluskin is the discussion we had about what format will dominate video in the future. I was gratified to hear he felt mini-dv would continue for some time, holding its own over DVD and hard drive camcorders. But he’s betting on large capacity flash cards…for both video and stills. This from a man who’s been in business for decades and who has to keep on top of trends.
Add-on: I’m a fan of removable media – and a hard drive camera is just scary to me. If the drive goes down, no camera. You can’t have multiple shooters sharing because there is no way to really tell who shot what (this from my teacher side). I like tape, but the tape carriage is the most fragile part of the camera and I’ve had several fail me or have tapes tick in them. A good solid flash card – now we’re talking. No moving parts. Fairly affordable and easy to plug in. Bring it on.
I’ve mentioned logging tapes a few times before. I’m logging a humdinger right now – a lengthy interview with a local black historian who is taling about historical segregation of minorities in graveyards. There is a wealth of detail in this interview and I want to transcribe nearly every word – if it isn’t used as sound bites in the story, we can mine it for information for the audio track.
think-news contributor (and partner) Larry Nance shot this fascinating interview a few months ago. We had to put it on the back shelf for a while. But the story told is too compelling to leave. Over the next few days Larry and I will walk you through the process of creating a visual story based on an interview and virtually no strong video. All of the subjects of this story are long dead. There are few, if any photos of them. The section of the graveyard we’ll be visiting is dismal – flat, uncared for. Join us as we search for photos and find ways to make this story come alive.
The question from Ken about pass-through ability on camcorders spurred me out of procrastinating and into dubbing my (too too many) old analog tapes into digital format. The plan is simple – hook up VHS VCR to ZR60 (in pass-thru mode), and loop into my iMac desktop and iMovie. I’ll convert to Quicktime clips for storage on DVDs so i can access them later and use for editing if need be.
There are actually three (or probably more) ways to archive or store media. My way – in a media clip on a DVD that can be accessed and used in editing programs. Media clips stored on hard drives. Dubbing directly onto digital tapes.
One thing to keep in mind – tapes start to lose their signal after ten or fifteen years…so you have to remember to re-dub, even digital tapes. The beauty of digtal tapes is that you don’t lose information the way you do with analog tapes. Plus I remember also reading somewhere that CDs and DVDs don’t last forever either. Maybe hard drives are the way to go after all.
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