Stonewall, Gay Rights, Cyndi Lauper & Me
40 Years Ago AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, the PBS television series and WGBH, the PBS station in Boston have joined together to offer a video competition prize entitled Stonewall Riots and Gay Rights in 2011. This is interesting in and of itself. What...
Read moreWhy TV Is Dead – But Doesn’t Know It Yet
Hello? Anyone home? Craig Engler, and executive at SyFy network has published a list of 10 Reasons Why Every TV Exec Has To Start Tweeting. This insightful piece comes, ironically, a day after The New York Times revealed that...
Read moreIs This The Future of Video Journalism?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjyFwbSNh4o&feature=list_related&playnext=1&list=MLGxdCwVVULXcPa4GXPxJhfxKPN4kc7vU7[/youtube] News meets hip hop through video… maybe Yesterday we looked at the top ten video series on the web for the month of October. The astonishing thing about them was that they are almost all derivatives of music...
Read moreYelling Fire in a Crowded Theater
silence! I was more than a little astonished to see Diane Feinstein writing in The Wall Street Journal yesterday, attacking Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and using the defense of ‘yelling fire in a crowded theater’ as some kind of...
Read moreThe Importance of Character-Driven Stories
Doesn’t really matter where he goes now… Today I want to talk to you about one of the most important aspects of making a compelling video and that is casting – or having a character. We are storytellers. Even...
Read moreCharles Kuralt Taught Me How To Narrate A Piece
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adsc6kW1Spk[/youtube] It’s old, but there are still lessons to be learnt There has been a lot of discussion here of late about narration. How to do it best. I learned how to narrate a piece from Charles Kuralt, who...
Read moreHans Rosling Marries Statistics to Video
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo&feature=BF&list=QL&index=1[/youtube] People often ask “OK – I can see video for a dying dog or a kid with AIDS, but how do you handle non visual things like economics stories or statistics? Here, Swedish economist Hans Roslings and BBC4...
Read moreForget The “Establishing Shot”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SAgsEN5JJs[/youtube] Now do you know where it is? When we run the face to face bootcamps we do a kind of parlor trick that proves an important point for filmmakers. We pretend we are going to shoot a story...
Read moreWitness To A Disaster
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmRtBEgOHo4&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] Even if you do speak French, these are hard to watch OK Witness is a wonderful organization Let me get that out of the way up front. I have met with them a few times over the years,...
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