Tips for shooting news with your phone

From the authors of Advancing the Story, some tips for shooting news video with your phone.

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Live blogging

Tomorrow Apple will reportedly announce its newest iPad device. Many sites will be live blogging. What is live blogging? Here is a story you can read to find out the ins and outs of live blogging.

 

Basic Final Cut Pro X techiques

Here are some basic tutorials on editing in FCPX. You can get more detailed instructions on Lynda.com.

Five Shot Sequence

As discussed in class, here is the handout for the five shot sequence. These shots compose sequences that work best on the web—plus they’re simple to shoot and simple to edit.

Please take note also of the pre-flight checklist and the sidebar info on the rule of thirds, the axis, and interviewing techniques.

Shooting video for the web

Building sequential video for the web is different than for television, although some of the basics are the same.

Personally, I love the freedom to break away from the time-tested formula you see on local television. Although TV news’ formula is efficient, it has become such a cliche as to be parodied by the Onion or the BBC’s Charlie Brooker.

Embedding sound clip

If I were to embed sound only, I could use sound cloud.

Soundslides projects to inspire

Before going out to get images and sound, we need to get inspired.

If you’d like to see a catalog of slide show examples, go to Interactive Narratives.

Tasha turned us onto these cool slides on the New York Times site. It’s a series of profiles of New Yorkers called One in Eight Million.

The one that really made you swallow your bubble gum was A Walk Down Sixth Street, which was produced by students at San Francisco State University.

Embedding sound slides

Now that we’ve shown you how to use Dropbox, we’re switching to loading them onto the Universe server. Use Filezilla (free download here) to upload to the server, using the server name, username and password you were given in class.

You should change the name of the publish_t0_web folder (use a story slug), then move into the 328 folder (which is inside the 487 folder). Then, find your story and control-click find the menu option “copy URLs.” You will now have the URL on your clipboard. Now, paste it into your new post in WordPress. It will look like this:

ftp://487@newsline.byu.edu/487/328/test

However, we’re not going to use that code–we’re only going to use the file name (in this case, it’s called “test”)

Then paste in this code and add brackets on each side [   ] and put your file name in after 328:

gigya src=”http://newsline.byu.edu/487/328/test/soundslider.swf?size=0&format=xml” width=”620″ height=”533″ allowFullScreen=”true”

Note: You should make a folder inside the 328 folder with your last name. Put your project folders inside that. If you do this, that means your code would look like this:

gigya src=”http://newsline.byu.edu/487/328/yourname/test/soundslider.swf?size=0&format=xml” width=”620″ height=”533″ allowFullScreen=”true”

Again, don’t forget the brackets.

Using twitter for reporting

Here’s an instructional video on how one person uses twitter for reporting:

Slide show instructions (Using Dropbox)

Our assignment today is to use SoundSlides to assemble a simple slide show, then move the SoundSlides files to Dropbox, then embed the slide show in your blog.

Here’s where you can access the user’s manual for SoundSlides.

As to embedding your sound slide in your website, here are the written instructions and tutorial video, courtesy virtualjournalism.net

Here are links for the SoundSlides embedding tool, mentioned in the instructions, as well as additional WordPress embedding instructions the from SoundSlides site.