Animations! How Journalists Can Use Them

Animations are in! International organizations, advocacy groups and journalists have come to embrace motion graphics as a means to explain complicated issues. And I’ve come to love them, too.

For a project on privacy issues, my friend and investigative journalist Stokely Baksh and I created this animation:

Full disclosure: I’m no expert in motion graphics and have only worked on a small number of animations, but here are the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Relationship between Infographics and Animations

In my humble opinion, the best use of animation is done when moving graphics are used to explain concepts and stories. This could be images of people and objects moving to “act out” what is being said in a voice-over. Or it could mean animating an information graphic (a how-it-works graphics, maps or charts) to illustrate a point. A lot of animations out there move words that are spoken, which is a great way to keep a long and boring speech visually interesting, but I get much more excited about animations that use graphics and illustrations in interesting ways.

This whimsical animation, for instance, was one of the first that inspired me to start incorporating animated charts and data visualizations in my work:

Video by Japanese artist and designer Kenichi Tanaka.

The Little Things Matter

Another friend of mine who studied traditional animation (a la Disney and Looney Toons) brought my attention to the “12 Principles of Animation,” laid out in the book “The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation,” which, according to my friend, has become a bible for animators.

When I first started fiddling around with animations I was just estatic to have made objects move into the frame at variant speeds. But little things — like easing in a motion or making an object bounce — can make a difference in how dynamic your animation can be or in how realistic a motion seems. The stylistic devices presented by the authors of the book are not crucial to making your story clear and lucid; your reporting, story and script are. But they can help you polish your work, the way a broad vocabulary and varied sentence structure can keep a reader interested in an article.

There are also a number of other fancy effects that can be used very effectively in conjunction with information graphics. You can generate a large number of the same object to show scope. You can track the movement of a person on a map through a line or a dot to show where they are going. You can have bar charts grow to show how the value of something increased over time. Those are immensely useful effects.

But then there are the small effects which last only two to three seconds and can take you hours to figure out. It’s painstaking, but it’s like solving a mathematical problem: once you find the value of ‘x,’ you’re immensely satisfied.

For specific effects, I’ve been told by various of my animator friends (commercial and journalistic) that this site is great for tutorials.

In this animation about the toll of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I had to wrestle with all sorts of small things, such as creating a small dot representing the epicenter of the earthquake that emanated radio waves to show how the earthquake spread. It was the first time I had used After Effects and I spent nights alone in the office, trying to figure out little things like that.

Workflow

So now you’re excited about animations but don’t know where to start? In those scenarios, Google is your best buddy.

When I Googled “animations” and “journalism,” I quickly stumbled upon a tutorial by Zach Wise, a New York Times videographer and multimedia instructor. It’s been possibly the best and most straightforward guide I’ve found for journalists who aspire to be animators.

Here’s his animation reel:

The process involves a lot of pre-production: nailing down a solid and accurate script, storyboarding the piece, producing all the graphical elements (lots of Illustrator and Photoshop work), preparing the audio track and then finally animating the piece. Understanding this process is crucial in knowing how long it takes to create animations. It also helps you gauge whether it’s worth undertaking such a tedious task or whether you might want to stick with something simpler.

Consume

Last but not least, it’d be worth seeing what other news organizations have done in the field. Here’s a short list of my favorite uses of animation in journalism:

NPR’s beautiful “Visualizing How a Population Grows to 7 Billion“:

The Guardian’s Stop Online Privacy Act explainer:

The Washington Post’s “One in Seven Billion“:

The New York Times “Choosing a President“:

Video Editing: A Skill Worth Fine Tuning

Another blogpost I did for ONA. Please see it here: http://journalists.org/2012/01/30/video-editing-a-skill-worth-fine-tuning/

Throughout my time at the Wall Street Journal I edited a lot of videos that were shot by other reporters, often print reporters new to the joy of filmmaking.

This has taught me two things:

1. How to become a better shooter (knowing what and how to shoot)
2. How important editing is in storytelling

A lot of people concentrate on shooting when they take their first steps as video reporters. Rightly so. The footage you shoot is literally the stuff that videos are made of. But I do think that fewer people put the same amount of effort into improving their editing skills. And if there’s one thing I learned from editing a lot of footage from video beginners, it’s that editing can be crucial to making a story work.

Here are a few things I’ve learned from colleagues, friends and readings that I hope will help others improve their editing:

SEQUENCES AND ACTIONS — WHY B-ROLL SUCKS

Someone said to me once that I should forget about the concept of b-roll. And I really took it to heart.

In visual storytelling, we often rely on our radio track — meaning the voice over and interview sound bites — to tell our stories. A voice tells us all the facts of the story, as do soundbites from subjects. Often our first instinct is to throw related b-roll on top of what is being said. The idea is that the footage we see should correspond entirely to what we hear. It’s an approach that seems more natural to print journalists, who might find it easier to work with written words than with three hours of footage.

In its worst iteration it could end up being something like this:

But sometimes it’s worth thinking of an alternative way of using visual material. What my colleagues instilled in me was that a visual story arc was just as important. I would encourage budding filmmakers to start thinking of visual information in sequences that add up to actions — a visual narrative that runs parallel to the radio track narrative. These actions, in turn, tell the story of a place or person.

In this video I tried to use sequences (shot of hands, close-up of faces, medium shot of them in the kitchen, etc.) to visually show the process of making dim sum, serving it and guests eating it to tell the visual narrative of a restaurant visit.

(Of course, editing sequential footage also requires you to shoot in sequences. If you’re interested in what that entails, here’s a lecture that USC Annenberg’s Andrew Lih and I used when we instructed a workshop for print journalists at Hong Kong University.)

RHYTHM

Something else I’ve learned to appreciate is pacing and rhythm. Articles and infographics allow for panning, scanning and skimming, but an audio-visual story is linear and has to be consumed in one go. Therefore, the editor dictates the pace at which a viewer consumes a story. Rhythm and pacing are essential to delivering information in a digestible way.

Pauses in your radio track can help let your video “breathe.” Don’t cut so tightly to the script. Shots with natural sound can be a nice, non-aural introduction, interlude or outro to an interview bite. You can also use pauses to emphasize moments: If your subject or narration has just presented the viewer with a complex idea or an emotional statement, it might help to give the viewer a second or two to digest what he or she just heard. It’s the short beat that the comedian waits for after the punchline; the moment you gasp right after you’ve been gripped by an emotional experience.

Another way in which rhythm is used is to express a certain atmosphere. Quick cuts can express anxiety, stress or excitement, while keeping a long shot can be very soothing.

Here’s a video that employs different styles of editing quite beautifully — first to show the fast-paced life in Hong Kong and then to show how bee-keeping brings serenity to the subject of the video:

THE GUYS IN HOLLYWOOD

Most of these thoughts were jump-started when I first read Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of an Eye.” He’s an Academy-Award-winning editor who’s cut Hollywood blockbusters such as The Godfather and The English Patient. He also is the only author I’ve read so far who’s written about his philosophical approach to editing, although there are a few other books I’m hoping to check out soon (On Film Editing, Towards a Theory of Montage).

It might also help to familiarize yourself with the vocabulary editors use. They can give you a concrete definition of cuts you might already be doing, but also provide a better understanding of why they work.

This is not to say that we should adopt Hollywood’s stylistic devices without thinking about how and why we use them. Using cinematic styles can be controversial in the world of journalism. But it’s still helpful to know what visual conventions are out there and when it’s good to employ them.

PRACTICE!

Getting better is, of course, always the result of hard work and practice. Cutting dozens and dozens of videos has not only made me a faster editor, but it also has helped me find different editing styles and methods that I can apply to different stories.

I would also highly recommend getting practice outside journalism. It’s healthy to break outside the mold to experiment with a project that doesn’t necessarily have to inform audiences. You could challenge yourself to make a video that employs no interviews and no voices — just visual information.

With that said I’d like to leave you with a short video I did for a film collective I’m part of. It’s a visual interpretation of William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say”:

No Hiding: A Simple Video Guide to How You're Being Spied on Right Now

As published on Motherboard.tv. Read the article here.

Carnival of Journalism Post: Workflow and Strategizing Video for a Print Newsroom

This post was written for the Carnival of Journalism debate on the role of online video in journalism. I'm taking a very pragmatic approach, looking into the workflow within a print newsroom. Please feel free to give constructive criticism and tell me whether you've found better strategies in working with video.
When in a newsroom, editorial decisions are difficult, especially when you work for a daily newspaper and resources for video are tight. Having had to make those decisions while heading video operations for The Wall Street Journal in Asia, I’ve had to figure out ways to allocate resources. When does it make sense to really go all out on a story? What kind of video can add value in what kind of scenario? Here’s a thought.

Categories
To help one get an overview of how we could build out video operations at newspapers it might be good to look at the spectrum of videos newspapers do offer at this point in time. On some level, the Internet gave newcomers in video, such as newspapers, the opportunity to be experimental and break out of what had become a somewhat formulaic approach to video (See Charlie Brooker’s spoof news story as an example:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4). It liberated the format somewhat, giving videographers the chance to dabble in various genres and possibly modify them. Here are a few categories I’ve found online (click to enlarge):







Decision Making
It’s difficult to determine which kind of video to do when. Ideally, we’d all be spending weeks with a character at a time to produce a nice 15-minute first-person narrative, but that’s not always possible. And not every editor wants to pay for that.

The system below is one based on deadlines. Please note that some of the most important questions here -- how important is this story? How visual is this story? How much access do I have? -- need to be weighed with each story and are a bit harder to put into a ‘template’ like the one below (I will try to do a float chart one of these days detailing these decisions, somebody please kick my butt so I'll do it).

It’s an important story but when is it due?
1.) It’s due now!
The most value added at this point is quite possibly news analysis videos.
When the Japan earthquake happened, the ABC correspondent in Tokyo was on air for hours on end. Al-Jazeera was streaming footage and photos they could find with reporters talking about what they saw. We put out breaking news videos

2.) We have about a week to go before this publishes:
This answer might prompt more questions: how much access do we have? How many resources can we allocate to this story, i.e. how much money do we have available? Depending on the answers of those questions we could then opt for either a video package or a reporter-shot package.

3.) We have AGES til this publishes:
In this case it we could finally try to a first person package or a really extended package.

Proselytizing the Idea of Multi-platform Journalism
Perhaps crucial for this to work is to engage reporters in the print newsroom in multimedia storytelling, both as shooters themselves but also as people who start thinking about stories on various platforms. None of the above are really possible unless we know about stories in advance and can evaluate whether a story has ‘video potential’ or not. Small experiences a reporter has with doing his or her own video can lead to a change of mind that later translates into him or her calling a multimedia producer earlier to produce a story.

See Andrew Lih and my explorations of how to teach reporters video journalism here:
http://www.andrewlih.com/blog/2011/10/01/fiveshotpattern/


Conclusion
Striking a balance between daily demands and enterprising journalism is hard, but both are needed and video can be a strong medium for both. I suppose until every newsroom has unlimited budgets for every form of journalism -- from videos to infographics to news applications and articles -- I suppose this could be a good interim strategy to determine when it's feasible and sensible to produce a video at a print organization. Print journalism is still the fastest -- and cheapest -- medium in which to produce and consume information and until we have the luxury of having the resources to train, equip and financially enable reporters to be multiplatform journalists, I think a model like this might be helpful.

Lessons Learned: I Need a Slideshow, a Video, an Infographic...

As a multimedia reporter, it's important to familiarize yourself with the different kinds of media there are and what their strengths are. There are stories that are more visual, others that lend themselves more to graphics. Sometimes picking and choosing the right medium for the right story is a better approach than to have 'everything' for every story. Here's a short breakdown of what I gathered from lectures, readings and concluded from my own observations:

The categories:
Infographics:

One of their main strengths is that they can deliver an instantaneous understanding of large sets of data, i.e. convey the larger context of a story. A line graph can show rise in prices over time faster and more effectively than can a paragraph that describes numbers. A color-coded heat map that shows higher percentages of a certain ethnic population can be better at explaining racial diversity in New York than a paragraph detailing the breakdown of every neighborhood. How-It-Works float charts are probably better at showing the mechanics of a process than a lengthy essay.

Interactive graphics:

Interactive graphics give another dimension to infographics. Interactivity adds the ability to hide information until a user prompts it and to create a multi-layered experience of information consumption. It also allows for heightened user engagement, too: be it through user submissions, continuous linkage (allowing for users to continue exploring). So if a data and information-driven story is particularly complicated, interactivity allows the journalist to stagger the amount of information presented. It allows to show correlations and give detail only if a viewer wants it.

Video and slideshows:

Visual storytelling is best used for personable approach to a story and at its best can show a larger story through a characters’ story. If done well, characters are often emblematic of the larger issues at hand: it's a way of humanizing the consequences of a new law; of showing a trend story through a character that exemplifies that trend; or even just to show a component human nature through the ups and downs of the story of one or a few people. Also think about what would best be SEEN rather than DESCRIBED in words (these are often action-driven or event-driven pieces).

Interaction of those components:

These components can also interact with one another. Some have employed flash and javascript to lay out a story like an online magazine, except that the photos and graphics that punctuated the pages of a magazine now move. We are now able to use flash, javascript and other software/programming languages to curate our elements, adding another layer of information. An information graphic could be used as a navigation for a number of video components, for example.

I often use the 'template' of a print story to explain the examples above. In a written feature the formula goes like so:

1.) Anecdotal lede: starting with a person that exemplifies your story

2.) Nutgraf: What's the story about

3.) Context graf: This part often gives the numerical significance of the story, a la "she is one of thousands of people who have..."

And then it alters from going back and forth between characters, experts and analytical paragraphs.

One could look at a video as a drawn out anecdotal lede and data graphics as extensive context paragraphs. Just in a different medium.

Recent Work: Domestic Helpers Fight Legal Battle for Equality

A Filipina domestic worker is fighting for the right for permanent residency in Hong Kong's High Court. But the case strikes at the core of much more than just the right to abode.



Read our story here: http://on.wsj.com/oCxhVu

This Is Just To Say

This was a film shot on a cloudy Hong Kong morning and edited on the hot afternoon that followed right after. It illustrates what has become a favorite poem of mine with scenes from my neighborhood and my apartment.

Thanks to Yvonne Young and Allison Morrow for their time, their help and their company.

Music by Onra
Poetry by William Carlos Williams

This Is Just To Say


I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

And in Chinese (translated by the lovely Isabella Steger):

我剛吃了
李子
它們在
冰箱裏

也是你
很可能
留下
當早餐的

原諒我
它們很好吃
又甜
也很涼

Recent WSJ Work: Living in Hong Kong's Tiny Apartment Units

Hong Kong's home prices have skyrocketed in recent years, forcing residents like Yang Lianchun and her family to live in subdivided apartments. She talks to the WSJ about what it's like for a family of four to live in 150 square feet of space.

Personal Statements

Personal statements. I dread them. How should you write about yourself without gushing too much or sounding like a pompous ape?

Well, this one was required for a fellowship. "Tell us about yourself in a personal statement or multimedia presentation," they said. So I woke up last Sunday, set up my ancient studio lights, my DSLR and filmed myself. Sometimes it's good to force yourself to do something. It's a little less scary each time.

Recent WSJ Work: Rikuzentakata, Japan

Some 2,300 people are dead or missing in Rikuzentakata and many small businesses were obliterated by the March tsunami. Survivors must make a heart-wrenching choice: Should they rebuild their town - or abandon it?

Recent WSJ Work: RIkuzentakata, Japan

Newly-minted Mayor Futoshi Toba was at work in City Hall when the tsunami devastated his community a month ago. Now he must find a way to balance his duty to his family and his town.



Here is the very moving story written up by two of my esteemed colleagues: http://on.wsj.com/eqSK6b

Some photos also made it into the slideshow and newspaper.