Lessons for Journalists from Independent Filmmakers

My newest post on journalists.org. 

I’ve recently started looking into the world of independent documentary filmmaking in an effort to understand how so many filmmakers figured out a way to make a living with long-form storytelling. One thing is for sure: Most successful filmmakers I spoke to also are savvy business/sales people.

It was very interesting to get a glimpse into this world, mostly through the FilmShop and the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, two collectives I am part of. As a journalist, the divide between the ad sales department and the editorial side was as holy as anything could be. Here, filmmakers were writing proposals for grants, setting rates for their film screenings and speaker appearances, and working out ways to get funding from advocacy groups and corporations.

Here are a few things I think we could learn from our filmmaking colleagues.

GET YOUR REPORTING FUNDED

I have been speaking to a number of documentary filmmakers and video journalists, picking their brains about doing long-form journalism at a time when funding is scarce. A recurring theme is that some journalists and independent filmmakers (those worlds seem somewhat separate) produce shorter grant-funded pieces for journalistic publications and repurpose the footage later for 60- to 90-minute films.

This works for two reasons:

First, this approach allows filmmakers to explore subjects and cast characters for their documentaries while making shorter pieces for the faster-moving news cycle. It takes a long time and a lot of resources to find the right characters for a good documentary — people who are comfortable in front of the camera and have an interesting story you can follow, especially abroad. Doing this in stages and through shorter stories can be a cost-effective way to go scouting for your next long-form project and to gather enough material to cut together a trailer that, in turn, can help you apply for some of the more traditional grants that documentary filmmakers have relied on for decades.

Photo by Hilke Schellmann/Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Wall Street Journal videographer and filmmaker Hilke Schellmann has been working with her journalist partner Habiba Nosheen on an impressive documentary about honor killings in Pakistan. They have made four trips through the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, ITVS and the Center for Asian American Media, posting shorter stories such as this one on the Pulitzer Center’s home page, which were then picked up by The Atlantic and a large newspaper in the United Kingdom. They will release a documentary about the subject in the future (distributing it on television), but in the process of working on these stories, they already have created considerable awareness.

This brings me to my second point: This staggered approach to releasing stories during the actual production process is an opportunity to build awareness about a subject and to garner a small audience that then can grow into a larger one — a nice “side effect.”

With that said, here are a few funds that might be of interest (and you can find a long list of fellowships here):

• The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
• The Investigative Fund, a project of The Nation Institute
• The Asia-specific East-West Center Fellowships

BUILD YOUR AUDIENCE

In the past, many filmmakers might have spent years shooting in silence and editing their films behind closed doors, only releasing them during festivals, in theaters or on television for a few weeks. But the lead-up to the release/premiere of a film has become much more important — particularly when it comes to raising funds.

The biggest game-changer for documentary fundraising has been sites such asIndieGogo and Kickstarter, both of which allow filmmakers and managers of other creative projects to tap into their audience as investors. Filmmakers set a fundraising goal, which they need to meet in a certain number of days. They then try to raise that money through supporters of the film, friends, family and others who might stumble upon their project.

My friend, filmmaker Theresa Loong, has successfully raised more than $11,000 — $3,000 above her goal — for her film “Everyday is a Holiday” and has lectured on the subject multiple times. The key to these campaigns is building an audience before you even start your campaign, she said. That means reaching out through newsletters, hosted events where audiences are first exposed to a rough cut of your film or the subject matter, and making sure your site becomes a portal for the issues you’re reporting on.

Her film is about her father’s journey from being a prisoner of war during World War II to becoming an immigrant to the United States. It touches on a number of issues, such as the life of veterans, immigration and Asian Americans. To raise awareness within her target audience, before the film will even be shown on television, Loong held events at the Museum of Chinese Americans and festivals sponsored by Asian-American organizations.

Her presentation on Kickstarter can be found here.

This approach could be compared to building a niche audience for a blog and then connecting to it in a physical — not just virtual — space. News organizations such asProPublica or WNYC (Radiolab) have organized live events to bring their content to selected audiences. I think it’s an effort that’s worth pursuing. In a recent conversation, Loong called her film and the site she will create a “movement” — looking at stories (blog posts, events, screenings) that way might be an interesting approach to defining long-term projects.

DON’T GIVE UP

The numbers of inspiring examples abound. I look around me and see people like my friend and fellow Columbia graduate Anup Kaphle of The Washington Post. He has received funding from a number of organizations to tell some amazing stories fromAfghanistan even though his full-time job is more of an office job. Throughout the years, he has carved out a beat for himself in Afghanistan — not to mention the respect from his colleagues, as shown in this cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winning animated cartoonist Ann Telnaes:

Cartoon by: Ann Telnaes. Courtesy: Anup Kaphle

Everyone has to find his or her own way to tell their stories. Sometimes that means reporting after office hours, when you’ve finished the assignments your editor gave you. Sometimes you make a deal with your editor to allow you to take a leave of absence for a reporting trip if you can find funding for it. Others might have to do work they don’t particularly enjoy in order to finance reporting trips they really care about. Whatever your arrangement will be, I firmly believe that there is a way for younger journalists like us to do the kinds of stories we’ve always wanted to do at a time when newspapers are hiring fewer people and closing foreign bureaus and regional newspapers, which used to serve as training grounds for aspiring reporters.

To quote Robert Krulwich’s commencement speech at Berkeley: These are dire times for journalism, “but there are some people who don’t wait.”

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”: