engaging stories... ...told economically

Social media has turned news upside down and now inside out. I went to the start of the #OccupyLSE protest at St Pauls last week. I wanted to capture the flavour of the start of the event for myself.

There is a phenomenal stream of information about this global phenomenon on a variety of platforms. When there is so much information you need two things: filters and searches. And you have to build them yourself.

A quick look at Twitter revealed that the Guardian newspaper and the BBC were quite actively reporting. There were many posts with several hashtags leading to articles and blogs everywhere.  But flipping between sites is labour intensive; I wanted to aggregate as much as I could find into one stream.

Yahoo pipes is a sort of visual Unix tool for the Internet. The basics are not hard to learn;  fairly quickly you can take disparate sources, fiter and aggregate them into a single feed. On the left hand site you can see a 'Fetch Feed' box which I used to pull in hashtags with URLs like https://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23OccupyLSX - it and its siblings return a Twitter stream in XML which gets piped off to a Union box which joins them with the other feeds. By selecting the various boxes on the pipes site you can see what each component is producing. The picture below shows a collection of feeds and filters being aggregated into an output. There is no reason why some of those feeds should not be video as you will see.


I picked up several site feeds from places like the BBC. Since they were general news feeds I filtered for words likely to return in-context content. You can read the feed in real time on the Pipes site. But I wanted something a little more convenient. For ease of consumption I built a Paper.li publication which updates twice daily. In effect I have produced my own newsroom which automatically researches the subject whilst I am doing other things. The appearance of an iPhone and iPad Paper.Li app facilitates editorial roles while mobile too.

This is the live paper:

This can be seen and subscribed to at Paper.li.

Adapted from a presentation given at the RTS meeting on 28/11/2011


In part 1 I talked a little about the strategic reasons for engaging with the idea of mobile reporting from an iPhone. Here we get tactical and I shall explain how to put together the disparate pieces of technology required to be able to get reports from interview to publication in just fifteen minutes.

The iPhone is currently the device of choice for multimedia reporting. It can record CD quality audio and, although the video is not to broadcast specs for HD it is arguably better than what we had in the late 1970s.  It also has the fastest video rendering. Android and other smartphones are baying at Apple's heels, so it won't be long before there will be significant choice. In any case, if you have the first/only footage of something significant then 'good enough is good enough'.

The iPhone has a tiny lens, so no matter how good it is, geometry dictates that the amount of light reaching the sensor will be limited. The iPhone is not heavy. So it wobbles easily and that doesn't make it easy to acquire professional looking footage. The solution is the Owle Bubo, a sold billet of aluminium milled to take an iPhone and to put a larger accessory lens in front of it.

The iPhone mic is good for audio recordings but not good enough for filming as it faces sideways. The next step up is to use the mic that comes with an Owle Bubo. It plugs into the iPhone and faces forward. It's fine for simple interviews in quiet locations. But you really should attach a broadcast mic and get in close. For that there is a choice of  interface cables and many microphones. Some have XLR plugs and others have 3.5mm jacks. Some have a monitoring adapter too so you can leave it on while editing. I use VeriCorder's cable as it has some circuitry inside for better signal to noise performance.

Some mic's need Phantom Power. I found the B29L pre-amp manufactured by AKG to be small and not particularly expensive. The device has two inputs but you'll need converter cables from XLR at the mic down to a mini XLR at the other end. It also has a belt clip, useful since there are lots of accessories to manage.

Lighting is often required. The Rotolight interview kit comes with a variety of filters so that you can balance for various different lighting conditions. There are two light heads, one of which can be mounted on the Owle Bubo and the other can be handheld or mounted using any of the variety of brackets and stands available.

The above will give you a sound, still and video recording system which is compact and fairly unobtrusive. With practice you can get really quite reasonable results, certainly good enough for radio, TV and online news reports, and even feature films if you like.

If you have the CNN news app it allows you to shoot stills and video and upload them directly to their iReport site either as a guest or to your own account. It also allows you to upload a report which you've already edited too. There are several options for editing on the iPhone. iMovie and ReelDirector are two common ones but I prefer VeriCorder's 1stVideo app. It comes in two versions, a consumer version which will do pretty much everything you'll need and a Network version which is aimed at newsrooms. The latter can be deployed for specific channels and events. Simply downloading the free app gives the iPhone much of the functionality of a single camera satellite truck with edit.

From within the app you can import or acquire audio, stills and video which you can then edit into a package for streaming directly into a newsroom server system. The editing is simple but adequate with cuts, mixes and captioning. The bottom line is that if you can't tell a story then you won't be able to hide the fact with production quality bling.

After my RTS talk, I was able to shoot and edit a short piece in around fifteen minutes. I uploaded it to a server and everyone could see the piece on the web from whatever device they had available to them.



It could equally easily have been sent to a TV newsroom for inclusion in a broadcast. The ramifications of this technology are profound and perhaps welcome in the light of the BBC's recent agreement with BECTU over rates for freelance. In particular, the use of this technology will allow the speedy production and delivery of reports at very low cost.

The final piece of technology is to do with story itself. For this we turn to Aristotle again. His beginning, middle and end was not a prescription for a three act structure, but to illustrate the notion that a story must be complete to be beautiful. Beauty is the quality which makes a story compelling to its audience.

So these short reports must be complete to leave the viewer satisfied. The traditional reporters' questions are borrowed from Kipling:

I keep six honest serving men,
They taught me all I knew,
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.

These are good questions, but they can be arranged as part of a quad of complete questions:

• What and where is it?
• How does it work?
• What does it mean?
• Why is it important?

What, where, when and who are subsets of what and where is it. How is from my second question and Why is part of How. This leaves two questions often unanswered.



The film above is a very simple example of an extremely short, but complete story. The production value is absolutely minimal but there is no doubt that the content makes a complete piece.

My examples are very early experiments in an area that I believe will become quite pervasive, driven by price and emerging technologies.

In the UK, equipment and advice can be sourced from Appleworld Distribution at Pinewood Studios. There is a lot of information on VeriCorder's site and the 1st Video app is available from iTunes.

If you are interested in learning more then please contact me by phone or email.

Adapted from a presentation given at the RTS meeting on 28/11/2011

About six months ago the World Association of Newspapers, WAN-IFRA, held a conference in London. Entitled 'Digital Media Europe', it was to highlight efforts of the printed press to address issues around declining circulations. They must find new ways to engage old audiences who are increasingly going online for a rich variety of media.

1. Phone apps are perceived as personal utilities in the main, so phones can often go where those who are obviously press sometimes can't.
2. Being filmed with an iPhone is a lot less intimidating than with a big camera. 
3. A newsroom can turn anyone with an iPhone into a reporter simply by asking them to download an app. CNN have an app and so do VeriCorder.
4. You can shoot edit and upload all on the same device. 
5. Phone content can be got to distribution faster than anything except live broadcast - and it can do that too.
6. It is incredibly cheap by comparison with broadcast kit.
7. Standard codecs are now common.
8. Increasingly, news is being consumed on mobile devices which are not able to use the highest quality anyway.

Journalists and publishers are increasingly taking social media seriously as their industry faces challenges to make an income from 'selling' the news. Many people now follow journalists, Twitter reporters and bloggers directly rather than subscribing to the output of more traditional channels.

The BBC held a summit on the subject late in May, and here is the playlist of proceedings. It lasts several hours.



Other material can be found by following #BBCSMS on Twitter. And the BBC College of Journalism has even more on the subject.

What now seems depressingly far in the past I trained at the BBC in the art or sullen craft of editing film. It was great, and after a career, I left to pursue outdoor activities. I became a race yacht navigator and delivery skipper, until my fortune was inevitably reduced to subsistence.

Decca and the newly available GPS were all the rage. In navigational terms they amount to credulity to three decimal places. It was all about believing the numbers. The higher the technology I was given to use, the more I worried about losing touch with the basics. So I kept the sextant going and read lots about aboriginal navigation and practised whatever I could.

I am sure that staying grounded in the fundamentals of navigation are what gave me 'position sense' and the good intuitions which kept us safe. It is the same, for me at least, with making films. Whilst it is true that new technologies and workflows are liberating, there are issues too. I find it increasingly rare to meet people who can 'build it in their heads' as well as the cameramen and editors with whom I worked back in the 70s and 80s. Some things are getting lost. And nobody is teaching the incomers.

All films of any consequence have, at their foundation, a well structured and engagingly told story. And stories start in your head. So long as we are beguiled by ever higher performance toys to the detriment of considering the underlying story we will produce the ephemeral and unsubstantial bling for which TV is earning its demise.

Of course technical quality is important. But the thing that makes me happy about the future is that while so many are dashing out and shooting ever prettier but meaningless pictures and exquisitely cutting them to whatever passes for music, I am with those who concentrate on the underlying story rather than a victory of style over substance.

Interestingly enough, technology has a timely solution. VeriCorder have produced an app for the iPhone which, along with a bit of improving hardware (Owle Bubo), make a raw but powerful storytelling system. There is very little production value, so if the story doesn't work then you don't get away with it. But you can shoot, edit and upload short but complete stories in a quarter of an hour. This is exciting, because in the end it is the emotionally and rationally compelling stories that audiences really crave. And here is a way of producing them with minimal resources.

My sackcloth and ashes world is not the complete answer, but for me it lowers the water level on the Emperor's sartorial realities.

A very long time ago we humans sat around our campfires. When it got dark there wasn't a lot to do beyond going to bed, and that was not the relaxing thing it usually is today. There was no writing so there was nothing to read, there was no radio so nothing to listen to and no TV so there was little to deaden the mind after a long day's subsistence living. And back then, a rock concert was a very different sort of a thing from today.

We complained about the boredom. We complained about the dark. We complained about the never ending work just to hang on to what Hobbes called: our mean, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives. We shared the joy and misery of our existence and then forgot about it. But in the flickering embers of deep pre-history something extraordinary began to happen.

Any communication is an attempt to impact the minds of others. "Duck!" is a good and well-intentioned example. "Stick 'em up!" is often more self serving on behalf of the utterer. "You're under arrest!" is the precursor to the bitter consequences of some badly thought out entrepreneurial whimsy.

Each utterance is an argument for a course of behaviour. My first example must be immediately compelling to be of any use. Otherwise, if the response is not what we desire then further weight can be given to the argument: "I'll blow your head off!" and maybe "We have you surrounded!"

All of this works well in the moment. But if you want to capture a sophisticated argument and persuade audiences long beyond the reach of your years, then you need more than these simple utterances. Humans make decisions about things emotionally and then rationalise them. So, the argument needs to be compelling in both emotional and logical ways. And further, since this is likely to be a fairly long argument, it will need to be interesting or it will fall on places where ears used to be.

The extraordinary thing I mentioned earlier, fanned from the flames of confusion, was story. Stories were, initially, easily remembered and probably rhyming pieces of knowledge. They had the distinction of preserving culture, philosophy, religion, science, maps and probably did some entertaining too. In this way we began to realise that there was increasing evidence that we don't learn from history.

Early stories were probably much like the rather beautiful creation stories that still survive in aboriginal cultures. They remained part of a verbal tradition until more reliably preserved by the invention of writing. Gutenberg and his press further improved the record and town criers gave way to journalists who are slowly giving way to game show panels.

I think that it's worth considering the way story works within different media. Then we won't make the mistake of thinking that someone made a film of a book.  We'll realise that actually what happened is that someone made a film of a story, about which somebody once wrote a book. It is the story which forms the foundation and not the medium of publication.