A creativity crisis

Today I am having a creativity crisis. Last night I watched and judged all the videos entered in this month’s NPPA Monthly Multimedia Contest. My crisis stems from the feeling of déjà vu. My entries looked and sounded like everyone else’s. So off I went for inspiration over to B-Roll.net TV. There are some really strong [...]

How to make your audio slideshows better

 
When Joe Weiss released his audio slideshow production tool called Soundslides in August of 2005, I quickly produced my first slideshow of a grand entrance at a Native American powwow. I was amazed at how easy it was to put together. I didn’t need to know Flash or have programming skills. I had a [...]

The Crabby Journalist

Update Two: Looks like the comments on AngryJournalist are being moderated now. Disregard update one. 
Update: Well, it seems the non-journalists have found this blog and trashed it with inappropriate comments. So never mind. I guess we will have to keep our stress bottled up.
 I found a link to this new blog called the AngryJournalist.com over at MultimediaShooter.com. It [...]

Sequencing: The foundation of video storytelling.

After judging several regional multimedia contests recently, I’m mildly discouraged by what I saw being entered in the video categories. I believe the people who shot these videos tried their best. Yet, entry after entry suffered one fatal flaw– They lacked the basic sequencing of video clips.
The sequence is the foundation of all video storytelling. [...]

Google Maps: Answers to your questions

After buiding our Storm Stories and Help Your Neighbors maps, I’ve heard from a few people wondering about how they might build a mapping app for their own sites. I’m by no means an expert on this — but that’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed this project so much. I learned a ton [...]

Team Multimedia

 
 One thing I’ve learned from my early forays into video journalism is that there are a lot of talented writers in my newsroom that can help make my videos more compelling than if I produced them alone.
Some of my first videos I shot included Spokesman-Review police reporter Thomas Clouse doing stand-ups from the scenes [...]

Finding the Frame

Here’s another easy way to add multimedia to your newspaper website. 

Shortly after the program Soundslides came out in August of 2005, I looked for an interesting way to use this Flash-based audio slideshow tool to tell different kinds of stories. One day in the photo department, as I passed the intern’s desk, I spotted a cool print [...]

Your photo archives can make great multimedia content

 
 
Here’s a quick way web producers can add multimedia content to their newspaper websites. I recently teamed up with Spokesman-Review writer Jim Kershner and together we have produced a half a dozen historical multimedia videos made up of photos from our in-house photo archive. Themes such as: The Evolution of Transportation in the Inland Northwest, Hobo [...]