duckrabbit’s tips on making photofilms
(Find out more about duckrabbit training here and also follow the duckrabbit blog which links to loads of great work)
These are some of duckrabbit’s top tips for collecting photos, audio and film to produce photofilms.
We can’t promise that if you follow these tips you’ll be producing award-winning work straight away but if you follow these simple rules you’ll have a much better chance.
And please remember that we all learn from our mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up when things go wrong, just move on.
What’s the story and who is it for?
Its important to have a strong idea from the outset, but at the same time be flexible to change. This may sound contradictory but if your idea is completely fixed than you may miss out on stories that are perhaps more interesting to your audience than your original idea.
Just as importantly you need to decide who the new media is for? If your work is unsuitable for your intended audience then it could end up being a waste of your time.
In storytelling as well as journalism we tend to always ask these key questions:
Who, What, Why, When, Where and How?
But as communicators in a new media landscape we also need to apply these questions to our audiences.
Who is this for? What is their reason for watching the piece? Why will they be interested? When are they going to see it? Where will they see the work? How do you want them to respond?
Finding out about the story (otherwise known as research)
Research is fundamental. Not just finding out about the story you want to tell, but also the people who are going to help you tell it.
When you go to interview someone the more that you know about that person the better.
The key to a good interview is not just asking the right questions but also having a good rapport with the interviewee. It really helps if you know a bit about them, this will make the interviewee feel relaxed and at ease. You should also have researched the area that you want to talk about as much as possible.
duckrabbit’s technical audio recording tips
1: Always use a wind shield.
Wind will destroy a recording and make the audio unusable. It is the sound recordists arch enemy.
2: Always wear headphones that cover your ears
If you don’t wear headphones you can’t hear what’s being recorded. It is vital that you wear them even if you think they make you look stupid and mess your hair up.
3: Always make sure you have spare batteries and a spare digital card
Do I need to say more?
4: Use SD cards that are class four and above
Slow cards sometimes fail to record on digital recorders
When Recording
1: Make sure your microphone gain level (how loud it records) is set to suit the background noise.
This means low for loud sounds, high for quiet noise. If you record at too high a level the audio will distort. At that point it is unusable and should be discarded.
2. Do not turn the headphone volume up too loud
If you do this then you can damage your hearing
3. Record Stereo WAV at 44.1 16 bit
This setting will ensure that you are recording at a high sound quality (the same quality as a CD)
4. Get the microphone close to guest’s mouth
The further form their mouth the less clear the sound will be and the less of their personality you will hear in the voice. Twenty to thirty centimeters is ideal.
6. Take a minute of ambient/background sound
When you come to edit and mix your projects, background sound layered under the speech will help to make sure you don’t have any gaps in the sound
7. Observe that the track time is moving when you start recording
This is the best way to be certain that you are actually recording.
8. When your guest stops speaking at the end keep recording without speaking for a few seconds
So that you can fade the sound out smoothly rather then ending the audio abruptly
9. When you’ve finished recording listen back to a couple of minutes of recording
To check that the audio is good quality. This also gives you a moment to think about any questions that you might have missed off.
duckrabbit’s top interviewing tips
Remember the art of a good interview is just as dependent on how you ask questions and your rapport with the interviewee as the question themselves.
Think about it this way. If you like someone and trust them you will naturally be open and honest with them in a way that you wouldn’t with someone you feel uncomfortable with.
1.Have a strong idea for the purpose of the interview
This is important. Without having a clear idea for the interview how will you know which questions to ask?
2.Think about where the best place is to interview someone.
If it’s a noisy environment than the sound quality will be poor. Also think about how an environment might be visually distracting. Its hard to record a good interview you’re the interviewees eye is constantly wondering.
3: Be warm and friendly
Why? This will help relax your guest. They are likely to reflect back the way you present yourself. If you are open with them they will be open back. Leave your ego at home, most of the time it can only get in the way.
4: If your interviewee is sat at a table, use a stand for the microphone
This means that you don’t have to hold the microphone. You won’t have any problems with handling noise and you don’t have to sit so close to the person that you are interviewing. Of course this doesn’t work if you want to include your voice in the work.
5:Get used to using lots of non-verbal communication.
Nodding your head will really help to encourage your guest, as will using expression in your eyes. This will make them feel that what they are saying is interesting. Conversely if your guest keeps going off on tangents make your non verbal communication much more passive.
Eye contact is important but it should feel comfortable for both you an your interviewee.
6: Adding movement into audio is an effective way of pushing a story along
It can be good to walk with an interviewee. Be careful of changing sound environment (quiet to noisy), or walking on noisy surfaces (gravel). The benefit of movement is that it can add a sense of narrative purpose.
7:Always get your guest to describe in detail what they are doing.
Radio is a very visual medium because the listener creates the pictures in their heads. We can’t see what your guest is doing. We may be able to hear it but we also need them to be descriptive. What does something look like, smell like, feel or taste like. These are key questions. ‘Tell me what you are doing’, ‘describe to me what is happening’ are key questions.
Photographic approaches for shooting mm:
1: Know your story.
Know what you are saying, and think hard about how you can say it before you start. Not just applicable to mm of course. Important for you, your workflow, your story, your editing later, your client, your viewer. Do not try to shoot and then build later. It may take a while for the story to become apparent, the approach to be obvious. When it does, work it, stick to it, have confidence in that. If working with someone, discuss, converse all the time. Keep asking yourself if your approach is relevant to the story.
2: Break down your audio and images.
DO NOT try to do both at the same time. This is probably a photographer’s most common error/frustration.
Accept that you will miss images, and you will miss moments of audio. Accept that. Take it on the chin. Nobody knows what you have missed. Use one medium to feed into the other. Eg if you hear something that piques your interest visually, follow it up. Be listening for images. Be looking for sounds. You will probably enjoy one more than another. Irrelevant. Invest as much effort into each. Your subject deserves that, respect it.
3: There is no need to literally follow what someone says with an image.
If you are getting the story across well with audio, you have room to play with the images a bit more, be more creative. If not, you need the images to tell the story more. Video has to go hand in hand with audio generally. Stills/ audio breaks that connection and , if done correctly, is much stronger. Let the viewer visually go away, then come back. Always be looking with fresh eyes, always listen with fresh ears…ALL THE TIME. Imagine the viewer. You are their eyes and ears. They are not where you are…bloody obvious, but easy to forget.
4: Remember the medium.
This is not a magazine or newspaper, or printed page. You do not need to get ALL information about the subject in the piece. You cannot. The work will most likely sit amongst other links, text, information. Less is more in these pieces. 3 minutes is a good length. A piece will have to be very good to sustain interest for longer. You are opening a door, starting a conversation.
5: Do not try to be clever photographically.
No-one but you and other photographers care, and they have probably seen it before. The punter/viewer, does not care at all that you’ve used a £2000 tilt shift at f2.8. Or that you can get such shallow depth of field on your 5d that only 1% of the subject is sharp. These pieces are not for you, nor about you, (unless they specifically are, such as a portfolio piece). The client is always right, and the viewer comes a close second. Pictures are only up for a few seconds at a time., maybe 5 seconds. If the imagery is too complex, clever, detailed or messy, it won’t work. Clarity, clarity, clarity of imagery. Clean backgrounds, clean subject, strong shapes/colours. All the while being on message. LESS IS MORE.
6: Kill your babies…or how to edit.
This is a vital point. Editing is a great skill in itself, and it is very hard for the creator to do it effectively. I give my images over to Ben to edit, because he sees them purely within how they add to the story, how they feed the narrative, NOT how hard they were to get, how clever I was to get them, how much I waited to get a particular shot etc. All are irrelevant. Story/narrative/flow is way more important.
Just because you spent a week arranging a shot, a day waiting in uncomfortable situations to get it, are pleased that you have at last mastered second curtain sync/shallow depth of field, panning, whatever, I, the viewer DO NOT CARE. Is that pic adding to the story, moving it along? If not, it’s gone. Get second opinions. Ask someone else to edit for you., someone you trust.
With magazines, I used to send up an edit set of about 30-40 images. Never, ever, in 20 years, were only my favourite pictures used. The pictures that best built the narrative were. Accept that, apply it to yourself. Less is more. I’d rather 10 killer pics on message than 30 weaker ones.
7: Think about the opening/holding image, and the closing shot.
Both are equally important. The holding image/title slide is the one that sits there, inviting the viewer to click. It has to be strong. It must invite the viewer. Think of it like the DPS opener on a glossy feature.The closing image dictates the taste the viewer leaves with, the feeling. Consider how you choose that, it is important. The holding image could be the strongest, or one that lends itself best to titling. You can use the title image again in the piece if needed without text.
8: Kit.
I don’t care what camera you use, and nor should you. I do care that you know how to use it. In recent training half of our students had very expensive top line slr’s. They didn’t know how to use them. The best pics came from a student with a £100 panasonic compact camera. She was confident with it, has taken on board the points discussed in relation to clarity, backgrounds, light, moment and composition, and shot some beautiful images. You MUST know your camera. You must be able to work fast, to take control. You can of course use a 10×8 camera if you like, but such quality is lost online, at 72dpi. If you do build a piece with film, large/medium format, whatever, you have to be ready to accept the extra amount of work involved. If you are trying to make this pay, your time is money, so maybe such an approach is best avoided if the piece is for online use only. If there is to be an exhibition etc, knock yourself out.
Also remember the format of a computer screen…horizontal. There is a greater clarity if the images don’t jump all around between wide, upright, 4/3, 16/9, panoramic etc. That does not mean you cannot play with formats, if your approach works, great.
If providing an image archive always shoot at the highest quality you can, that take it down in post. That applies universally, not just to an archive set.
The minimum I recommend is a digi slr…any will do. Compacts are too restrictive generally, plus you want to be taken seriously as a content gatherer.
9: Shoot for the audio:
Shoot images that will fill gaps, allow the audio to breathe. For example shoot details, colours. Use blank space in a few images to allow text overlay. You can never have too many….not in the piece, but as editing options.
10: Have a reason for every shot:
Sounds obvious, but it’s not…t’s too easy to get swept along with your muse. ALWAYS ask yourself, WHY am I taking this? What is it adding, what does it show that I don’t have? How does it relate to the story? Ask yourself what you are missing, relating that to the audio. If you have a great bit of audio from an individual, get a great portrait. That question should be nagging you all day long. Remember you are not shooting for you.
11: Vary approach:
Two suggested approaches…either shoot every pic with a rigid technical approach, ie all shot on same lens, camera, same angle, aperture, etc, or shoot to stimulate with variety…ie details, wides, portraits, colours.
12: Play:
Please experiment, practice, mess around. Use software, hardware, kit, moments, friends, lovers, pets, whatever. Just to see what works, and what doesn’t. Enjoy yourself. Remember…there are no rules…
SOFTWARE and HARDWARE
Its very hard to make too many recommendations in this area because it is totally dependent on budget and what you intend to use the multimedia for.
For the latest reviews of audio kit check out the excellent TRANSOM.
For audio editing on the PC, without spending a lot of money we recommend using Adobe Audition.
Audacity is a free programme works both for the MAC and PC. Some people get very good results from it.
If you want to create slidshows quickly than Soundslides is excellent.
If you have a MAC, then IMOVIE9 will do an excellent job. It’s simple and easy to use. If you want to do more technical work then you can use Final Cut, or Adobe Premier if you are working on a PC.
You also need to educate yourself on how to output movies for the web, but that’s a course in itself! At some point I will write something up about that here.
Remember whats really important is how you tell the story.
Open College of Arts Training
I’ve just finished a really inspiring two day training at the Open College of Arts. They want to use audio slideshows to illustrate good work to their students. What’s incredible is that two days after the training finished they’ve got their first audio slideshow online!
This is what Gareth Dent, Chief Executive of the College had to say about the training:
“It may seem fanciful to suggest that one can learn multimedia story telling in just a couple of days, but Duckrabbit gave us everything we needed from skills in interviewing and audio editing to image selection techniques in that short time. And did in such a way that left us with a passion to develop further. A transformative experience.”
The Herbal Notebook from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.
Textiles tutor Pat Hodson talks about The Herbal Notebook, its genesis and the methods used and why. Or rather, how the why sometimes escapes articulation.
Condition Critical (MSF)
Condition Critical is a groundbreaking digital campaign by Medecins Sans Frontieres to raise awareness about the conflict in Eastern Congo.
‘The last chapter of Condition: Critical featured stories directly from Congo – just their voices and photos to accompany them. It proved to be the strongest part of the whole campaign and the engagement that people felt having watched them was amazing (as you can see from the message map). Unsurprisingly, people within the organisation are suddenly keen to learn more from duckrabbit about how to produce this kind of multimedia, to better make our patients voices heard.’ Pete Masters, Web Editor, MSF
Duckrabbit has played a dual role in the campaign. Firstly we trained members of the MSF communications team to gather audio and photography and secondly we then used the materials to produce the four films featured in the final surge of the campaign.
The results have been remarkable:
The website had 350000 visits between November 2009 and March 2010.
60% per cent of people who start to watch a video on the website, watch it all the way through to the end.
The videos have also been featured and embedded on dozens of other websites including The Telegraph, Sky News and Boing Boing.
Over 10000 people have visited the website as a result of links to it from Facebook, blogs like The Travel Photographer and other influential websites.
Over 2500 people have left messages of support on the website.
The videos were screened for two days in a shopping centre in Belgium, reaching thousands more people
We’re particularly proud of this project because it demonstrates both that duckrabbit’s training is effective and that well produced audio slideshows can be more powerful than video. It’s especially important that the videos tell the stories of the people featured in their own voices.
‘I’ve appreciated your strong commitment to the project; your perseverance, hard work, and integrity; and above all your grasp of the reality of DRC and how to tell these stories in way that is compelling, dignified and at the same time raw and honest. Thank you.‘ Jake Wadland, Condition Critical Coordinator
Since we completed the project MSF have contracted us to train all of their UK communications team.
‘Before doing this training I felt I could have a decent stab at recording audio in the Congo. I now know that it would have taken some sort of miracle for me to get really useful audio. I now have the tools to come back with something a bit special. Thank you.’ Robin Meldrum, Publications Officer MSF
MSF UK now not only have the ability to produce multimedia for their own websites but also to offer the work for publication on some of the world’s biggest websites. Remarkably audio slideshows they have produced have been published on the BBC, The Guardian and The New York Times’ website.
‘Many people at MSF believe this is a breakthrough in getting the stories out there, for a bigger audience.’ Bruno Du Cock, MSF Picture Editor
We recommend that you take time to experience the videos and the messages left by viewers on the Condition Critical website here. Alternatively you can watch them embedded below:
digital storytelling ’10
duck is looking forward to talking at this event.
You can sign up here (it’s free)
Any duckrabbitblog readers please do grab me for a pint afterward.
duckrabbit teaching multimedia at LCC
duckrabbit are teaching a short module focusing multimedia storytelling on the Masters photojournalism degree course at LCC
Paul Lowe, who heads up the course, is a great supporter and advocate of digital storytelling. The fact that he wants to prepare students for life after print is rare amongst university educators (nudge, nudge Newport).
The aim of the module is for the students to produce their own multimedia piece of between 2 and 4 minutes long with up to 40 images. All images and audio to be collected by each student.
The Trinity Sessions – audio and photography training
duckrabbit training presents The Trinity Sessions, a series of fun, hands on workshops for forward thinking photographers who want to get to grips with digital storytelling (multimedia, audio slideshows).
We’ll teach you how to use a digital recorder, record powerful interviews, then edit the audio and produce audio slideshows.
Taking place in one of the UK’s most iconic arts venues, a Seventeenth century church turned arts centre, The Trinity Sessions seek to baptise an exciting new generation of digital storytellers. The training is for photographers who understand the economic and creative importance of presenting their work in fresh ways.
‘LEARN FROM THE BEST’ ADAM WESTBROOK
Meet the Trainers
Benjamin is a former BBC Radio documentaries producer profiled by the Observer as ‘one of radio’s biggest turn ons’. David is an award winning editorial photographer represented by Horton-Stephens. Since forming duckrabbit last year they have picked up a POYI multimedia award and most recently have been nominated for an Amnesty International Media Award.
Benjamin and David have designed and run training courses internationally in Ethiopia, Kenya, Pakistan and in the UK.
The first Trinity Session will run over a long weekend from the 10-12th of July. There will only be six places on this course. We strongly recommend that you book your place early due to the small number of places.
Workshop Schedule
Friday Evening
Friday evening is a chance for us all to get to know each other and prepare for the following two days. We’ll share a meal together, have a drink and introduce our work to one another on the big screen (projector).
(Please note participants can take part in the workshop without being present on Friday night.)
Saturday
The morning will be spent learning the basics of recording audio in the field. We’ll then split you into groups, assign you your story, facilitate a brief discussion on ways of presenting it, and then go out to shoot and record.
David and Benjamin will work with the groups in the field, feeding back through observation.
At the end of the day we’ll discuss the material we’ve gathered, how we might edit it and what elements of our stories, if any, are missing.
Sunday
The morning will be spent exploring how the features can be edited, selecting the photographs and gathering any additional material that is needed. The rest of the day will be spent producing the features.
Everyone will spend time editing the audio and photographs, as well as pulling the two together.
The workshop will end with a showing of the work, followed by a debrief and a warm feeling of satisfaction.
This is a participatory workshop in which the focus is on learning through doing.
Costs
£300 – Individuals
£250 – Students
£350 – Individuals funded by their employees
Equipment
Laptop, digital camera, and an audio recorder (although exceptions may be made).
Accommodation is not included although there is plenty of choice to suit different wallet sizes in Bristol.
To reserve a place or for more information email training@duckrabbit.info or give David a call on 07866361695.