At first glance, this post might look like an unseemly ploy for Web traffic. And that first fleeting feeling is correct. But also, I’ve gathered these videos over the past few months because I think they make two larger points about Web video in general. The first is a matter of audience and the second is a matter of style.
One night this summer, I was stationed near the back of one of the few bars in the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. At the other side of the bar, there was a 10-foot projection screen and the bright blacks and whites of an Usher video filtered over heads and through clouds of hookah smoke. The bar stereo blasted something – not sure what – but it wasn’t Usher. I was watching the music videos divorced from their soundtrack, and I was drawn to the editing, the intentional jump cuts, the colors. At this point, I was knee-deep in about four video projects and fairly obsessed with Final Cut.
The vast majority of news video – the stuff of 10 p.m. newscasts and cable news – is pitched to an audience that takes itself seriously and its news seriously. (There is something unsettling about approaching a story about a man forced to eat his own beard with faux, Edward-R.-Murrow earnestness when you know what you’re trying to do, but that’s another argument, another day.) I have no beef with this, love it in fact, and hope it continues.
But as someone in the business of making videos targeted specifically at Web viewers, that whole pile of news video is not my competition. The Usher video I was watching in that bar has 34 million hits on YouTube. That is my competition. That tells me that I need to push my video content toward the not-so-edgy edges of the Internet meme-scape. Only then can I differentiate myself from the pile of wholly admirable but not-so-trafficked newsy video to my right while peeling off a portion of those 34 million Usher views to the left. The videos below are the types that I, personally, aspire to steal from. Taste is a fickle thing.
That’s all well and good, but what does it mean in practice? To me, it’s a matter of style. News video gathered faithfully, ethically and truthfully should then be edited faithfully and truthfully while blatantly ripping off techniques and tactics from every inspiring movie and music video you can find.
That means have fun. Use jump cuts, graphics, color correction, music beds and anything else you can to grab the attention from your competition: the much-more-enticing music videos and kitten clips that flood the Internet on a daily basis. This comes with two caveats. Video journalists need to be (almost) as good as those directors… on deadline. Also, video journalists must be faithful to the tone their subjects projected during the reporting process. Fabricating reality is not an issue, because it’s right there on the tape. Augmenting reality beyond the bounds of journalistic forbearance is a definite danger.
Hoes Come Out at Night – Tiombe Lockhart
This video kind of slid by a month or so ago in my inbox, but I wanted to swing back around to it. The first ups go to the person in charge of casting, because the faces drive this clip beyond anything else. The tone-poem nature of the video leaves me with no doubt that the women featured are absolutely badtastic and powerful. Tone, the director of photography on this project, did a great job on the edit and it cues up exactly what I’m talking about with asymmetric and incongruous edits. I don’t think news video should look this hot, but I do think news footage gathered in good faith could be edited like this and entice viewers.
