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Respect the mundane.
Respect the mundane.
Standing in the middle of the sidewalk in one of the busiest parts of the city, my team pointed the video camera at an intersection. It was just people—people milling about, ordering from hot dog stands, stepping over clouds of steam from sewer grates, driving around with Eagles flags flapping in the wind. This is Philadelphia.
B-roll is one of the first "journalistic words" I ever learned, and it came to be how I focused my broadcast journalism into environmental storytelling. With a video camera, you can plop the viewer right into the moment. To me, the magical part of B-roll, to me, is not just the sensational moments you capture, but the mundane.
Without integrity, a journalist will not be trusted to video those slower moments of life with that perpetual symbol of invasion: the camera. Yet it's that camera that allows videos to bridge divides that words cannot.
At WHYY, everyone on the team had a different role. One person would edit the video, another would be the camera person, someone else would be the script writer, and there were still people to arrange and conduct the actual interviews. But with The Panther Press, we don't have a whole team, only two reporters per average working on a video. Integrity becomes extra important when you're one of the only people capturing the moment.
When my team pulled up to the site, the first thing I saw was the banner displayed on the roof. “Housing is a human right.” We were immersed in the colorful encampment, and I could see the kids running around a statue, their hands dusty with sidewalk chalk.
I have always felt comfortable in words, and before this story, I thought journalism was all about that. Yet by holding the camera for our video, I discovered an environment of laughter, of hand-painted signs, of the exact flutter of a full petition in the wind—those fill a space greater than words can contain.
I was also the script writer, and I figured out that the environment easily became transitions between the interviews, like how the kids around the statue became a question to interviewees and then the script line,
"Residents are worried that returning to life post-eviction will be a drastic change not only for them, but for the children that have grown up in what's known as the Black Bottom, previously a predominately Black neighborhood."
A video is just as important as a good article. Sometimes, they can be even more important.
When you have a camera with you, people tend to stiffen up. Cameras can be intrusive, and that’s exactly how I felt when I sat in the back of a Philly mosque during their prayer time. For the first time, I wore a headscarf, struggling to maintain a perfect posture while listening. Uncomfortable, but necessary.
As my WHYY adviser reminded us, we have a responsibility when we bring that camera around to respect the space of others; not just in what we choose to depict in our videos, but in how we present ourselves in any given situation.
I was assigned to do the interviewing for this project. It meant I was the one to call the number of countless religious organizations in Philly, many of whom ignored us, and when an interview that was initally a call became an invitation to visit the mosque, I had to make the decision of whether we had enough time before deadline to make it happen.
I'm glad we ended up going in person, because it gave us the fullest and most accurate experience of the topic. One of the mosque leaders mentioned that the media has often misinterpreted Islam through of careless and disrespectful cameras. By showing up respectfully, we gained enough trust to be allowed to video certain parts of the prayer time and have truly open interviews.
This was the first video I made in my senior year, and getting used to Final Cut Pro again was definitely a learning curve. It was especially difficult because I was the only one doing it, from the interviews to the editing.
For the interviews and practice B-roll, I sat in on the Black History Month assembly's last rehearsal. They had put so much work into it, and I wanted to make sure that the video highlighted that as much as the product itself. This assembly is fully student-run, including rehearsal times, script, and props, and
The camera captured something I don't think my words could have — the way their eyes lit up when they talked about this event they had been preparing for since the very beginning of the year. Video allows me to get moments like that, even how some nervousness seeped into their voices about the assembly to come.
As the interviewer, I always get to see those things. But with a video camera, the audience gets to stand alongside me and experience the interview in almost its purest form, without me diluting the interaction into words on a page.
Initially, I thought that since I had used Final Cut Pro in the past with WHYY, it would be easier, but this notion was quickly dispelled when I had to search up how to use the basic blade tool. Putting my own ego aside was a key obstacle for this video!
There are a few parts that I wish I had done differently, but I'm still proud of it. It helped me get acclimated to video editing again, and it reminded how important it is to stay organized. After getting tangled in the video clips for the first couple of days, I started naming them. I also made a timeline in my notebook instead of just moving the clips around haphazardly.
The most difficult ten minutes of making this video were the first ten minutes of doing so: when my co-editor-in-chief Matthew and I talked through the synopsis of this deeply confusing musical. It would have been easy to make this video without a complete understanding of 'Alice by Heart,' but without that understanding, the questions we asked wouldn't have been as rich.
For example, we tried to emphasize the relationship between the leads Eli Graves and Jack Davies. A recurring theme of the show is growing up, which I almost missed in my first read of the synopsis, because I was more focused on the loss aspect.
But because we read the synopsis thoroughly, we were able to ask Eli and Jack questions about how their offstage friendship over multiple years mirrored that of their characters' growth over the show.
We took the lessons I learned from my BHM video and applied them here. We started with soundbites (instead of getting lost in B-roll like I did with the BHM video), and we built around those soundbites.
Because it was more organized, we had more time to make the sounds transition better, as well as do more deliberate separation of the audio and the video. All these small parts combined to create a video that has been the most fun to make, and maybe one of the best videos I've ever helped to make as well.
Some of the theater kids thanked us afterwards, because the musical isn't very well known, and the video helped to simplify it and encourage students to come watch it. I love musicals, and I think the best way to get people interested in them is through video. The sharp choreography and magnificent runs can't just be described in words — video is where they get a chance to shine.
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