Danny BullBeing a Video Journalist requires of a mix skills, from the technical to emotional IQ to a good team collaborator. I break down the top five skills to focus on to improve your work and make it in this industry.
1. Trust and Integrity
This is the most important factor in the job. Keeping trust with your viewers is paramount to the job, trust with your colleagues and trust with your subjects you are filming. For the audience it is paramount not to set up shots or dictate a persons actions, as members of “the media” we must keep an honest account of how events transpired. This is becoming increasing important in todays world where we are on the cusp of AI and Deepfakes working together to confuse the viewers. Where will they go for trust? I have many thoughts on this but I will save that for a future blog post.
As for our subjects that we have the honor of meeting and filming, many times we are meeting these people on the best or worst day of their life especially when filming in a breaking news environment. Look at the Turkey-Syria earthquake this week, it reminds me of filming in Nepal during the 2015 earthquake. Around 9,000 lives were claimed from that disaster and many thousands more were grieving. You must be sensitive with people you meet and how you film them will decide if they feel imposed upon from vultures or respected with compassion. Sometimes you just need to put the camera down and open your heart to the people in front of you. This is where Emotional Intelligence is of extreme importance.
2. Technical Skills
As a cameraperson, you must know your equipment inside out and have a detailed account of each item. The last thing you want is to show up in news event and not know how to operate your camera, I always tell people coming up that their camera must be an extension of themselves. It must be muscle memory. Nothing should be thought about, everything about the gear is there to help you tell a story, not to trip you up and get lost in buttons on menu settings. When I was in journalism school, I used to spend many hours just locking on my focusing skills. I would sit by my desk with different items scattered on the table from a wallet to a Gatorade bottle and pull focus as fast I could from object to object with the hardest lenses I could like my 50mm f/1.4.
In addition, you must keep account of all your gear, you can’t arrive at a protest and forget the proper mic or forget a charged battery or forget memory cards. For example even in my office, I have two shelves in my “charging station”. The bottom shelf is for charging batteries and for used or dead batteries. The top shelf is only for 100% fully charged batteries. Everyone in the office knows this rule and no one goes against it. Even still, on days that are “slow” (my inventory days) I am constantly charging batteries and checking gear to make sure everything is up to code.
3. Storytelling
At the end of the end this job above all else is about storytelling. The visuals just help guide the story. This comes from both the edit and the filming itself. Depending on the story, you want to shoot in the mood of the story. Is it a story about dirt biking? The shots will be very fast paced and hard pans. Is it a more ethereal story? The shots might be more slow and dream like. You are helping create the mood within camera before it even hits the edit. This concept deserves its one full blog post (its coming, so please subscribe).
4. Be an expert in your field
In this role you are director and journalist put in one. You must know the story you are reporting on. Study and learn about your beat, your community, your city, country, or region. Don’t leave it up to someone else to tell you how it is, whether that be another reporter or editor. You must respect their knowledge but you also have a point of a view especially when the visuals are driving the story and being an expert in your beat will give you the confidence to participate in the story dialogue.
5. Stay Hungry!
Finally, stay hungry! Never stop learning. That is the truly beautiful thing about this job, every day and everything story is an opportunity to learn and grow. This is reminiscent to the phrase Shoshin which is used in many Japanese martial arts. To keep the “beginners mind.” As a beginner, every day is exciting and your brain is a constantly absorbing new information. Never stop this hunger for improvement. Neither in your personal life or in professional life.
My equipment list when out in the field:
Sony A7siii camera – https://amzn.to/3lh13yW
XLR-K3M – https://amzn.to/3xdcXwh
Mini LED lights – made by iWata – https://amzn.to/3Xl0fpT