Documentary video — short examples
I like to catch Frontline/World on PBS, and with a little help from TiVo, I was lucky enough to see three attention-gripping documentary shorts earlier this week. Now I just found a news item that says all three shorts were made by recent graduates of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. I thought it was cool that recent graduates (a) did such good work, and (b) got a chance to have that work broadcast on free TV.
But even cooler — you can watch these documentaries (free) on your computer. So many people are trying to learn to tell stories with video today — maybe these three shorts can be instructional.
The Women’s Kingdom (by Xiaoli Zhou; shot in China): Broadcast version (length only 9:36) will be online July 5; a 20-minute rough cut is online now.
A Death in the Desert (by Claudine LoMonaco and and Mary Spicuzza; shot in Mexico and the U.S.): Unfortunately, the three clips online (lengths 4:36, 7:54 and 6:12) at only available in Real Video format, which looks horrible, as usual. (Why doesn’t PBS use Flash video? Or at least QuickTime! Come on, people, Real Video is so often completely unwatchable, it’s not even funny!) This story taught me some things about the U.S.-Mexico border situation that I had not realized, even though I have been following the recent political discussions pretty closely.
Zimbabwe: Shadows and Lies (by Alexis Bloom and Cassandra Herrman): The video (length 26:36) will be online July 5, and there will be a QuickTime version (hooray!). The overall online package for this story is excellent; it includes two interactive pieces and transcripts of the extended interviews with several knowledgeable Zimbabweans.
Technorati tags: video | journalism | documentary | broadcasting
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