Teaching video to the print folks
Andy Dickinson ran a workshop for print journalists who will be using video, and he posted some fascinating details about the training.
British print journalists can write shorthand at 100 words per minute? In 2006? Who knew!
What really grabbed my attention was the 150 words vs. 400 words comparison.
In TV, even if the information is there, we still have finite amount of time, less on the web, and it isn’t likely to be 400 words worth. That makes script writing practice a vital issue. Not for the tone or the style, but to ease the pain of restricting the use of one of a print journalist’s most treasured tools.
Dickinson points out that a one-minute script (VO) requires about 150 words.
The print journalists in his workshop all wrote about 300-400 words for their assignment.
Dickinson also posted a set of tutorials for using Windows Movie Maker, a free video editing program (think of it as the Windows version of iMovie). The tutorials are Flash movies that show step-by-step how to do everything in Windows Movie Maker. Awfully nice of him to post these!
Technorati tags: journalism | journalists | video | teaching
Thanks for the link.
The 100wpm shorthand is a requirment of the newspaper training body, The National Council for the training of Journalists.(NCTJ). They examine at speeds of up to 120wpm.
One of the reasons given is the restriction on recording devices in courts. Accurate notes are a must and shorthand is seen as the way to produce them.
December 11, 2006 at 5:03 pm