Experimentation
Friday, October 27th, 2006Albert says to me, “Don’t you think your desktop background is kind of cheesy? This nature picture and all…” And he’s right, of course, even though no less than thirteen dozen people have complimented the picture and asked, where is that? Did you take it? And I lie to this answer and say it’s New Mexico, so maybe they will go away or maybe they will ask about why I was there and I can tell them my stories.
So now it is the Challenger explosion on the background. And we are sitting at the front desk of the Third International Video Journalism Film Festival. This is the ticket desk. The festival posters are hanging on every wall and window, plastered on every ID tag, on the cash box, projected on the walls, and smiling from a button on my lapel.
Most of the time, the desk is occupied by a small army of students, volunteers from Weimar, media students at the Bauhaus University. Part of the time I am here, I am giving them on the fly lessons about shooting. We’ve had some workshops where I introduce them to the basic shooting system we have taught and perfected on a thousand disparate occasions.
Though we are inside, I suggest wearing a light jacket. Every few moments someone opens the door and lets in the cold air. Outside, a VJ is shooting an interview, and part of me wants to revolt at the way he is doing it, but I am wrong.
The Vj is shooting his subject in front of the cinema (kino). The subject is on a stool, and, as it is nighttime, there is a sungun on the ground pointed upward at the subject.
This makes me crazy inside. It’s a kind of rage I usually feel when I see tourists shooting statues or using a camera’s eyepiece instead of taking advantage of the brilliant invention known as a viewscreen. But watching him work, I know I am wrong. So very wrong.
Anyone who has taken our course knows that, though we love to be surprised, we always begin with a very strict regimen of shots, which we use in order to help people get on a solid plane as a shooter-editor. It trains you to think of shooting as the first step of editing, to collect usable images, because, though a sunset might be attractive to your camera-eye, it is not always a useful shot.
The longer you do videojournalism, the more you learn to move beyond the five shots. It becomes the kind of thing which you can always fall back on, but there are many situations where 5 shots won’t work (conversations, for example). You put yourself into the piece. Or you take yourself out. You find characters to tell the story, or the story tells itself. I could go and on abut this, but the fact is it’s up to everyone individually, and a quick glance over our work will show quite a bit of variety which strays beyond the basics.
This festival constantly features people talking about the meaning of videojournalism. Pretty much, the only thing everyone agrees on is that it’s digital, and relies on one person to shoot and edit. Beyond that, the content and style are left to the individual. The grand hope is that the technology will liberate people and new styles will develop. This, of course, will take time. Though you can already see it happening on several levels at the festival, a lot of the work is traditional in style and execution.
In an effort to embrace the freedoms of VJ, I believe we have, at Moose, developed our own dogma. Whenever we can, we refuse tripods, lights and staged interviews. We use narration and text with as much moderation as possible (I can’t begin to explain how easy some projects would have been with some narration, but it is a restraint we put on ourselves because, for me, it seems lazy and sloppy to rely on voice over to tell a story when it can usually be told best by the people involved).
So when I see someone on the street, some traditional camera crew, with a producer, or with their camera on a tripod, my immediate reaction is to scoff. Just the other week, we attended a retrospective of Richard Leacock’s work, and the old man, quick as he is, went right after those who use tripods…how they limit you, how they restrict your access to people. I’ll tell you it would have been almost impossible to shoot the White House film using tripods…though of course tripods have their time and place.
Tripods are just an example of the kinds of tactics we avoid in order to become more pure about our work. It’s a weird outgrowth of our upbringing as VJs, trained in the Rosenblum method, growing in the world of television, and maturing in the world of cinema.
But there he sits outside, this accomplished German VJ using a stool and a light. Either he isn’t a pure VJ, or he is just showing that, the thing works no matter what, and my rules are no better than anyone else’s. Of course there are a lot of people who just VJ to save money. But who cares about those people? Their work is clean and pretty and antiseptic. Maybe they have a better image than us, but we can get a damn good image too, and nobody will get closer to your soul than a VJ. That’s our essence.
So if you are reading this and are in my class, maybe you can throw me for a loop by bringing up this argument. But if you have ever worked as a VJ, you know what I mean. Experimentation is key, and any rule, even if the rule is a rejection of rules, is a waste and gets in the way. We are after truth and we chase it by building an alliance to our stories. That’s all.