Cathy Healy

Cathy Healy works with K-12 classrooms worldwide as they make a difference in the world.

Cathy Healy

Advocate for K-12 Global Collaborations

How To: Brace a tripod against yourself to move, shoot

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Who knew?!

Slater Jewell-Kemker, a 17-year-old video journalist, and the My Hero video team showed a group of us at the iEARN conference last week how to brace a (lightweight) tripod so you can move around while shooting a  interview. Slater has been videotaping interviews since she was 5. Examples of Slater’s work.

I don’t know why I thought you had to leave the tripod legs out and move it by picking it up and setting it back down. That’s awkward and that’s slow, so I never did it. I just didn’t use my tripod, but I am going to reconsider.

Slater demos videotaping interviews for iEARN
conference participants in Barrie, Canada,
July 23, 2010.
Photo by Cathy Healy

The story only you can tell: Bringing your photos to life

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My associate, Mari Lynch, and I have been working on a blurb that describes my upcoming presentation to staff at the Washakie Museum and Cultural Center on Sept. 7, 2010. We think we’ve captured the essence. I am particularly fond of Mari’s title.

The story only you can tell 
Bringing your photos to life

Stuffed in boxes. Stored in the basement. Stacked in scrapbooks.  Where are your family photos? What story do they capture that only you can tell?
On September 7, 2010, Cathy Healy will show you how to bring your photos to life, including using the techniques of Digital Storytelling. Telling a story “digitally” means creating a three to five-minute video. As in any historical documentary, you start with a story. Once you record it, you illustrate your words with photos, letters and home movies, then, finally, complete your mood with music.

Bringing storytelling to the computer arena means you can more easily share and distribute your stories. Digital stories can be watched on your television set with DVDs; they can be stored online on family genealogy sites, or added as links in books that soon will be accessible on e-book. Book lovers—which are most of us–can create hardback books that can be updated and reprinted. You can even make them available on Amazon, and on the Kindle.

Cathy is a third-generation regular in Worland, who as journalist, novelist, magazine editor, and online producer, crossed the mountains to see the world and always returns home. She recently completed graduate certification in Digital Storytelling from the University of Colorado-Denver, in a joint program with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California.  Cathy’s professional expertise (National Geographic Society, Amèricas Magazine), technical expertise (Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford University) and volunteer interests (international, K-12 collaborative projects) merge to link people and their stories.

UC Workshop Report: Five Easy Multimedia Tips

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One can never get enough of “easy” tricks to improve multimedia reporting.

Dr. Susan Currie Sivek, a mass communications professor at Cal State Fresno, has blogged about her recent Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at UC-Berkeley, which was sponsored by the Knight Digital Media Center in the Graduate School of Journalism. [The Knight Foundation has been funding initiatives at a number of universities to retrain print reporters and journalism professors in multimedia. Cal and USC are prominent recipients, with Cal specializing in bootcamp skills.]

Sivek detailed five easy tips. One was obvious — the damn tripod (“damn” is my word — easy to use for interviews, but hard out in the world, especially since a tripod makes people in public places nervous, and evokes security guard attention. By the way, ditto video cameras. Guards put my video camera into a locker at the entrance to the Taj Mahl, but still cameras, which of course shoot video, passed through with no take-over.]

Here are  briefs of what I learned from what Sivek learned–her full stories are worth reading.

1) Audio: Don’t have “constant loud noise, include ‘breathing room’ so the viewer could relax into the experience.”

2) In Front of the Camera: Limit gestures when you’re being taped. Use only one gesture to accentuate only a main point. While gesturing hands look normal when you’re talking, they are distracting onscreen.

3) Tools: iPhone has limits but you can get reasonable pix and video and the iTalk app records decent sound if you put the phone right up into someone’s face during the interview. Sivek quotes instructor Richard Koci Hernandez, Cal professor, and links to his page on the tools you need for good video with an iPhone (and this was before the 4.0 came out with a better camera.) Hernandez’s page includes links to buy such gadgets as grips to hold your phone/camera steady and little tripods with wrap-around arms. Wonder if they’d work with my new still camera (Panasonic’s Lumix, which has a Leica lens) which I bought to use for video.

4) “Storytelling: It’s worth getting slightly injured to get an element of the story that grabs the audience and makes them persist through the rest of the story.” Um. Maybe ;-))