Turning up the volume on visual storytelling
By Nate Hite
Videographer Nate Hite sits behind the camera during anchor auditions for West Virginia Today.
As I enter my third semester taking a broadcast news course at WVU, I find myself working on the one show that I haven’t yet worked on for the College of Creative Arts and Media: West Virginia Today. This show is quite a bit different from the other shows I’ve worked on in the past, like WVU News, as it focuses on the entire state of West Virginia and on public affairs reporting.
But as far as being a videographer for this show, my focus is less on the content and reporting for the show and more on the video that helps to tell the story behind all of the content. Video, and audio too, for that matter, can make or break the story.
As my colleague points out in his blog, lighting and the deep dive we’re taking into lighting techniques this semester is a crucial part of video storytelling, but I was unable to attend a class focused on these skills because I was away working with reporter Jerenie Sands reporting a story in Elizabeth, West Virginia.
But I do think I was able to incorporate the things I already knew about lighting into my work for this show. Professor Wright was very impressed with some of the techniques I used in a video of West Virginia House Delegate Sean Hornbuckle greeting guests at an event in Martinsburg I worked on with reporter Jeff Boggess. This particular shot utilizes natural lighting when it meets indoor lighting. I had always thought it was a decent video, but looking back on it, I realized that when I was recording that I had thought to myself, “that lighting and this video quality is a near-perfect video for b-roll,” at the time.
In addition to lighting, I have always been fascinated by the audio used to tell these types of stories, too. Audio pops, or nat pops, where you can hear the story unfold just as I had heard it, are always interesting to me. As a musician outside of college and someone who studied Music Technology as an undergrad at WVU, I know quite a bit about audio, mixing and editing sound – probably just as much as video.
Nothing can be quite so heartbreaking as setting up the perfect shot for an interview, only to learn that there was no sound to capture what they said; or to set up the camera as a big event is about to happen, like a thunderous applause at a quote during a speech, only to watch people clap in complete silence. It also relates to the time in the TV studio where we actually make West Virginia Today, where I normally can be found in the audio booth, playing the music, mixing the sound levels and listening to the mix to make sure we can hear the story being told, as well as hear what is happening in the b-roll video behind the storytelling.
My point is multiple items make a news story what it is or what it can or will be; it may not just be the content, the story itself, or the ideas proposed in the story, but the visual and audio parts that could be just a little too out of focus, or a little too loud that makes it hard to understand what’s happening. After all, to understand and enjoy West Virginia Today, you need to see AND hear it.
As for the show itself, I have a sense of pride when I watched our first episode of the semester, and I felt a sense of accomplishment when I saw my classmates as reporters, and when my video and my sound were actually used and published for all the world to see. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the semester and the next two episodes of West Virginia Today hold.