The Left (Democrats) vs. The Right (Republicans)
Picking the “best” of anything can prove to be challenging. But when it comes down to picking the best press stories of the year, The National Press Photographers Association (or NPPA) has a difficult decision to make. —Which story multimedia story will be best? Which feature story will take top spot? etc…
For this assignment, I decided to look under the “News Multimedia Story” tab on NPPA’s site and chose to write on the first place piece entitled: “RNC 2012: Inside and out.” While there were so many stories to choose from, I decided to write on this one mainly because even though it was a simple idea, it showed a lot of symbolism into what was going on at the Republican National Convention, but without the use of a narrator.
To me, it’s amazing that even though this piece is only 1:26 long, it shows two contrasting views of political parties by putting clips of what was going on both inside and outside of the convention together. One thing that immediately jumped out at me when I first watched this clip was that the liberals’ clip was positioned on the left and the conservatives’ on the right (since we normally associate liberals as being on the left and conservatives being on the right).
The clip utilizes a simple technique. By jumping back and fourth between the audio on the liberal and conservative sides, it shows the hostility between both parties and provides the viewer with insight on just how serious people are about politics in our country. Besides alternating audio, the piece is further enhanced because it uses a series of long, medium, and close up shots to help draw the viewer’s attention into the issue at hand.
While the piece does not use any fancy camera techniques such as pans, tilts, etc… I think it actually makes it stronger because it helps the viewer focus his or her attention to the content and the issues rather than how pretty it looks. It is politics after all (which is generally nasty) so I guess, who cares how it looks?!? As long it gets a message across, it has done its job: inform Americans about who and why they should elect into the Office of the President.
As I mentioned above, while the piece does not use camera techniques, it does use a lot of symbolism. One final thing I noticed about this piece is how both parties used the American flag or flag symbolism to help promote their arguments. It just goes to show, even though we are all different we still all are Americans set out for one mission: To be one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.