I have been so excited for the new Legend of Zelda game that I have been watching everything Nintendo for the last month. I have seen this video about Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto probably four or five times. During my last watch, however, I noticed a tiny move that the editor of this piece made that was really clever. Since The Legend of Zelda is all about finding the hidden treasures that allow you to triumph in your quest, I thought it was appropriate.
The video is about how carefully Miyamoto and his team have designed every aspect of their games to teach the player how to play, to tell an engaging story, and to remove any barriers that might make their games less immersive. When they’re talking about this last point, they discuss the design of the very first Nintendo controller. You know the one:
The narrator is trying to make the case that Nintendo’s decision to release a Mario game for iOS is in keeping with the ergonomics and the ease-of-use that the original controllers provided. With a clever editing trick, the video links these two design choices starting at 5:27:
Did you catch that? When the narrator finishes his part, the editor brings in the audio from an old news spot from 1988 about the original Nintendo Entertainment System. The camera pulls in close to a child’s hands using the iconic NES controller while the reporter says, “These controllers direct the characters. The better your eye-hand coordination, the better you do.” In the middle of this audio, however, the editor brings in a close-up shot of someone playing Run Mario Run (2016) on an iPhone.
In one move, the editor brings the philosophy of the past into the present. By leaving the words in the mouth of a 1988 reporter, but showing that those words are just as true now as they were then, the two eras of Nintendo history are linked. It’s probably especially effective because it’s the last shot of the video so it leaves the viewer really satisfied. Well, I know it left me pretty satisfied at least.
For the last five or six months, I have tried to read every article and watch every video about filming and editing that I can find. There are a couple of series that I really like that focus on why great movies are, well, great. Even though we do journalistic/documentary work, there are so many parallels to the way that fiction films are made. One of my favorite series is Every Frame A Painting. Some favorites of mine are “A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film”, “Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement”, and “How Does an Editor Think and Feel?”:
In this video, Tony Zhou, the narrator and co-writer/co-editor (with Taylor Ramos), tries to demystify the editing process. He runs up against the problem that there is no exact science to video editing and enlists the help of experts (Michael Kahn, Walter Murch, and Thelma Schoonmaker) and cinematic examples to try to explain.
Zhou breaks his explanation up into three distinct elements. The first thing he focuses on is eyes. He says that focusing on the subject’s eyes shows the editor so much about the emotion of a scene, and this focus can guide the editor to make the right kinds of cuts. Scenes where there is a lot of emotion in the subject’s eyes, he says, “are powerful because they work so well with other shots.”
The next thing he says is that “emotions take time.” When trying to clearly convey an emotion in a scene, Zhou believes that the best editors precisely time their cuts to allow emotions to develop. In documentary work, this can apply just as well. In the New York Times piece “Alone” that we watched in class, the scene that begins at 4:47 is a great example. This is the powerful scene with audio from the fight Aloné has with her family while the camera only focuses on the door. Aloné stands at the door for almost 9 seconds before she is let in. Her nervousness needs that amount of time to develop. The editors could have cut most of that time out, but Aloné’s trepidation would not have come through as well.
The third point that Zhou makes is that the editor feels the natural rhythms of life or a particular scene. He shows a scene from Creed (2015) where the rhythm is obvious. He then shows a scene from Pierrot le Fou (1965) where the rhythm appears obvious but the cut is very strange, subverting the natural rhythm. Zhou says that things like walking or a conversation have a natural rhythm that is easy to cut to. He calls these cuts “invisible”. Visible cuts, those that move the story along “in a jarring way”, can be used to convey unease or disorientation.
All of these ways to understand pacing in editing add up to a simple question that Zhou asks: What reaction do you want from people? He goes on to say that there is no way to get good at eliciting these reactions from people besides practicing. It seems that that’s always the way it is.
I’m sure you are all familiar with Nerdwriter but, if you aren’t, he has some great videos about how filming and editing work. Another favorite channel of mine is Now You See It. This last one doesn’t have a lot of videos yet but “Movie Geometry”, “Which Way Did He Go?”, and “How Film Scores Play With Our Brains” are some favorites of mine.
Just why Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) is so haunting, I’ll never completely know. The film has a sense of urgency that fights with the looming feeling of surrender. I think the opening scene gives some clues as to how this tension is held throughout the entire movie. In it, the main character Johnny rides a frenetic horse while he narrates. He talks about how, when breaking horses, it is important to leave some of the wildness in them. This relationship between tameness and wildness floats throughout the film.
The way that the opening scene is shot, however, is tied closely to the narration and is mirrored in other scenes later on. In the opening frames, Johnny explains that, while breaking horses, it’s important not to run them too hard. He says that that will break their spirit. While he says this, he and the horse are framed by the trees and pickup truck with the sun setting behind them. The trees seem to hold them in. For a moment, at 0:17, the horse tries to walk away from the trees toward the hill. Johnny reins him back and they turn toward the trees again.
Eventually, after a minute or so, Johnny explains that “Anything that runs wild got something bad in them. You wanna leave some of that in there. Cause they need it to survive out here.” As he says this, he lets the horse start to trot toward the hill. “Here”, in this case, is the reservation that Johnny and his family live on. It serves as a meeting place for wildness and complacency.In the next scene, Johnny’s sister Jashuan walks up a hill. She is split in half by the grass and the open sky. In three minutes, Songs My Brothers Taught Me establishes the feeling of freedom and imprisonment that its characters feel on the reservation.
Around 22 minutes into the film, Johnny and Jashuan go to an open field that is surrounded by mesas. Some of the biggest conversations they have about life and the reservation happen here. Jashuan rides on Johnny’s back as they run across the field.
The freedom that they feel in the open field is followed immediately by a very wide shot where they shout at the mesa to hear their own voices echo.
It is almost impossible to see them they are so small. This framing shows how unable they are to leave and how that sense of imprisonment (at least for Johnny) is massive.
Spoiler alert:
Songs My Brothers Taught Me is a film about an Oglala Lakotan teenager that plans to leave the reservation and follow his girlfriend to Los Angeles. He doesn’t see anything especially sacred about the reservation while his younger sister does. In the end, he doesn’t leave. Bound by tradition, love for his family, and fear of not being able to survive in L.A., Johnny stays in North Dakota. The final scene shows how he has come to terms with the battle between freedom and imprisonment.
He goes to the mesa–this time in the dirt. He grabs a handful,
tosses it into the air,
and it floats above the hills into the sky.
This scene plays very similarly to the opening scene. The film establishes the two realities for life on the reservation and shows that there is not always an easy solution. In some ways, Johnny recognizes that he is trapped between the mesas. But, like the horse, there will always be something wild in him that allows him to survive it.
One of my favorite pieces of advice in the book Telling True Stories was this: “Curiosity is a muscle. The more you use it, the more you can do.”
The piece “Last Train” seems like the direct result of someone’s curiosity: What stories will we find if we interview people on the last train of the night?
It’s hard to find spectacular shots in a mostly vacant train station at the end of the night. But this piece does a nice job of transporting the viewer to that terrible fluorescent lighting of the subway so we can meet a variety of characters and hear their stories.
The shooter captured some nice visual moments by simply being at the train station late at night and using the geometry of the infrastructure.
This is a nice one at 0:08:
The empty spaces help tell the story of what the city feels like at the end of a long day.
I really like the shot at 0:24 where the only motion within the frame is the empty escalator.
Later, at 0:50, we see empty seats inside the train car, and the only motion in the frame is the world passing by outside the windows. At 0:54 the doors open, but no one walks through them.
The shooter did an impressive job of capturing the conversation that starts at 1:05. Sound leads picture as we hear the conversation before we see the people talking. But then we see tight shots of a man and woman – back and forth – as they have an animated (possibly drunk) discussion on the moving train. Then, at 1:17 there is a seamless match-action cut to a wide shot of the same two people – mid-discussion. The scene makes you feel like you’re there, and the sound is surprisingly clear for being recorded on a moving train.
The shooter also managed to find beauty in this world. I love the soft focus shot at 1:24 where the reflections of city lights flicker on the outside of the train window as the camera steadily tracks someone sitting inside. I wonder if this could have been shot using a GoPro attached to the outside of the train.
The framing in the interview on the train at 1:45 is unusual. The subject is looking out of the frame and doesn’t have much nose room. But it feels excusable because you’re on the train. Oblique angles feel more normal in a train car, where you often don’t want to be facing people.
The story at 2:14 is the kind of gem you can’t expect to find on the last train, but you hope you will. A couple who remember developing a relationship on the train, on “a subway date.”
The framing of the man talking at 2:35 is awesome. It feels like the way you would interact with someone on a train. He’s standing, grabbing onto a pole and handle for support and swaying as the train moves.
The cutaway at 2:41 to overlapping images from inside and outside the moving train feels like the perfect segue to the next shot from outside the train. It feels as if we are walking through the walls of the train onto the platform.
In the long shot at the end, the fluorescent lights and their reflection create enough motion within the frame to hold the viewer’s attention from 3:04 to 3:20 as we watch the last train pull away.
I’m not into hockey, but I love the way this piece delivers the sound and the feel of so many hockey-related things with quick cuts and great audio. This type of edit seems like it could be a useful tool in stories where you’re trying to give people a sense of place and movement without a full scene. The fast pace and curious noises pull the viewer into the piece in a sequence that would make a great intro or transition.
In the first second – from 0:00-0:01 – the filmmaker crams in three tight shots: a flood light flipping on, filling a water bottle, and sharpening a blade of a hockey skate (love that shot). Each of the shots feature movement and sound, giving a rapid-fire feel to the piece right off the bat. The opening cuts move so fast that the shot of the spinning roll of tape at 0:06 feels long because it lasts one full second.
I like how the shots vary between hands and objects and faces. It’s a lot to follow, but I think that is what makes it visually interesting. If too many of the shots were just objects, it might not hold the viewer’s attention for a full minute.
At 0:08 there’s an interesting sequence that goes from a medium shot to a tight shot and then back and forth again:
It’s four cuts in less than four seconds, but because it goes back and forth on the same guy, it draws extra attention. It seems like a fun way to highlight a fast-paced action without cutting together a full match-action sequence. I think these jump cuts work in the context of the piece.
There’s another sequence that starts at 0:15 that makes quick work of patching a hole in a backyard ice rink in your backyard. We see a tight shot of a guy’s finger in the ice, then a wide shot of a guy collecting snow in a pan, a tight shot of stirring the snow, a tight shot of scraping it over the ice, and then an overhead shot of the guy on the ice.
That sequence is played out by 0:19, and then we get a breather with a “long” cut lasting five seconds with a bit of music before diving back back into more rapid-fire cuts that race through the process of making an ice rink.
A few shots are recycled – the foosball table, siren and washing machine stand out, which could represent hockey games and the subsequent washing of the uniform. If you need to cram a whole hockey season into a minute or compress time in any story, this is one way to do it. As the filmmaker describes it in the Vimeo post, it’s “a whole bunch of good ol’ Canadian hockey in under one minute.”
A couple months ago, documentary filmmaker Ian McCluskey moved into the vacant desk across from me at OPB. He is best known for his two full-length documentaries, Eloquent Nude and Voyagers, but over the years he’s done a wide array of video work for OPB and his non-profit, NW Documentary.
The very first film he ever made, Echo of Water Against Rocks, was the product of a documentary class he took while earning a masters in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. He got an incomplete in the class, but the story eventually aired on OPB.
The story of how Ian went from learning to shoot at U of O (where he forgot to bring a tripod to his first filmed interview on the Warm Springs Reservation) to making a living as a filmmaker is worth hearing (Kickstarters, freelance work, grant applications, soliciting all manner of in-kind donations and living off “very meager savings” were all part of the process).
But I want to focus on one short, experimental piece he did called Summer Snapshot. It’s a 10-minute short he shot using a Super 8 camera and some of the last Kodachrome film on the shelves before Kodak discontinued it. The full piece is password protected, but the trailer above allows you to see the rich, nostalgic quality of the video he produced.
He used authentic interviews and the Super 8 footage of a recreated scene to approximate the memory he and others have of swimming in the Sandy River and, more generally, “the love of friends and a summer day.” Here’s how he explained the value of using vintage film to tap into a universal feeling of nostalgia:
“You can no longer go anywhere and get Kodachrome, and all through the late 40s, 50s and 60s – an entire generation of home movies – people’s memories were captured in this format, and they all had this sunny, golden look, which created a sense of nostalgia. We think of those years as a kind of golden era, and they kind of were that way because they looked that way.”
The film was shot in 18 frames per second, creating “a stuttery look that’s kind of half not real,” he said. Using the older, cheaper Super 8 camera, he said, it’s hard to hold focus and use depth of field.
“Everything is a little blurry, a little in and out of focus,” he said. “But if I were to see a 4K video of a kid on a tricycle and a Kodachrome of a kid on a tricycle, something feels more nostalgic, precious or memory-like, almost held in amber with Kodachrome. When we dream or remember we don’t remember in sharp focus. I tried to take everyone’s memory of what they think a trip to the Sandy River might look like. It was like my memory but there was never a moment that was that nostalgic or that perfect. That was kind of like the memory I wanted to have.”
The entire film was shot without a tripod. In the trailer, the opening shot of the car coming down the road and the later shot of the car at 0:33 were filmed using a handheld camera while sitting in the back of a pickup truck.
The lens flare at 0:24 and 0:36 0:38 was purposeful:
“I was really obsessively thinking about memory and how memory gets recorded,” he said. “Our human eye doesn’t naturally see lens flare, yet somehow that dreamy quality is so pleasing to the human eye because it looks sun kissed. It’s almost impossible to get lens flare with the lenses today. But here I think it created that curtain, that lace curtain, so you’re not looking right at something real but through the lace curtain of Kodachrome.”
He created the split screen shots at 0:24 and 0:33 by using an old projector and filming the projected image with a DSLR camera. Then he put two of those shots side by side.
The film made no money, but it was accepted into 50 different festivals around the world including Tribeca Film Festival.
“Write” is a short (01:14), life-in-a-day style film that celebrates life and the idea of capturing it with a pen and a notebook. It was produced by North of New York for Field Notes Brand, a collection of vintage-styled pocket notebooks. The video received numerous awards: Hatch Awards 4 GOLD Medals, IAC Outstanding Online Video, Addys Silver Medal and was the finalist at New York Festivals Advertising Competition and Golden Award of Montreux.
According to the Adweek, the video initially was a purely creative project about remembrance and family. Its director Matthew James Thompson, shot it on a 5D using only natural light over Fourth of July, 2014, in Maine. “I wanted to keep it extremely natural, like a video diary, so I kept everything very small and non-invasive,” he said. Then, he pitched the project to Field Notes as a piece of branded content. They obviously loved the idea, especially along with the text that the copywriter Adam Cote wrote for this video:
“Let us never forget the sprawling genius of a midnight dream, and how silly it seems in the light of day. Let us never forget the mundane and the beautiful. Let us never forget why we write. To remember what happened… what could have happened… what didn’t happen. We write to find out how it ends. So let us keep writing. And let us never forget how it feels to hold life in your hand.”
The copy and deliverance create a strong narrative storyline for the piece to develop along. The copy is very short, yet strong and inspiring. For example, such words as “the sprawling genius of a midnight dream, and how silly it seems in the light of day” or “remember what happened… what could have happened… what didn’t happen” speak to all people. The writing style is cohesive and convincing – there is a call to action (instruction to the audience designed to provoke an immediate response – “let us keep writing”). The voice-over is done by an older man, the actor Jarlath Conroy. He reads the copy in a contemplative and captivating manner with a husky and gravelly voice.
The editing also deserves praise. It is smart and it evokes emotions. All the shots until 00:22 don’t have people in them, they are cut slowly to match the music. At 00:32 music goes faster and the editor uses quick cuts. The quick cuts of children and grownups—running, laughing, playing, just being themselves—are mixed with shots of stormy seas, late-night drives and fireworks to create an evocative editing. The music, the use of natural sounds, indoor and outdoor shots (rocking chair, glimmering lamp; dark cloudy sky, twilight sea, children, a toddler with mom, trees, spiders and night driving) help to create a thoughtful mood.
This short ad is a great example of using nonfiction storytelling with branding purpose. The use of strong narrative copy, sometimes shaky but intimate footage and eloquent editing techniques inspire viewers to take their pens and capture special little moments before they pass by.
The video “Are U There?” directed by Anderson Wright and Todd Martin, filmed by Todd Martin and Daniel Stewart, and edited by Alexander Evan Morales, shows how stunning editing can be.
“Are U There?” features three dancing couples shot in three different locations. The choreography is terrific, as well as cinematography. This music video is original and unique due to the way it was staged and filmed. Just take a look at these shots and angles:
Equally impressive to the unique to the unique cinematography was the incredible and complicated editing by Alexander Evan Morales and the techniques he used.
The video comprises parallel editing of three stories, straight (mostly in the first 30 seconds) and jump cuts (01:16, 01:18, 01:26-28). At 01:10 there is a moment of silence after which the song progresses and the cuts become faster, there is a cut almost on every beat.
I enjoyed how the editor played with speed: speeded up spinning effect at 00:15, fast motion at 00:23, 00:28, 00:36, 00:58, 01:19 and reverse motion at 00:29, 00:32, 02:01-02:04. The reverse speed effect reminded me of Coldplay’s music video for “The Scientist.”
Those are obviously heavy editing techniques that are not appropriate to use in every video. Nevertheless, they helped to create a beautiful dramatic effect in this video.
If you also liked this video, you might be interested in watching this one by the same director, Anderson Wright, edited by Matt Schaff:
One of my dream countries to visit is Norway. So when I saw this video on Vimeo staff pick I fell in love with this country once again. Mostly because I’m used to the bright summer image of the Lofoten islands and in this video, the author Nick Kontostavlakis (a traveling nature photographer and videographer based in Greece) went there and filmed in cold snowy February.
“The islands are full of legends, maybe because of their natural beauty and their mysterious landscapes, or maybe because there the Sun either never rises or never sets,” says the caption of the video.
The visually enjoyable drone footage shows the beauty of nature and its mystery:
Filming with a drone is something I have not tried yet, and that is another reason I chose this video to analyze. It is very cinematic, the music is appropriate and deep rich colors play a big role in it setting up the mood. The video, seamlessly edited, combines static shots (0:30, 0:38, 01:07, 01:28, 01:32, 02:12, 02:14), a timelapse (0:35) and beautiful aerial footage.
I like the way the cinematographer uses gradual drone movements when zooming out (0:19, 01:20, 01:21. 01:44) and zooming in (0:23, 0:26, 01:24, 01:53, 01:57). Slow camera movements are somehow more cinematic and make shots appear more controlled and crafted.
Aerial pan shots in this video are also incredible (01:00, 01:02, 01:12, 01:40, 01:47). They are quite a bit more complicated than a simple pan from a tripod, thus the visual effect the cinematographer achieved is much better.
Overall, this short film looks very well pre-planned and considering the weather conditions, its author should have explored filming locations before shooting. This video also proves how effective can be drones in capturing landscapes.
It happened like this: Last year, my instructor, Donna Davis, mentioned that Starbucks had recently hired former Washington Post editor, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, to head up their visual brand storytelling efforts. I was intrigued, so I went home and did some googling. That night I watched every single Upstanders video, and read the accompanying articles, and became familiar with the name Josh Trujillo, Senior Manager for Photo and Video at Starbucks. From then on I knew that was the type of work I wanted to pursue with my two degrees in Strategic Communication and Multimedia Journalism.
Fast forward a year. I’m in a multimedia foundations course, and my instructor, Wes Pope, mentions that he knows Josh Trujillo. I geek out and ask him to connect us so I could interview him for this class assignment/blog post, et voilà! This is what I learned from Josh, who I recently met in person (!!!) and whose work I greatly admire, but first a little background:
Josh was an accomplished photojournalist when he made the move to Starbucks. He was hired to do photography at Starbucks, but ended up having to adjust to doing video and learning how to edit with Premiere on the fly. In advance of our conversation, I took a look at some of his early work with Starbucks, and assessed it with the lens of both a strategic communicator and visual producer:
Click here to watch one of the first big projects he produced.
I liked it because I felt a sense of “authenticity” in its presentation. Everything from the story, to the visuals, to the sequence of shots, and the editing decisions add up to a piece that is a short but illuminating piece of branded content. It’s a straightforward and insightful piece and as a strategic communicator I think it, like Upstanders, achieves the goal of unique engagement with the socially conscious segment of Starbucks’ primary stakeholder group, the consumer base. It enables a connection between Starbucks coffee drinkers, and the Starbucks coffee growers, and it demonstrates a personal (less so corporate) commitment to the latter, another group of vital stakeholders. This is great storytelling rooted in journalism, and it reinforces positive brand association. A+
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If there is one thing you take away from this post it’s this:
A sense of authenticity and a mission statement that alignment with his own personal creed and journalistic mission are two of the main reasons Josh made the jump from being a journalist at a newspaper, to a journalist working for a corporate brand: “This is an interesting place to be. One of Starbucks core values is to be authentic. I have used that many times in my career here. Journalism is all about authenticity. And that is what Starbucks was looking for when they hired me and a group of other journalists to help tell the Starbucks story. On our team we have Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a former top editor at the Washington Post, we have Linda Thomas, a former news anchor here in Seattle, we have the former news director from a local tv station and a television morning show editor. All here at a Coffee Company.” He is adamant that nothing can ever replace true journalism, the press, the fourth estate. And likewise he drives home the point that journalism is a profession and “news is not free.” While branded storytelling will never replace the press, being able to pay journalists or storytellers for their work is one of the reasons why the field of branded content is growing and is an exciting field to be in currently. At the moment, a lot of smaller newspapers and media outlets can’t compete with the level of resources big brands like Starbucks have to offer. Along the same lines, I also asked him about working for a consumer brand versus a traditional media publication, and if that at all influenced the way he and his team tell stories. He said it didn’t. He’s allowed to be a journalist, and is allowed creative freedom and doesn’t let the marketing and public relations pressures get in the way of his ethics as a storyteller.
If you’re not familiar with Upstanders it is Starbucks’ “first original content series, which aims to inspire Americans to engage in acts of compassion, citizenship and civility. ‘Upstanders’ features ten stories, each told in written, video and podcast form, about ordinary people doing extraordinary things to create positive change in their communities.”
According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “’Upstanders’ is a unique set of stories told in a unique way. When we turn on the news or scroll through our social media feeds, we are inundated with stories of discord and dysfunction. But there is more to America than that. In cities and towns across the country, there are people who are courageously, selflessly, collaboratively, and thoughtfully creating positive change. We want to share their stories, which are often ignored by traditional news organizations, with millions of our fellow Americans through Starbucks unparalleled platform.” (Starbucks Newsroom, 2016)
On the topic of Upstanders, I asked Josh specifically about the second episode entitled, “A Warriors Workout,” because it is one of my favorite Upstanders stories. It moved me, and brought my friend, a veteran of the US Army, to tears when we watched it. I wanted to know how much time it took and what the process of gaining trust and getting Brian, Dave, and others to open up about their struggles with substance abuse was like.
Josh: We had to spend some time with them and make them comfortable. Dave later said that he thought his athletes opened up to me because I am a veteran, and as a journalist spent time in Afghanistan. I was able to talk their talk and understand them and their experiences. There were moments where the questions and topics were uncomfortable, but working alongside Rajiv Chandrasekaran was incredible.
Watch the film for yourself:
I also asked Josh what, if anything he learned from doing this piece in particular, and if it had any personal impact on him?
Josh: It opened my eyes to the needs of our service members and others in our community. It made me realize that collectively we can make big differences, with small, individual acts. My own family now makes regular meals for a homeless shelter in our neighborhood. There is so much need in our communities —but with the buzz of our daily lives it is so easy to ignore. If it’s easy to ignore then it is even easier to not act upon.
Thanks to Josh for taking the time to answer my questions, and to Josh, Rajiv Chandrasekaran for inspiring me to find stories that matter and shed light on my own community. And finally, a big thanks to Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks for his visionary leadership and foresight in investing in his company’s visual storytelling and producing Upstanders for the benefit of us all, budding storytellers and extraordinary citizens alike.
