An accident led BBC video journalist Dougal Shaw into shooting his features on a smartphone. One day, when he arrived at a café to produce a program about free wifi, he discovered that his traditional camera’s battery had been drained. Rather than go home without the story, he decided to record using his iPhone. Pleased…

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Wytse Vellinga’s  mini-doc “Cleaning Up Other People’s Mess”  illustrates nine easy-to-do but powerful techniques . In just under two minutes, you will see an approach that will enable you to add drama to almost any biographical featurette. The nine classic techniques are: starting with a close-up (the car) breaking a single action into separate shots for visual variety…

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Tune in to just about any traditional TV news program and the chances are you’ll see a horrific train crash or other frightening catastrophe. This kind of news illustrates the old saying ” If it bleeds, it leads.” The calamity may have happened on the other side of the world. It may have no direct…

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Experts talk about how new technologies are disruptive. Think of the impact of Uber on the taxicab industry. But often the results are such that we should be talking about  constructive technology. Case in point: This week the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives shut down TV coverage of the opposition party’s protest. In response, smartphone-wielding protesters resumed coverage using…

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You may have heard that Tribune Publishing, which owns the Los Angeles Times and many other newspapers, has rebranded itself as tronc (Tribune Online Content). tronc (the lowercase “t”  is the corporate spelling) brags that it will strengthen journalism by multiplying the amount of video used to tell stories and by relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to create links.  The ultimate…

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MojoCon Ireland was the first international conference devoted to mobile journalism, filmmaking, and photography. Alison Gow was one of the journalists who used modern methods to cover the event.

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