EmailMolly Martinez, an MMJ with Spectrum1 in Columbus, Ohio, recently completed our 4-day intensive Storyteller's VIdeo Bootcamp.
All of her work is done on an iPhone, which is interesting, but frankly of less singnficance than what she was able to produce with it.
Working alone, as an MMJ or VJ or MoJo or whatever you want to call it gives you the chance to do local news in a very different way.
It allows a kind of intmacy in filmmaking -and I purposely use the term filmmaking because that is what we are striving for for local news.
No one really wants to watch a reporter stand up, a few talking heads, some predictable b-roll and some shots of yellow police tape. Every story done that way starts to look like every other story.
The same people watching your local news are also watching Game of Thrones or The Crown. There is an inherent expectation that your local news stories will be as compelling as The Crown.
Let's be honest - they aren't.
They are boring and predictable.
But they don't have to be.
Take a look at this story, reported, shot, edited and produced by MMJ Molly Martinez from Spectrum1 in Columbus, Ohio.
It's reads like a movie.
You feel like you are with the characters. You relate to them. You feel for them, and through them, you get a far better understanding of what it is like to live with a loved one with Alzheimers.
This works.
It still has all the journalism.
But is also has emotion, intimacy. and power.
What it doesn't have is the reporter stand up
Or the talking heads
Or the b-roll
and, it was all made in one day
On a phone.
Featured Courses
Recent Posts
No News Today — or tomorrow for that matter.
March 26, 2024
For most of human history, people lived in a world without news. The concept simply did not exist. The idea of news is really a 19th-century phenomenon, driven first by newspapers, and then by electronic media which brought us radio, then TV and now the web. Now, it seems, we are headed back to a world without news. Not because the technology is not there, but rather because, increasingly, people are no longer interested in news, at least in the way it is packaged now.
What TV News Could Be
February 26, 2024
When television was invented in the 1930s, no one knew what TV news was supposed to look like. The medium had never existed before, and so, like Gutenberg half a millennium, prior, the first creators of TV news had to fall back on a medium with which they were familiar, and that was radio.
What Is News? What Should it Be?
February 20, 2024
Maybe scary stories drive ratings… or maybe they don’t.