EmailYou will not find a bigger fan of shooting video on an iPhone than me.
But like any piece of technology, you have to know how to use it, and clearly the people at The Today Show do not have the vaguest idea.
This morning, they did a live shot from Grinnell, Iowa (which they mispronounced, by the way) with a nurse whose husband Steve had nominated her for a 'special series' they are doing called 'Spreading the Cheer.'
I won't get into the details, you can watch it yourself here.
On the one hand, it is great that they understand that they can go 'live' from the hospital where Judy works, using just iPhones.
They put together a nice suprise bio package using Steve, her husband, as a narrator. They did an interview with Steve on Skype to get the audio track, which is a mess, and I assume that he sent them the photos. Next time, Today Show, let him do the interview part on his phone and then WeTransfer the file to you. This was not live.
But the worst part comes at 02:33, when Judy leaves the meeting and heads into the hall for the 'big surprise'.
If you watch is, at least as a video producer, you can see that once we get to the live part in the hallway, there are feeds coming from about 3 other iPhone or iPad sources. You can see them as the producer pans the room.
The producer's shooting is A MESS.
There is no excuse for this.
It looks like really terrible home video.
It astonishes me that in 2020, someone can be a producer for The Today Show and not have the vaguest idea of how to show some pretty basic video with a phone.
Now, don't get me wrong. This is a lovely story; a powerful story; a great story. It is just executed very badly because the people doing it do not know how to shoot with an iPhone
I would cal this Video Illiterate.
Well, this just reaffirms my deep belief that the networks simply are never going to get it.
Never.
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.