Educators

Instructor’s Guide Part 1 (30-50 minutes)
Begin by assuring students understand basic shot composition and camera movement terms, including wide shot, medium shot, close up, extreme close up, pan, tilt, truck, zoom, dolly, high angle, low angle, axis line, etc.

Next, help students appreciate the difference in amateur shooting versus professional shooting. More often, professional single camera field shooting avoids pans, zooms, handheld shots, etc. and instead seeks steady shots that blend together well to make action seem to be occurring in real time, as if seen from multiple camera angles. It may be helpful to find scenes from movies, TV dramas and the like that employ such a technique. (Be selective in what you show, and be ready to acknowledge that, for creative purposes, professionals sometimes employ certain camera shot or transition gimmicks that do not follow these standard rules.) The documentary "The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing" is one good source for showing professionally sequenced dramatic scenes. Insist that students, especially while training, not have any moving or hand-held shots in their final edited story. Upper level students may be given more flexibility once these basic skills have been mastered. Also be ready to acknowledge that day-to-day local news video often shows less than quality shooting and editing.

Screen the ‘edited stories’ from the DVD.

The first is a simple 3-shot sequence to represent a hospital or clinic environment.

Next is a combination of sequences related to one story on a local charitable organization—the opening 3-shot sequence provides the story’s establishing shots, the next four series show sequences of shots to help make other points of the story.

The individual segments of a story on rape awareness shows first how important the CU shots are to show detail and how important the wide shots are to show the shirts in context.

The combination of people shots shows details to give context to the event.

BUT, with each of these, point out flaws in the sequencing, or make judgments about the effectiveness of the ‘creative’ shots.

How many close-up shirt shots are too many? How long should each shot stay on screen?

For example, the people shots in the rape story collectively show what is going on and use a variety of shot compositions.

They are not matched-action sequences, such as when a hand gesture in a wide shot is matched with the same gesture in the medium shot that immediately follows - so they are not as effective or ‘real time.’

Also point out to students how steady the shots are overall.

Part 2 (students edit on their own time, then 30-50 minutes of class critiques and discussion)
(Note: You may choose to do this assignment over two class shorter class periods or one long lecture/lab period.)

Use the ‘outdoors on campus’ raw footage as an editing project.

Have students log the footage and make an edit decision list.

Give instructions that students are to use shots of appropriate length in a way that shows the bird, the bugs, the clock tower and the water fountain in relation to each other.

The final edited scene should use a good combination of shots, be no more than :30 in length, match audio levels from shot to shot and should not include any sounds that do not fit the scene (like the background train sound).

None of the ‘moving’ or ‘camera shot being adjusted’ parts of the raw video may be in the final edited version. The pace should match the ‘theme’ of the scene.

Critique some of the final productions in a group setting. Be ready to evaluate pacing (including individual shots held too long or not long enough), shot combination effectiveness, which shots were not under the photojournalist’s control, situations in which students chose to simply follow the order of the raw footage rather than move around for the best visual combinations, and similar issues.

Finally suggest other shots the photojournalist might have looked for in this shoot, and have students suggest other shot ideas as well.

© RTNDF Educator in the Newsroom Lesson Plans