Is this what I’ve been missing?

After my newsroom’s morning meeting this morning, our Assistant News Director asked me if I’d like to have our newest videographer help me out with my story today. It had been a morning of oversleeping, fighting with the dog, and overall just dragging my butt, so on this day, I was relieved to be offered the help, and quickly accepted.

Now, even on a day like today, when I’m clearly riding the struggle bus, there is this little nagging voice in the back of my head that sometimes whispers that two isn’t always better than one. Especially knowing this particular photog had less than a week of training, I had questions: “Will he remember to focus? Will he use the proper mic settings? Am I going to babysit him to make sure he gets the shots I want?” On days like today, I remember that my favorite part of being a one-man-band boils down to one word: control. Sure, sometimes my stuff can be sloppy when I’m rushed and overworked, but at the end of the day, if I’m unhappy with my work, I have no one to blame but myself.

So imagine my surprise when, upon looking over my partner’s video after a long day of shooting together, I come across the standup he shot. My thought process went something like this: “Look at that slow zoom! Wow! That fountain in the background sure makes me look like a somebody! Man, I don’t know what it is, but I feel like a national news correspondent!”

Hours later, I know what it is: the zoom itself. You see, when you’re shooting by yourself, it’s hard to get a standup in focus, so forget about a zoom, unless you do it digitally in post-production (which, of course, never seems to look as good as the real thing). In fact, let’s be honest, as a one-man-band, the standup so often becomes an afterthought that it’s much more common to make a package without one than with one.

Is that a fantastic standup or what? What a difference a zoom makes!

As I went through the day’s video, and wrote and edited my package, it occurred to me that not only did I have a killer standup (it’s going to take me at least until the end of this post to get over that zoom!), but I had four sound bites in my package and every one of them was from a different person.

That’s two “expert” sources, two “man on the street” interviews AND a standup in one package. My first thought was, I don’t think I could have come up with so much content if I had been working by myself. My second thought was, Yes, I could have, and I have in the past. However, I sincerely felt like I had more time to tighten up my writing and improve my editing (my video was all file from 9-11 and Purdue University, so I guess I really didn’t have to worry about hovering over my photog’s shoulder and making sure he was getting the shots I wanted, after all).

So today was one of those days where I really did understand why the “old” model worked/works so well. There are very few people out there who are great shooters and great writers. Sure, you have great shooters and good writers, or good shooters and great writers, but if we could all do both with excellence, the news business would have taken up the multimedia journalist plan long ago.

I enjoyed zoning in on my strengths today; next time, I’ll be grabbing my camera and trying to figure out how to get that remote-controlled zoom to work.