AK Press Club - Matt Pearl On Creating A Video Story

I'm at the Alaska Press Club listening to Atlanta television (WXIA)  journalist Matt Pearl talking about how to put together a video story. One story was about an autistic high school student who comes into his own as manager of the high school football team and the story was about the night he got to play in a game and make a touch down,  He went through the logistics of getting out to the town three hours from Atlanta, how he connected with the kid's mom and gathered a lot of different kinds of shots so he could tell the story with some real context.

Pearl strongly emphasized the need to think hard about why the story is important.  He used his story about the Cleveland Cavaliers victory parade in Cleveland and how he got up at 5am to get establishing sunrise shots of Cleveland, then how he took wide shots to establish the setting for the viewers so they get a sense of where they are when they see the close ups.  He even demonstrated this by taking an audience member and walking around the room to show how he'd get shots from different angles.

This talk inspired me to take some video, but I can't edit it while I'm here at the talk, so maybe I'll get to put some up later. [Later: the video wasn't good enough to use.] I'm thinking about how I use video which is different from what he's describing.  But I can use words and other pictures to do some of the story, but without having to make the video the whole story.

The key point I got was that you have to go the extra mile to make the story more than just out of context images.

Oh, and he's also the author of The Solo Video Journalist.