 Mae'n gweithio gyda Mark Beiter here with us. Mark is a senior multimedia video journalism trainer, which is a great job to have with the BBC academy, but he started out creating sound effects for radio drama, which I think is a much more fun job to have actually. And he's going to talk to us about creating content, working the story you want to tell, how to tell it and what equipment you might need so, you can ask Mark to come forward. Thank you. Hello, yes, as Bill explains I work here in Newcastle mostly. I'm based here, although work with usually BBC journalists from all over the world, they trek to Newcastle from time to time, find out how to do things. Before that I work mostly for Look North here, working in regional TV news. So apologies if my thoughts tend to be video based rather than audio based. And I know there's a lot of concerns that we think about audio content as well. So it's kind of a pre-apology in there. I really want to say one main thing, and that is that despite the fact that this is all technology driven, it really is not about the camera. The kit doesn't matter. And I think we're starting to realise that actually it's the story that counts. So what I want to talk about over the next few minutes is a little bit about the thought process, about how you go about getting content, whatever we call it, media stuff made. And I think first of all, you've got to tell yourself, ask yourself what you want to make and who you want to make it for, because if you don't know who your audience are, then you're in trouble as we go. If anybody wants to chip in as we go because you think I'm making no sense, or you'd like to ask me to expand on something, please do. But we've got some time afterwards, haven't we, Bill, to do some of that? OK, I want to show you a little film first, very short, and not all of it. This is from a news programme in Gaelic, just to confuse the issue. So if you don't understand the words, you won't be alone. It's potentially a great story. It was made for the BBC's Ann Laugh programme, which is made out of Inverness for the Gaelic-speaking community across the UK and beyond. And it's a great tale about a farmer who they think the last person ever to do an old farming practice, what they used to do was to take the cows from summer to winter pasture. And the winter pasture was often on small islands because it wasn't quite as cold. And because they didn't have boats big enough, they used to make the cows swim across the sea to the islands. OK, so... I'm going to keep the sound down because, as I said, you won't understand it anyway. He's just told she had... How do you know? Actually, anybody here speak Gaelic? No. We're a dull-eyed rock, but can you... Rwy'n cael llawer, elu'r noch gig. The repair job... ..a pi bachonni. Are you enjoying it so far? Fy mae'r caffig i'n iawn o fynd yn yw'r bachonni. What do you want to see in this film? What do you want to see the cows doing? What are we seeing? A man and... Oh, look, there's a man talking in a room. The BBC is brilliant at interviewing people talking in rooms. Would you believe... I might be able to get my little pointer on here and slide along because I don't want to watch all of this because you'll get very, very dull. It actually takes to about one minute, 38 seconds before we finally, in the distance, see a cow. Great. So, I think what I'm trying to say here is, no matter how much you love your story and no matter how passionate you are about it, you've really got to put yourself in the audience's shoes and ask yourself, what do they want to see about your story? What do they get... Oh! Oh, my goodness. But the sad thing really is that the journalist who made this really did think that people were interested. It's getting fantastic, isn't it? Oh, and the boat does work as well. Brilliant. Now, imagine... I mean, just to pause it at that point, I missed it. If you were to pause your film at that point and say, right, that's the starting point for your film, okay? Never mind the stuff about the motorboat and why the farmer does it and the history of it. That does a whole bunch of things. Immediately, it's impossible to reach for that. It's impossible to reach for that. It's impossible to reach for that. It's impossible to reach for that. Immediately, it's impossible to reach for the remote control, right? It is absolute because it raises so many questions. And part of the art about making a film is getting into your audience's heads and making them subconsciously ask themselves questions. And you know what? They won't go away until they've had an answer to that question. And what question does that raise? What the hell are they doing? Great. What's happened to the cows? Can cows swim? Do you have to prod them with sharp sticks to make them go in the water? I don't know. But blimey, you're going to keep watching that. So what is your story for me? Absolutely crucial. And the whole thing is about not only the big picture story, but also the tiny little story in there as well. The one that a question that can be asked and answered in five seconds, like a close-up of the cow's head appearing above the water. That's the question which can be answered very quickly. No, it's not going to drown. You'll find they've been doing this for hundreds of years. But why are they doing it and what's the whole background to this? It's a much bigger picture story which you can take time and if you get your audience starting to be engaged in that question, then you've got them for a lot longer. So what is the single most important message for me is important and secondly, why on earth should we really care about it? And this is possibly a tougher one depending on who you're talking to. And of course, when you're making content, you've got all sorts of people that may be your audience and they've all got different reasons either for getting engaged in what you're trying to tell them or actually not really caring in the least. You're making technology has kind of changed. It's not so long ago that this was what you used to have to make any kind of film with. We guess it would cost 40 grand. Pretty much spot on. 40,000 pounds for this. Before a camera would use to take a mortgage out and then hope they'd get some work off the back of it. Luckily, things have changed and we can start to use much cheaper kits. But we might be making different sorts of movies. We started to think already about how you get your own term with the iPhone and what sorts of things they might do. But a record of an event of a stunt or a show or a project that your organisation is putting on might be one form of media that you want to make. You might want to be pitching an idea. I mean, remember funding? That was nice, wasn't it? But trying to put together a funding bid or to convince a potential sponsor or partner that a project that you're trying to make is a worthwhile thing for them to get involved in. That might be the sort of media that you want to make. It might be part of a bigger show. You might be putting on some huge theatrical event that you want to back-project some great stunning images onto. Then you need to start asking a load of questions like how long is it going to be and whatever you think of, probably divide it by at least two. Then you need to start thinking about is this run by a big-shot talent presenter? Have you got somebody with a character who can tell the story? Is it an animation? All these sorts of things. Right. Getting on now to the sorts of technology that you can use. This was a film that I worked on. You can probably work out when it was, right? 99? Do we not remember when it was? Ancient of the North going up? It was 10 years ago. Yeah, it was. It was great, but it was made with... These sorts of cameras, producer, every camera operator had a sound recordist with them. It was cut in a cutting room that cost, God knows, how much. These days, you can do things differently. This is a tiny movie that I shot on an iPhone for my wife who was putting together a report for the Beebe about whether iPads were a good idea. Only the BBC could wait for the iPad to be out for a year and then ask themselves whether or not they're a good plan. We thought about it a bit. Shot it on the iPhone, didn't edit it, topped and tailed it, and it's doing a job. It's not a very polished performance, but you can see what's going on. The picture quality is the phone's struggle a bit when it gets to close focus. The first thing to do really is to assess how big your project is, how big your audience is likely to be and how much money you can spend on it. If you are just going to use your phone or mini-codec ZLIA cameras, like Flip cameras, everyone's got one of those. That's still in production. Just, yes, the Flips aren't any more. Everyone's got one of these hanging around. Most digital stills cameras shoot really quite a nice video. You don't actually need specific kit which is labelled as video kit anymore. You can probably cut it if you need to cut it. You don't make it in one take on the computer you had at home as long as it's less than five years old, probably. You or your team can make it, potentially, with a bit of help, potentially. The cost, of course, is free, just time. But what does cost is the effort to plan it, think about it, and work out what you want to say. I would talk about, say, the next side of things is kind of what I would call meeting the prosumer thing. This was made for Look North using a camera, not our mission to create the sculpture. He's putting the last details into the clay before it's cast in bronze. It's not quite as good video-wise. Or go back one these days. Frankly, you need to have a really good eye before you can spot the difference in stuff shot on these cameras and the big deal ones that you carry around on your shoulder. Medium-sized project. You can shoot on stuff that you can rent. You can rent these cameras for around 50 pounds a day from most production facilities, which is not terribly expensive. You can cut it on a Mac like this one using 100 quids of the software. 200 pounds now they've updated it into something that nobody likes anymore. And with a bit of help, you and your team can work a camera like that without actually too much input and produce something which is starting to look pretty slick. And the cost isn't 100 pounds. Probably even less than that once you bought your camera. You probably shouldn't be buying cameras if you're renting this kit. Computers are worth having because you can find other uses for them. Cameras can only do one thing. The next scale of things is when actually you do need to spend some real money. I don't know whether your projects are going to involve this, but they might. This was an extraordinary community project co-production between the BBC and the local community, a musical. This was shot, as you can see, with lots of lighting, lots of camera rigs, big cameras, sound kit, the whole thing. And if you're going to start making things like that, then you need enough. Do you get the idea? You need a large format camera because you do need the picture quality. You need people who can operate it and the rigs and the lights, and you may well be cutting it in a big deal edit suite. And the cost for that does start getting expensive. For instance, your average camera crew, depending on whether they think they're cheap skate or have a big reputation, up to £1,000 a day, can be less than that. You can see the sort of cost, so it can start to mount up. And I would say there's one main caveat here. As soon as you start getting into renting people with cameras, they're used to working with people who've got strong ideas, with directors or reporters. So make sure you have a pretty clear idea of what you want because you can't, when it's somebody else's kid, just nip back and get that shot that you forgot because that's a whole extra day. Planning of your shoot is vital. There's all sorts of ways of talking about creativity and how you invent something, but I think when you're trying to plan your movie or your bit of audio, you need to kind of sit down in a darkened room and think to yourself about what you'd like it to be. You need to imagine it in your head first. What you can't afford to do anymore is go and shoot a whole bunch of stuff and then hope to create it in some kind of edit afterwards. It'll be fine. We'll fix it in post, is the phrase that gets used, and it's almost never true. So once you've got your idea, and this will take loads and loads of to-ing and fro-ing, and how ideas emerge is one of these mysteries of the universe, but once you've got it in your head, you then need to think about how you get it onto paper because you can't really communicate these things until they are down on a bit of paper. The traditional way of getting a bit of video described on paper is to use the old two-column script where the left-hand column describes what you're seeing and the right-hand column describes what you're hearing and the left-hand might be the voice-over of your presenter or reporter. It might be what you think your contributors, guests, interviewees might say. At this stage, you don't know, of course, because you haven't gone out there, but nobody goes to interview somebody unless they've got an idea of what their tape might be. So if you're going to interview punters who've been around your Straddling South Coast Gallery, you can invent some perfect things that they might say. That kind of helps because when you start hearing them say it, you think, hey, that's the sort of thing I was hoping they might be saying. Of course, the reality is never quite the same way as you imagine it, which is just as well because our imaginations are pretty limited and the reality of what you find when people do start talking to you is usually a lot more interesting. But unless you've got a clear idea in your head about what they might be saying and how you could pull this together, it makes life really tough to go out when you go out there doing things visually can help as well. So the idea of a storyboard. Now, nobody thinks they can draw, but you don't really need to be able to draw to do a storyboard. Here's some scribbles which describe somebody walking up to a house in a wide shot, a long shot of somebody head to toe in the shot, then a close-up of somebody's face, then we see that they're talking to the house. You get the idea and that way, if things sort of look okay when you cut them together on paper, the chances are they might look okay when you cut them together for real. This isn't a camera class and I'm not going to try and teach you how to work cameras, but I am going to give you one big tip. Have a look at this. This was shot in the aftermath of a plane crash in Nepal. See if you can work out what's going on. Tell me how easy it is to watch. This wasn't shot by a professional crew, I hope, or by somebody who's ever picked up a camera before by the looks of it. It's really tough going, isn't it? And it just reminds you of your Uncle Alfie's holiday videos when the camera is over here. Oh, look, it's the Grand Canyon, isn't it? Deep down there. There's your Auntie Anne, she's scared she's going to fall in. You know, you're all over the place, really. My main single tip for anybody who wants to start shooting their own stuff is bizarrely don't treat it like a movie camera. Don't move it around. Keep the camera still and let the stuff in front of the frame do the moving for you. You'll find if you do that that your editing is far easier. So get your camera. Work out what's interesting in what you're looking at. Make sure that you can see, the audience can see what you think is interesting. Push the button and hold it for 10 seconds. Just keep it as still as you can. And then turn it off. If something interesting happens in that 10 seconds, by the way, carry on a bit longer because it might be fun. That's my main tip. And when you do that, you get stuff that can look like this. This was shot by a guy called Travis Fox, who's a bit of a hero of mine, who's a video journalist. It's a weird project. The camera never moves. In Haiti, they're called tap-taps. They go all over the city, actually all over the country. They're cheap, it's only a few cents to go across town. Since only around 3% of Haitians own their own car, if someone's going more than walking distance, they're going by tap-tap. Tap-taps are privately owned. Each one is owned. That's me.