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with a plan to get the story on the air with the best coverage you can and the quickest way you can. That is

spot news.

Be Prepared

Spot news requires instinct and a great deal of luck. You can increase the luck factor by always being pre- pared. If your equipment is organized, easy to get to, and well maintained, and you know what is required to make a good story, then when the big one comes your way, the Emmy is yours. Shoot with both eyes open, always looking for the next shot, impending danger, or anything else that might be about to hap- pen. Keep your eyes moving but your camera steady. And check your systems: if you aren’t recording, you won’t get the shot; and if you don’t have audio, that’s what people will remember about you for years to come—“So-and-so had the pictures and not one peep of audio; it could have been a career-making story.”

General News

This category of news stories, as the label implies, is very general. Most stories fall under this heading. These are stories about the city council, the plans to build a new housing development for the elderly, or the strike by local bus drivers. Most storytelling tech- niques apply directly to this form of news. The main concept in general news, sometimes called hard news, is to communicate ideas or information to the viewer. The story must be very understandable, with a good beginning, middle, and end. On this type of story, the reporter and videographer must work closely to pro- duce the maximum impact on the viewer.

Presentation is of utmost importance. The subject matter might be the dullest in the world, but if the in- formation is important (or if the boss demands the story), the story must be done and done well. As they say, “There’s no such thing as a boring story, only a boring approach.” The idea is never to lose a viewer; never give a viewer the opportunity to say “so what” or “who cares” to what you are presenting—or, worse yet, switch channels.

Get a Good First Shot

Always make the first shot of the story count. More than likely, it will be your best shot, and it should be. Grab the viewers’ attention immediately to get them into the rest of the story. As a general rule, it is bad form to open a story with a talking head or a reporter stand-up. This opening looks too much like the people on the news set—that is, a person talking without showing you anything. If television news becomes the same as radio, why watch?

Sound is also important in the first shot. A natural sound clip is a good opening for almost any story. A dramatic soundbite can also be a good opening, but good ones do not occur that often. In an opening shot of a street construction story, the sound of the jack- hammer (if one is in the shot), turned up full for about two seconds, can set the story’s tone and topic. “Get ready, Seattle, the streets are being torn up.”

Create Visual Soundbites

The worst thing about general news stories is the lengthy talking head shots that can make up the bulk of the video. While interviews are the bread and butter of TV news, they do not have to be the most boring part of the story. As with anything in TV news, the talking head can be overused. Most reporters use two basic styles of talking heads: one to make the stories they have written more credible, and the other to let the subjects tell their own stories. The former is a tra- ditional journalistic style, in which importance is placed on the reporter’s ability to interpret and ana- lyze; the latter is a style of simply allowing subjects to present their points at length, with little additional comment from the reporter. Both styles have their place, although letting subjects tell their own story is better suited to feature reports.

In either case, the talking head should be well shot. If the subject is to be on camera for a long time (maybe as much as two minutes in a three-minute story), then the interview had better be pleasing and interesting to watch for the entire time. By shooting each answer during the interview at a different focal length (changing focal lengths during the question) or maybe doing some answers in a reporter-subject two-shot, the parts used for the edited interview

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might vary enough to add some interest beyond nice framing. (See Figure 2-3.)

You may sometimes opt to do parts of the same in- terview at different times and different locations. If the same subject is to be heard many times within the story, it might be possible to shoot in more than one location. One bite might have the subject behind a desk; another might come from a walking conversa- tion with the reporter; and still another might have the subject on a balcony overlooking the factory. It takes a little more time to do the interview, but the results are far better.

Another way that can work in certain situations is simply different perspectives or angles within the same basic setting. By moving the camera to different points of view within the room for different sections of the interview, the edited piece can look like a multicamera shoot. A good idea is to shoot a master shot, or estab- lishing shot, followed by a series of setups, or different camera positions, including over-the-shoulder (O/S)

shots, medium shots, and close-ups. An important guideline in this situation is the 30-degree rule: each camera setup should be at least 30 degrees or more from the other setups, without “crossing the line”—

the action axis or 180-degree rule. (See Figure 2-4). If the camera setups are too close to each other, the shots do not vary much from one to the next, making the story less interesting visually, and possibly causing the editor to make jump cuts between shots with similar framing. The important thing is to work with the re- porter or producer to find creative ways of avoiding long stretches of static talking heads.

Cover Long Soundbites with Video

When a piece does have long stretches of talking heads or long soundbites, try to cover as much of them as possible with B-roll—all the shots other than the in- terviews or talking heads (which are the A-roll). These might be establishing shots, close-ups, inserts, cut- aways, or anything else that includes images and action relevant to the story. If you are going to use several bites or one long-running bite from a subject, the au- dience only needs to see that individual for about 5 seconds. In that time, the voice is established with a name and a face so the picture portion is free to show what he or she is talking about—the B-roll footage.

Figure 2-3 To make this interview for a school-related story look interesting, the shooter: (1) placed the subject in front of a background that adds context—a school bus; (2) keystoned the background, using diagonal lines that run along the z-axis, converging toward an out-of-frame vanish- ing point, to add depth perspective; (3) used selective focus to add additional depth and to draw attention to the in-fo- cus subject by defocusing the background; and (4) canted the camera—tilted the horizon line—to add a youthful feel to the youthful subject.

Figure 2-4 Diagram of the 30-degree rule for camera set- ups. The circles represent two subjects, with the 180-degree line between them. The two camera positions are on the same side of that line, with at least 30 degrees of separation.

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