Tips for Video Journalists: Johnny Harris Explains It All

good start hey everyone thanks for coming out my name is Johnny Harris I am a video maker at box and I've got a lot of stuff to talk about today but I also AM more interested in hearing questions about what we talked about and what you guys do and how what I do which is one kind of very specific thing can help you in your work in your perspective so I'm gonna talk a little bit I've got some slides here I'm gonna tell some stories and kind of give some context but then I want to dive into kind of a more of a back and forth in here questions and get specific like I want to hear your questions about the gear and the actual techniques that I use or about the storytelling process or anything that I don't kind of cover in this first section I want to get nitty gritty and then I'm gonna open up some of my scripts and give you some like real kind of behind the scenes of how I think about storytelling and how I use paper like well Google Docs but how I use like writing to help frame out and flesh out stories before I go out into the world and try to capture stuff so first for those who are not familiar borders is a series that I do at box it's a documentary series about borders and it's kind of trying to explain the human stories behind the map or inside of the map I want to first talk about what boxes box is a us-based outlet that is in the business of explaining the news or helping people understand the news when I tell people I work at Vox they always think that I'm saying Fox they're like oh you work at Fox Fox News and I'm like no no no I don't work in Fox News I work at Vox with a V before Vox was actually big enough for people to recognize that they just defaulted to to Fox but we're very different than Fox okay so Vox is a is a company that is in the process of of trying to reinvent what it means to understand the news or to explain the news is kind of this word we use the word explained that the language here is actually really important for us it's not just a for us doesn't just mean like like listicles of like really easy to understand things and like explain for us has a very kind of specific meaning we believe that there is a lot of information out in the world there's net there's no issue now with getting good information there's plenty of research being done that is almost like too specific for any one person to really grasp and it's too niche and too kind of specialized and so our whole idea is that this information is so specialized and so abundant that it's often like behind a wall see Mike nope my clicker there we go so when news hits our job is to surround that news with all of that information we call it context basically all the research the data the policy reporting we call people we read think-tank reports and then we communicate that to a mass audience in a way that they can understand it or way that that connects with them usually using internet language you know like whether that's writing or text or graphics or video in my case the whole idea philosophy is the same for whatever we do it's basically taking complex topics and funneling them to a mass audience in a way that is still rigorous but is easy to understand and the the result is not some dense policy paper it's something that feels native to the internet it's something that feels approachable but if you were to read this piece it would be still not dumbing it down not oversimplifying it it would be still pulling on the theories and the reporting that's done to make it a good piece of journalism but just more accessible to a broader audience so we've got numbers and who cares about numbers I don't talk about video for me video is kind of the thing that I've focused on and blending this philosophy of explaining with with video itself a lot of news outlets are interested in video these days and we often get asked and I personally had asked a lot from other news outlets who are often trying to poach those of us at Vox what is it about your team or like what are you doing that that allows you to tell these interesting stories and make these beautiful videos in short they ask like what one guy from the New York Times like what's the secret sauce of you know Vox video and so I thought about that for a little bit and I was like well what is the secret sauce and that's what I want to talk about today is like what is this the recipe to our secret sauce and and spoiler alert it's not a secret it's like pretty basic things but I feel like talking about this and breaking this down will kind of give you an idea of where my show came from it and where Vox came from because it's all part of the same philosophy the first kind of component of this is this idea of empowering creators to make what they're interested in my boss at the time Joe when I asked him this question like oh hey what's her secret sauce he was like we just hire creative people and we are curious people we let them make stuff like we give them we like let them make stuff instead of assigning them to make stuff and what this looks like is well I'll kind of break down what the kind of old model was in journalism vasila is in a lot of places and I don't want to disparage this old model because there's actually a lot of rational reasons why we did this old model which is the model is that you have a writer someone who's good with the facts and understands fact-checking and writing and prose and journalism and then you have like the technician the person on the other side who's like knows how to press the buttons and run the camera and edit the thing and there's always kind of bit of bright line between those two then for good reason if you're if you're churning out you know like daily news hits and breaking news you need to specialize at Vox and then of course on top of all of that you have like an editor or like an idea we call it an ideas leader like someone on top of that who's assigning what everyone should be doing you know we have to cover this and writer you write this technician you do this at Vox we've kind of been in the process of saying like what happens if we revamp this model and dissolve this and you're all my click is a little bit delayed so instead of that being you know go back one because instead of there being a divide between the two we see all of these people who come in my colleagues are kind of from all over the place we see them as creators they come from a bunch of different backgrounds I personally came from an international relations background no film school no journalism school everyone's just a creator okay you coming to Vox your career and then this ideas leader up top is not necessarily the person assigning but is rather someone an editor who we call a facilitator instead of assigning it's more of creator would what do you want to work on and what can we surround you with that you're not good at like for me I I had a little bit of design background I knew international relations but like I wasn't a very good writer when it came into Vox and I didn't really understand fact-checking very well and I didn't have like really formal typography and color theory you know but my colleagues did and my colleagues would help me my editor facilitator would help me improve in these other things that I didn't I didn't know this isn't some we all hold hands and sing Kumbaya and everyone's happy and like there's no like rigorous feedback this is a really intense process actually what this means is I'll write a script and I've never written a script before I don't come from a journalism background and my editor will look at it and just tear it apart and say like hey this is so factually thin error you have no good evidence for this like what are you doing here and and then my you know the art director will look at it and be like man these colors are really clashing or this animation is really clunky like it's it's intense it's rigorous but what that does is it turns the creator into someone who can do like four or five different things and maybe they didn't start out that way but the team culture of this idea of hey you have an idea we want you to make it and will facilitate that however you need has helped us create this these people who can wear a lot of hats now again this is hard to scale and this is their challenges that come with this manager Lee and from a company standpoint but what this does is it creates an environment of experimentation and creativity and it allows a creator who's used to maybe getting assignments to feel like oh I have an idea and I have the power to kind of execute on that idea and so I don't necessarily recommend that the world do this I don't recommend that every organization this this model doesn't necessarily fit for a lot of organizations but what we can learn from this is that there's power in one creator having multiple tasks and having the kind of power to have their own vision and that being given to them as opposed to kind of it being divided up so much to where they're kind of involved in one specific thing and so there are ways to blend this with the old model and it Vox we've kind of and we're having to do that as we grow we're now what kind of a bigger team and this original model doesn't look as much like this we're doing a lot more collaborating and a lot more kind of drawing some lines but this original ethos is still a big part of our team and our the DNA of our team so the second thing that is really important to us is the idea of aesthetic and in style I think there's always been this idea that like aesthetics and and good looks are for like the brands and the commercials and for the people with big budgets and stuff like that and in news and in documentary and stuff like that like we're just here to tell the story stories King who doesn't have to look very nice and while I agree with the idea that story is king what story is the most important a good story that's delivered really well that's delivered in a way that makes you feel something or that is beautiful to watch to me can go further and to me can actually have a greater effect than a story that is not that is told without those stylistic concerns and kind of taken into account so that's been a big part of ours and it takes a little bit more time but we feel like our stories can go further because of that here's a little sample of a few pieces always go through I'm sure some of you guys it's already seen box stuff but here's a few pieces from my colleagues nope and we don't have audio yes we do let's start it again this far away in many years before it existed in 1979 the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan and defend a puppet dictator against rebels I think everybody would say oh yeah there must be a spike for world or want you know sure enough there it is like 25 million and there must be a big despite World War two in there it is it's like 65 million but then you'll see this other spike that is as large as World War two right after we were one that most people a lot of people say what what was that and the party has undergone a remarkable transformation from the party of Abraham Lincoln to the party of Donald Trump has gone through immense climate changes many days or in some cases leading to mass extinctions but light persistent mammals evolved from reptiles and primates from mammals they stood up and walked out of Africa eventually reaching the corners of every continent but only after well over a hundred okay so you get the idea you could if for more go watch the Vox Channel we really put a lot of work into aesthetics and that is because that video about climate change of that video about the Republican Party we could have got it done quicker and it could have gone out in a quicker way and maybe not put so much time into the style but because we did that it was able to last longer and people it was able to be something that was evergreen and that was that would travel we find that on the internet things travel and are recycled in the algorithm when they're compelling and fun to watch and that doesn't mean that it's dumbed down it's not like we're just making you know now entertainment it's all pretty and beautiful it's still the rigorous stuff it's just clothed in this really beautiful style that people want to watch so that's a big a big ingredient per se in our in our secret sauce the next one is this idea of respecting intelligence and as a recliner our founder really really believes in this idea this idea is that we hear so much on the internet that like the internet is deteriorating our attention spans and you know it's giving us all a DD and we're scrolling through and we have to make these 90 second videos if we're gonna survive on the Internet and that we believed in that like for a long time we made two minute videos because we're like it's the Internet I make too many videos and then we started to find that some of our stories couldn't fit into two minutes and so we started to make three minute videos and then kind of three to four I remember in 2015 people would ask me what's the sweet spot for time and I back three to four minutes like that's it like this is absolute truth and then I remember it was the Syrian civil war came around and became really in the limelight and people wanted to understand it and the foreign editor Vox at the time said to me well why don't we make a video about the Syrian civil war that actually explains it no one's done this a lot of people have done like these big articles like who's fighting whom and why in publi and so we put together a script and did I just like did the word count and divided it by 160 words a minute which is kind of our guideline of how long talking is and it was like six minutes long and we're like whoa six minutes like no one's gonna watch the six minute video and so my bosses were like hey you got to cut it down like six minutes those wait for wonderful video so we tried to cut it down we're like we can't cut this down it's the Syrian civil war or like you can't cut down there's so many different players and like to really explain it well you need at least six minutes and so look at all right we'll make it and no one's gonna watch it but like at least it'll be on there it'll be like our service to the readers whatever and so we made it we made this six-minute video that was like not even oops it wasn't like even super flashy like it was just one take of a camera kind of floating around the map and you see all these people moving in and this and that and this became our most viral video of all time our most viewed video ever got a hundred million views I mean last I checked 100 million views on Facebook on Facebook the ad D platform that is supposed to only reward cat videos in entertainment suddenly a six minute video about geopolitics in the Middle East is just got 100 million views and was going bonkers on the internet and we're like what do we do with this and so that really reshaped our paradigm we realized there's no limit to this there's no natural law that you know six minutes or three to four minutes or whatever so we started to push it we started to push it a little bit more and then they we wanted to explain the israel-palestine conflict which as you all know it's not an easy task or a fun task or something you should ever do on the internet if you don't want a lot of hateful comments and so I I wrote the script with max the foreign editor and it was 10 minutes long and again they laughed like I love what I loved about my editors at that time is like they were like that's crazy but like try it you know at the beginning of Ochs it was just this idea like let's just see we don't know we're doing so we made this ten minute video and sure enough it did super super well it continues to do super well you know years later and so all of this is to say the lesson here is let's not assume that our audiences on the Internet only want to watch 90 second videos because it's not true if you earn their attention for ten minutes or four six seven minutes they will watch it they'll watch it for 15 minutes what's that the what you want to see part of it you said I don't I don't have it up but I could let's see I could pop me find it really quick yeah I'll give you the first bit of it here we go so Syrian civil war Vox let's see what happens notice very intense here I'll go into it because this this beginning part is not like that's work region and the world started traveling to Syria to join the rebels now I saw it actually encourages this by releasing jihadist prisoners to change the rebellion with extremism and make it harder for foreign backers to support them in January 2012 al-qaeda forms a new branch in Syria Shabbat Eleuthera also around that time Syrian Kurdish groups who have long sought autonomy take up arms and informally secede from Assad's rule okay so it's this for six minutes and 45 seconds which it's not the most engaging in the sense that like from my perspective this is I made this like two or three years ago I'm like done this better anyway the point though is that this met a need people wanted to understand this and this was a visual that was going to help them understand what's the deal with the Kurds and how did Isis get and who are all these people and what's Iran doing and all this stuff so the whole lesson here is the idea that we shouldn't assume what our audience wants we should assume that our audience wants to learn stuff so this model back to this which is kind of the first thing we talked about is in 2017 it's what spurred on borders borders is this international series where I am kind of blending the typical map explainer with documentary and it into the first season I kind of jumped across and did oh there's a whole intro video that we don't need to watch did six different episodes in a bunch of different places from Mexico to Norway to the northern border of Mexico to Nepal and a bunch of others and what this has done has kind of helped us push our ethos of of there I'm with a yak in like the Himalayas talking about the border of China and Nepal which is interesting you know go back to this for a sec what this has done has helped us blend this idea of explainer and this idea of wanting to help people understand the news with what does this mean when we actually go on the ground and instead of just doing this from our office how do we do this actually in the field and it came with this crowdsourcing component where I'm this person who you know grew up the United States and Here I am trying to go out and report and on these other places I felt woefully unprepared to do that and so I wanted there to be a crowdsourcing component to basically say hey we're on the internet like the Internet is the place where ideas are shared people share and contribute and love to be a part of a big thing what if we use that in our reporting and so we started to gather these local communities in different places so Hong Kong was the first experiment in this go to Hong Kong and instead of just going with my own research I put a poll out and said anyone who lives in Hong Kong who wants to help contribute to this project sign up so they sign up to put their name their email and they give me like what they think I should cover so now I have all these cool ideas and then every week I would follow up with these people with my questions I would say hey what are visual ideas or the concrete examples of Chinese encroachment in in Hong Kong what they are are some examples of British like relics of British influence in Hong Kong how do I cross the border in the north what's it like up there all these questions and these Hong Kongers would respond I would get hundreds of responses to these and would just read through and before ever going I felt like I was reporting on the ground because there was this group of people who were with so much local knowledge who were giving me like tons and tons of amazing like useful useful information and visual information that I could just have never gotten if I was just like you know typing on the internet trying to find this stuff on my own and so what that did is it allows us to tell these really amazing stories that we uncovered through this local network we've done it in Hong Kong recently we're in Colombia and then I just got back from India all of this crowd sourced all the ideas where crowdsource go ahead so we put an announcement out to our network so we make a video that says hey I'm going to Hong Kong if you live in Hong Kong go to voxcom slash borders Hong Kong how do you verify well if they totally so so if there was ever anything any information they were giving us that was fact-based we would go fact check it like it was these these people were more giving me information that was that was like like for example what are concrete examples this is all my big questions what are concrete examples of Chinese encroachment they'd say oh if you are on the buses you'll hear Mandarin now we speak Cantonese here but more and more you're hearing Mandarin everywhere that's not something I need to necessarily verify that person I'll go to Hong Kong and I'll listen to that and I'll film it or hey the army barracks in the center of town is a really good visual example of the Chinese army in the middle of Hong Kong so a lot of it was like that kind of stuff it was like source stuff that exists in the public sphere that I just don't know because I'm not a local totally yeah and that's a major challenge to this model which is like we have a demographic of like 18 to 35 year olds you know they're younger liberal like Hong Kongers who are obviously yeah they've a very specific point of view and that actually is like the big kind of weakness of this is a sampling error where it's like we have like one so often when it's opinion based stuff like like how do you feel about Chinese encroachment I'll take that with a huge grain of salt I'll be like okay how do you feel about Chinese encroachment all these people are gonna say they hate it you know I need to go look at the opinion polls from university of hong kong has done legitimate polling to the public and i'll use that for my like public opinion thing i'm not gonna use i'm not gonna use this as a scientific thing i'm gonna use this as a way to mind the locals for perspective that i just can't have you know and sometimes that is subject to bias but often it's stuff that isn't really contaminate with bias well it's for stuff like this where it's like again these are like concrete examples that i'll need to go and like film that are showing a certain thing for any again anything that is subject about bias certainly it would be like go check all sides to the normal to diligence certainly yeah yeah that's yeah that's i mean that again that's a weakness like if i wish I could have a like poll of every single person in Hong Kong and speak Cantonese this is my way of basically penetrating and understanding a place that I've ever been to and getting an idea of what visuals like go along with the broader reporting project I'm involved in so I don't use these people as the only source or them even the main source I use then and we're going to talk about this when we talk about visuals and the important of visuals and storytelling visuals for me are like gold like when I go to a place with my camera this story doesn't exist unless there are visuals to help explain that story of visual anchors what locals do is they they're like my fixers like local fixers who will help point me in directions not necessarily that will influence the nature the character of the story but will at least help me find like checkmarks in the story that I can point my camera at and say like here's a great example of Chinese encroachment in Hong Kong I could have found that otherwise if I just would have like cold the internet for a year but this is a kind of a fast-track way to get an overview of the place yeah that's a great question how do I decide what stories to do and I think that's so that's I think gonna be like the second half of today is gonna be talking about what story should be told in video and what should not if there are a million good stories that should be reported on in the world my philosophy is that nine-hundred should be told those videos the rest should be text or photo essays or interactive graphics or long-form magazine articles video to me is seen as like this cool new thing we should make everything a video my thought is we should only make things we should only put the work into making a video for stuff that's inherently visual that needs to be explained or understood visually so that's my main guide post is what is visual and we'll the visual anchors guide me to a really really good story that's compelling but know that that's like a huge challenge of like I mean I think timeliness it makes a difference in the sense that like we want to make sure that the stories were telling are useful and like relevant to to our audience but popular or in terms of like what's gonna get the most views is not the guiding principle it's more like is this visual is this timely is this useful so more about crowdsourcing and storytelling later I do want to talk a little bit about what borders looks like from a tactical standpoint I'm like a kind of behind the scenes standpoint because I think it's easy to see this and see like all these flashy visuals and assume that it's just all this like very seamless smooth process and the I want to tell you a quick story about what it actually looks like when I'm on the ground because I report by myself I'll go with my camera I'll usually have a fixer translator but because of that it basically shows I want to show you kind of what it means to do this on a very low budget as a one-person band as it were so I was in Haiti in the first season of borders and I was in this little town way down here in the south with all of these these fishing boats like a fishing village and every night there are these groups of women who kind of load up onto this boat and they take this long journey of like along the southern coast of Haiti to the border with the Dominican Republic and they do this because along this route if you go to the Dominican Republic there's this really nice border market right here at the border and they do this because there's this big mountain range here so they can't drive and it's just it's economically in their interest and there's this kind of binational that's supposed to be like this cooperation between the two countries and so they do this night journey every single night and it's grueling and just I wanted to see it firsthand so I went on the boat with these merchant women we arrived to this to this border and the border markets up there this is Haiti and there's this bridge with a guard and the guard stops the merchant women from they've just been on this 8 hour boat ride overnight it's like dawn and they kind of sit there and and this was a really powerful visual for me because it shows the asymmetry that exists on the island it shows the idea that the Dominicans really have the upper hand and that these women are just sitting there at the mercy of this one border guard who can either let them in to go sell and like do what they came to do or stop them as long as they want and I wanted to capture that as best I can and it again with being one person I like having my drone and I have like my camera and I'm trying to interview people and I want to capture this whole thing so I get my drone up in the air and my hope my dream shot was to get like all of these women like rushing in as soon as they open the gate and I didn't know when they were gonna open the gate I was like this could happen in five minutes or two hours and so I kind of just let it up there and the cool thing about drones is like you can just let them sit and they will not do anything so you can like put the controller in your pocket and so let it sit up there for a bit and went and started interviewing people like getting the b-roll that I needed having these interesting conversations and the drones just kind of sitting up there well drones have batteries and batteries tend to run out and so luckily drones are very safe and so after you know like when it's ten percent left the drone will just come home kind of on its own and you can like override that but you shouldn't so it comes home it lands I change the battery out put another one in go back to reporting talking to these people I'm on my like third battery at this point and I'm like really like man I want to get the shot so bad you know and like I tend to just push a little bit in these moments where I'm like this shot would just really make this piece and make this kind of climactic moment and it's on the last battery and the drone starts to like beep at me again so I'm like swiping to be like override like come on just like one last second like any moment it's gonna open and it gets to a point where the drone like actually just starts coming home on its own like it you can't override it it's like you're an irresponsible pilot like we're coming home whether you like it or not and so finally it's like starting to do that and I'm like oh I failed and like right in that moment they open the gate it's like the drones like actually still filming it's coming home and like the people are like rushing through and I'm like getting the shot and I'm like filming and it's like this moment where I'm just like this is ridiculous like what am i doing like this this should be like I should have like a drone pilot here who like actually knows what they're doing but it also shows to me this idea of like these tools we have these little tools that are you know my drone is like can fit in your pocket and yet you can use them and push them in ways that allow you to tell interesting visual stories without needing a big crew without needing to go to film school or things like that the final roses the final would it look like finally hours after the Dominicans were allowed to enter there's a shot [Music] by itself or the day before returning to the boats to make the journey home chameleon boat journey the senseless discrimination it embodies the asymmetry that exists on this island watching it happen so you can see you see that shot where it's like zooming in and like that's yeah that's the drone like literally coming home like it was just some serendipitous moment I so it's it's a funny thing and like maybe a little irresponsible but the what the reason I show you this is to kind of give you an idea of what the behind-the-scenes looks like for this like it is a lot of scrappy shoe stringing to get shots and to be on the ground and to interview people totally so this gets to a point that I teeter-totter back and forth on because you'll see with borders that a lot of it is kind of like vlog where it's like I'm walking around and talking and it's this kind of tension that I feel worth like I'm an outsider coming in to shed light on an issue and there's a fine line between me doing that in an objective kind of way where I'm providing information or providing a bridge into this community and where it becomes indulgent to me and my reactions to the place and that's the last thing I want like that is the Latin that's like the most like that's the thing that to me would be the most egregious kind of version of of like an insensitivity in this reporting and so I'd do a lot of those things like I'll be on the ground and I'll kind of give reflections and I'll be like oh my gosh we've been waiting so long and I didn't this I do a little bit of that I do kind of say like we've been like waiting because I've been on the journey with these women this whole time and now what kind of waiting but obviously like if I wanted to I could go cross and like so it's tempting to be like oh my gosh this is crazy like I can't believe we're waiting and and yet to kind of also acknowledge the fact that like no I'm an outsider who's not subject to this and like I'm not going to indulge myself in this moment because a lot of vlog kind of format is a personal reflection people talk to the camera and they talk about what they're seeing and what they're feeling in blah blah blah and my whole project is to try to take the vlog format and funnel it into journalism and frontal into something that is telling someone else's story but through me is like this kind of proxy for the viewer of asking the right questions so anyway that's a whole nother can of worms that gets to the kind of moral dilemma but yeah I do think that there is room for reporters to show behind the scenes as a means of visual evidence for the viewer to understand it better and I think as long as it's in service to the viewer and in service of the story and not kind of a self-reflective indulgent thing then then it's totally appropriate but that that's a very fraught you know fine line that I do I think about a lot so I I want to ask that I kind of want to hear your is this questions about either what we talked about at the beginning of the different components of what makes a box box or what makes borders borders in terms of like the gear and the workflow and the reporting and the process we're gonna get into like actual scripts and stuff but I'm curious if people have any questions up until now yeah yeah at Vox Populi like I mean we have people in like their 50s that box yeah what do you ask yeah yeah yeah yeah there is I definitely and so I definitely feel that's that pushback of and it's not even I mean maybe age is correlated here but it's more of a kind of approach kind of a legacy approach we're like this is the way we do things in legacy media and oh the kids are doing this these days they're ruining journalism you know like there's there's definitely that and I and I get that luckily at Vox we were with this idea of you know we're gonna start out on an internet native the right foot so that so that these things are encouraged and sometimes we go too far sometimes we're like sometimes we we push it so far that we're like no we need to be quirky and internet e and we forget the journalism at least at the beginning we we kind of swung too far that way I think we're now in a really good place where we're doing rigorous stuff that's that is you know getting done nominated for Emmys and whatever and yet it's it's also native to the internet but that's a culture thing you know and that's like that was our intention from the beginning I feel like there's a lot of legacy media companies at least that I see when I go around and Europe and etc that are trying to do this but yeah it's an appetite thing it needs to be an appetite from the from the top for that to be the change yeah well so voxbox well boxes box the the box calm me personally with borders no I don't cover breaking news or yeah you're right it's more documentary about current events voxcom the website is a news organization by the in the United States it's classified as a large news organization in the same caliber as the New York Times The Washington Post in terms of when it gets awards it's classified in those same in the same categories and and does cover breaking news has a newsroom has a Capitol Hill reporter etc that so that's true that was your last question your first question was how do you viewers viewers are on the Internet all on the Internet we don't have any other mechanism we use we have some paywall stuff like Apple news Apple News Plus which is a paywall subscription but it's still mobile you know internet-based our viewers are 18 to 35 year olds who are mainly in the United States and Canada and Great Britain in Australia but all over we have and for for our YouTube analytics tell us that especially for borders we have more people watching outside of the United States then within the United States and yeah but they're mainly I mean the you can see the bell curve but mainly it's 18 to 35 year olds with people on both ends you know a lot of 35 to 50 year olds as well but not as many as that kind of mean demographic how do we make money that is the big question for all digital media for all media generally but digital media especially we've been able to make it through this first wave in the United States there was a lot of digital media groups that came up in kind of 2013 2014 and a lot of them have been have gone out of business Vox has been able to make it through in part because we have a we this is gonna get really wonky but you guys might be into this at Vox we're also have an arm that is a an in-house advertising agency and then we also have an in-house publisher that publishes our that makes our technology that makes our our CMS what we use to publish and so between the ad and the people who make the technology that publishes our stuff on the internet we're able to go to an advertiser and say hey we can make you a custom beautiful ad campaign that fits right into our whole experience it's going to be beautiful it's not going to be a clunky display ad and your campaign will feel natural and native to the experience and so because of that our ad rates are going up well ad rates for everyone else are going down because we offer this kind of one-stop shop and so ad but then we're experimenting with all sorts of things that's different memberships now on YouTube you can go on and pay five bucks a month and get behind-the-scenes content and we're trying to crack the code we're doing sponsored videos now or at the end we say thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video and they pay some amount of money so we're trying to diversify but it's a hard question for everyone in digital media yeah yeah a lot of money but not actually making yeah I embedding that an appetite for what I call curiosity content which is really well reported I spend months on these and I read books and books and think-tank reports and talked to dozens of experts to make this 12 minute video that lives on the Internet and that lives next door to a a video of someone live-streaming their video games that cost them nothing to make and yet we get the same ad rate by view and I actually post this exact question to this the CEO of YouTube who was at our office the other day and I was able to meet with her and I said like there's no way we can keep doing this if we keep getting paid the cents on the dollar that you're paying all your other creators who are making stuff that takes them no effort at all and she gave some the answer that basically said like well too bad like we don't have to change like we're making plenty of money like so so Corp like from the corporate YouTube and these big distributors who are the ones who kind of hold all of the cards here because they have a monopoly over this publishing yeah it's a pretty dire situation to say like I don't know how we're gonna sustain this but my hope is that with the crisis of fake news with the crisis of harassment with the crisis of all of these terrible things that are happening on these platforms that YouTube will wake up and say man we have to fuel this kind of content if we're going to be a beacon of legitimate information and not just a free-for-all for anyone to publish anything and I think at some point they'll have to wake up to that and I think at some point the incentives will align that they will have to do that they'll be forced into it because their advertisers won't want to be part of it but that's me speculating there's demand for this though I mean every one of these seasons I get 50 million views for for like four or five videos there are millions of people who want to watch this and who will stick around and watch these 12 15 minute videos and so I'm just waiting for the day when it becomes like an actual like corporate priority for rigorous information on these platforms but yeah yeah storyboard the graphics and everything yeah I'm gonna put a pin in that question because I'm actually gonna open up my script and go through literally everything and we're gonna watch what that script look like so after and I'll tell you like hey I plan to this this was all but this the short answer is I do as much research as I can on the macro story on the story that I can learn reading books and talking to experts and reporting from my office I want to get on the ground the micro story the human story is always way more complicated and way different than anything I can conceive of one reading Wikipedia articles and so that always informs not usually the arc of the story the arc of the story is something that usually I can garner from a lot of different places oftentimes it'll change slightly and sometimes it'll change a lot but it always does inform how the story fills out how it looks so we'll see that in detail yep yeah yeah yeah yeah it takes a long time for something like this and my whole idea is that what I do specifically with borders like shouldn't be a model I'm never going out and saying like this is what everyone should be doing because like he said like this isn't this isn't this is more like long-form like magazine articles like this is like the New Yorker where you will read and it will kind of go along like what is happening in the world but it's not necessarily like breaking news but I believe that the the concepts here a visual first storytelling can be applied to breaking news can be applied to a social media manager who has to report immediately on what the protest Hong Kong these past couple of days and is like what do I do if we're thinking of visual first storytelling on visual platforms that can inform a two-hour turnaround or a two-month turnaround for me I four five videos I will usually pre report for six weeks I'll go on the ground for ten days and then I'll do post-production for about eight weeks and all of that with that it's a long time but it's five videos and there are five kind of meaty documentaries and they are before before we had a bigger team who were covering a bunch of different things I was uh I had to turn stuff around I didn't do a video a week and now that we have a team who's kind of doing news and doing all this stuff I've been able to go off and do this and it it's a useful thing because it allows us to have again like you have long-form magazine articles in addition to breaking news pieces it gives our audience a lot of different aspects of but yeah it takes a long time it's a lot of work but it really people love it and it travels on the internet you know so I don't know that's that's why Vox has made it a priority to to invest in it what's that well I'll tell you know they did they pay me but if you were to think what this would cost for a typical documentary production to go out and and cover five videos that are you know seven to 15 minutes long and to produce them in the way with graphics and all the stuff that would be you know the salary of four or five people probably what Vox is saying here is if you can be scrappy and do this all on your own but these trips cost me $6,000 $6,000 are all my expenses to go out and travel especially in a place like Haiti or something where it's not very expensive I I cost Vox $6,000 plus my salary to go out and make five of these videos and they can they get 50 million views back like it's worth it to them it's super worth it to them and then they get two Emmy nominations and you know like it's it's something that they've seen is actually really good business because it's incredibly cheap relative to what documentary typically costs who hasn't yeah just like things that you do how I guess I'm wondering how often you ask yourself is this really informative yeah yeah totally I mean that's a I think that's a question like every journalist has to ask themself always even if you're doing breaking news like as long as you're pressing the buttons to report a story you're filtering it through your brain I think the notion of objectivity is is largely a myth in the sense that like as long as you're presenting a story in an order with facts that you've chosen and talked to experts that you chose to talk to you have to funnel it now I agree with you that there are much bigger like a story like this I'm piecing together ten different elements into a narrative that I've chosen and so the degree of those variables is now much slippery and that's what a good editors for you know like I have a good editor who who is able to poke and ask these questions and push and say well where's the facts say and like what like why are you saying this this feels like a little bit like you're imposing a little bit and she's very rigorous in making sure that everything we say is assertive in a factual way and then we have a very intense fact-checking process that allows us to check our characterizations check our numbers check whatever and between all of that we feel like we're able to button it up but no I don't pretend to say that somehow this is this is some firm objective especially because I'm using fancy graphics and and fancy camera moves and music all this stuff that's like very subjective very artful and so I'm okay with that I guess I'm not saying that I don't see that as something bad as long as we are not misleading or mischaracterizing an issue that we've reported so anyway it's a slippery slope for sure so for me maps maps and visual storytelling with maps is something I love I really love it I feel like it's a really powerful thing to show Gio did I do a lot of like cartography and geo data and being able to show those macro trends on a map and then zoom in and show a human story I feel like that balance is what I really love maps and then like visual like what I call visual anchors which you'll see here pretty soon so yeah I guess that's that's kind of become my like format of choice or container of choice is maps and and then cinematography I really believe that good cinematography can be good journalism because you are Scimitar rafi the art of showing someone's something in a way that connects with their brain and and it's always kind of been seen as like oh no the like fancy you know like people have a lot of time and money can do fancy cinematography but even with short short videos when we're covering turnarounds like quick turnaround stuff we try to employ really good artful cinematography because it's descriptive and and it's and it's factual it can be factual if you're pointing your camera at visual evidence that proves the the thing you're trying to say so yeah I would say those are maybe my my kind of ideas of or trademarks yeah a couple more questions and we're gonna move on go ahead yeah yeah no yes so back in these days it was I was pretty solo I had a editor who I would bounce ideas off of since then I now have a assistant producer who is like the fact guru and she goes out and like hey we need to get all the data of fishermen who were arrested in the pulk Strait from this date to this day and she would go scour the internet and call people and figure it out and visuals she'll go and find archived in the snow so she's just like the person who knows where to look for archived in facts and data and then I have on the team someone who I call a story producer and her name is Christina and she is has become more and more fundamental in helping find a story and say hey this is a visual story like hey we're going to India what are we gonna cover so then she'll go out I'll go out we'll both like go out and look for stories we'll come together and she will usually help flesh out a lot of those stories she's like what would be a producer and kind of radio like radio producer who like goes out isn't the reporter but is like very closely entwined with the videos and then I'm more and more like she's doing an edit for one of the videos like she wants to learn editing and she wants to learn motion graphics so I'm giving her one of the edits and kind of coaching her through that and hopefully she'll be taking that more and more so that's the main ones and then of course my editor is still there she's like story editor not video editor and then we have of course our social media people an engagement team they help run the crowdsourcing all of the engagement stuff which is itself you know wizardry and then of course all the people at Vox would just make the team run you know like that's obviously like so so it's not it is a one-man band but it's not at all it's like it's very much this giant group of people I just happen to be the one on the ground with the camera and doing the editing and graphics and stuff but without all of these other people it wouldn't be nearly as rigorous and it just wouldn't go as far so let's do one more question and then we're gonna talk about scripts and stories or we'll just do that now oh yes sorry yeah yeah yeah so that's an old format actually so we used to do in season one that was going to all these places and just doing one video in each place and then I was doing these dispatches which were totally unplanned like vlogs like why are there so many vending machines in Japan and like these little quirky things that have cool kind of economic explanations or something we kind of retired those in the name of doing five videos in one place and each of those videos is now some of them are a little bit lighter like why are there so many neon signs and in Hong Kong and they're kind of interesting developments around that and but they're now more reported and so they're like taking that old format and blending it with the bigger format and now we do five yeah they're all planned out now and and at least somewhat planned out to the point where they're not just spontaneous it was just too much burden to like stroke to a place in BEC I need to come up with a really pithy like macroeconomic explanation for this thing on the fly and like at my hotel like reading and like calling people and it's just was it was a little too ambitious for like spur of the moment okay so some of you asked about process and what I want to show you is scripts so how we find stories is based on on what can be shown visually and this is a huge huge tenant of mine with like if I'm gonna be in the in the business of doing video why go out and do video why spend all these weeks and months and resources doing this if it's not a visual thing and I feel like that's the number one mistake made in video is like people just like oh should be a video because the kids like video these days I don't believe that's true I think we should find stories that have a visual and usually you can find a good visual for every story but you should find stories if you have you are looking for interesting stories visual should lead so this script is this three column thing is is what I've kind of developed from porters and house all these color coding and I'm not saying this is like sacred like oh this is all just stuff that helps me think through you know like like fact-checking so everything that needs a fact check is read when I'm writing it I'll be like this is an assertion that is or is not true like make it read and then we go through and and once it's sourced in this third column and has a hyperlink and has the fact and the source well put there then then it turns green and then we have Christina the proof so then we'll go through and check all of those at the end to make sure they're all good sound bites like sound bites from interviews are in blue here stuff that I'm supposed to shoot on the ground so when I'm writing this I have this ready to go like as I'm writing I'm thinking if I'm going to start this video out talking about the crisis at the border with Venezuela and Colombia I need action of people at the border ending people crossing I need chaos and then they need to do this on camera stuff and then I need an animation of people flowing from 2015 to the most recent okay and you'll see these visual anchors visual anchors are everything there they are the heart and soul like you might look at this and be like oh the heart and soul of these videos is the fancy camera transitions know like those are like the icing on top of the cake this story here are these visual anchors there are things that you can point your camera out that exists in the world that are physical pieces of evidence that show whatever it is you're trying to say this story 12 minutes long about colombia is trying to say one thing which is Colombia's border crisis is different than a lot of other border crisis because they're actually letting people in they're like opening their doors which you just don't see very often that's what I want to say so all of the visual anchors throughout the entire piece are supposed to say that in some way without me having to explicitly make the connection the you were should be able to do that when I'm thinking about a story I'm thinking about what visual anchors are the best I'm gonna put those up front to show people like to get them bought in and get them saying like wow I understand this thing because I'm looking at these these different things so the intro to this piece has the first visual anchor which is just a ton of people at this border and then it has a visual anchor of people carrying suitcases across which is a really powerful indication they're leaving Venezuela never to come back and then you have this visual anchor of this money it is Venezuelan money that's not worth anything so now they're using it for other purposes yes this is most of this sometimes I'll get on there and I make wool this there's a visual anchor that like I didn't even think of but it connects what's funny about these visual anchors is every other news organization has covered them but they're not using them as visual anchors like the money sculpture thing which again you'll see what that looks like I I saw several reports before I went down if people covering that but it was like at the very end and it was like a it was like a little and now they're making money is there money's been turned into sculptures and I'm like think that's gold like why isn't that like the focus you know and and so anyway then so this is kind of what it looks like you have the title slate and then there's a couple other ones like this hot dog visual anchor what I didn't have before so anyway let's watch this and I'll call out these visual anchors you'll see them because this is what I'm thinking about when I'm looking for stories and when I'm on the ground they're the most important thing no not in a case like this in a case like this it's like we're on a border with a bunch of migrants and we just have to go around and get sound bites from people everyone's around we'll have a source lined up for a very specific purpose like in India as a Muslim family who's been discriminated against because of their consumption of meat because they consume cow meat beef and and their father had been killed by these Cal Virgil auntie's and I was like that's a compelling story that proves this point and so I worked for months to get in with those people but for something like this it's like people on the ground okay so let's just watch this and another you've kind of seen the script and you see the thinking this will make a lot more sense on what what I was shooting for here okay so visual anchor number one just a lot of people you like okay there's a crisis here tons of people like that you don't know one has to say that you see it okay so this is the second one this is a second visual anchor it's another one that just it dawns on you what's happening here purely because you're seeing it I could have said that I written it somewhere but it just wouldn't sink in you see these people carrying there's loads of suitcases if it proves the point [Music] [Music] you need proof of how bad it is in Venezuela right now look at this purse this person made entirely of the bills of the Venezuelan currency - holy butter relation is so high that this money is now completely worthless and so my friend Jorge over here has gathered in front of the stuff and turned it into commodities the person sculpture what's that yes I'd seen I'd knock Jorge like I didn't know Jorge or whatever I just knew there are people who are making sculptures out of money that's the money sculptures that's like and that was like in everyone's report like buried at the back and I just like this gold and they're not like they're not showing it they're there they're just using it as a gimmick or as like I feel this is like a really powerful thing and put you know in line with all these other visual anchors you're starting as a newcomer a bunch of people are newcomers to this story they have no idea where Venezuela is a lot of the viewers but they're starting to piece together in the first one minute they're starting to piece together what's going on because the visuals have done all of the work and I've been able to say some words here and there to kind of give them meaning but the visuals are doing all of the work [Music] agility Neapolis a big man more than a million Venezuelans have moved into Colombia in recent years and in an era of record-setting migration when orders seem to be getting thicker harder to cross Libya doing something that you don't see very often it's open its doors and letting people okay so so I'll use like the stylistic like big synthy music stuff to get to make it like energetic and fun to watch like in the sense that like in as much as I'm gonna be giving people facts and visual information I want to still be fun and interesting and like to get people the endurance to stick around yes but I believe in the first 10 and 15 seconds for a different reason a lot of people will frame it it's like you got to catch them or they're gonna be gone I believe instead of that instead of like oh people are searching for entertainment you better like lock them in with some catchy visual my idea is like probably like tell them what you're gonna tell them like give them a promise of a visual promise or a story promise and say like in these like these first 10 or 15 seconds is like you're like you're throwing out there like hey this is what you're gonna learn and this is like a vibe of what you're gonna get and yeah I totally believe in the idea of front-loading your best visual anchors because it's a promise to your viewer of like what they're gonna get and then you of course have to deliver on that promise if we don't deliver that's the greatest sin of all but if you if you deliver on that then that really instills a sense of like okay like these people promise something cool and the game isn't cool all right I'm gonna give you one more visual anchor on the other side of the slate here just to give you an idea of what these look like and then and then I want to talk about kind of structure and how to think about visual anchors and for account of cooler guys now totally bust later this is the very end of the border rise people are entering and the one thing that you'll hear that is a little interesting is sick compra de nada yo my hair continued on their way to make some money is the women to sell their hair or basically get a hundred thousand pesos like $30 okay visual anchor right there like you don't need you don't need to explain anything to say look at the desperation that's happening here these people have to sell their hair that's one that I didn't know about I went down there saw it said that proves the point better than anything I could ever say let's go cover that [Music] and the guys are reflecting on how much this hot dog we caught if they were trying to buy in Venezuela with the current economic situation okay poverty that we've just never seen laughter okay so all of that visual anchor after visual anchor after visual anchor the hot dog that the hair whatever it was you can't just have a video or a piece that's just all visual anchors you need to have what what I call like bridge like a bridge in between them so like all of that was visual anchors you need context if people are gonna start to understand this and context is not gonna be as rich in visual evidence it's gonna be more ancillary visuals like b-roll you know like here I'm gonna turn this down and we'll just watch some of it but it's it's b-roll b-roll meaning like footage that is associated with but it's not let's see here but it's not direct visual evidence of whatever we're talking about housed or hair actually so after all those visual anchors we now get a history section you know this this shot I could have done 15 different a hundred a thousand different shots of you know closed down stores and destroyed its kind of visual evidence but it's more indirectly related the country into an economic if that their worth than the Great Depression and the fall of the Soviet Union okay so a story can't be all visual anchors it needs stitching or it needs something to bridge the gap in between them only go so long before I got to get to the next visual anchor so I'll go and my next visual anchor is going to be a data visualization this this right here this is visual evidence Columbia has taken in way more than everyone else around this is a piece of evidence that you can show someone and then you can show that they that all these other countries are putting up increased security and Columbia's not so that's a that's a really powerful one anyway so this idea of anchor bridge anchor bridge is it's my formula and it might sound simple but finding those visual anchors is hard and that's where the reporting comes in that's the majority of my reporting there's a lot of contexts and numbers and stuff but a lot of it is hunting for those visuals and hunting for what's best gonna show this trend or this issue with visuals yeah exactly if you're and just depending like for a newcomer to this issue they won't know the history like you I gave given them enough context to say like whoa something bigs going on here this is crazy what's happening Venice was in crisis if I'm gonna then teach them like what this has like what meaning this has it then has to be a little bit more of this kind of zoom out and talk about the history and talk about that but that's but I think that's more specific to my format in the sense that it's explainer explainer for us means we're trying to get in 15 minutes or 11 minutes or whatever someone to come on the other side and say oh I have a pretty good idea of like what this crisis is about and what's happening oh good good Russian perspective the United States perspective the natives perspective no you choose to explain yeah so usually so explainer usually is not perspective based explainer is supposed to be our objective and again back to the earlier comment like I don't believe that there's any true objective anything that is put in a linear form like we make decisions but explainer is supposed to be the Wikipedia article where you go and you can say okay in 2015 inflation was this much and the country started to collapse and so a lot of people started to leave that's what explainer is in terms of the perspectives and stuff that is much more subject to bias and that's a hard decision yeah for the Israel explaining israeli-palestinian one like you you have to make decisions and you can argue with what just like what the best mix is but as journalists like that's what we're doing like we're we can't talk to literally every single person otherwise we're political scientists and like and even then they're making decisions so we we choose based on what we think is a generous mix of perspectives but it's never gonna it's never going to like meet the standard of some perfectly objective sample I believe of course yeah I mean it's information on the internet like yeah yeah and that's a fair criticism yeah there's oh and like I say my thought is that there's always going to be you can pick apart any 11 minute video and say well you know technically you didn't include this and this and this there's always something more to include and that's actually my as someone who comes from an academic background I constantly struggle with like well if we added six more minutes to this we could go into this whole other thing with this one specifically by the way we we did a whole Venezuela explainer why the collapse of Venezuela explained which was a whole go at Chavez and and the history of Venezuela and so I felt less of the burden to take that on because I feel like on our Channel a few months earlier we had done like a very holistic look at it good yeah so I speak Spanish and so in this case and in Dominican Republic which is another Spanish speaking country I didn't need a translator in Haiti they were speaking Creole which is and I you and I usually will travel with a fixer translator in similar what's that no no a person a person a person on the ground who is in charge of basically like showing me the label and sometimes I won't like when I was in Israel actually reporting I didn't have a fixer which our house should have and basically someone who could help me get into places who speaks the language who can help me set up things beforehand those are usually locals though usually locals who do this for what's that yeah it's it's a day rate you know in Haiti $60 a day you know that budget I said earlier includes fees yeah yep totally yeah sometimes exactly these are macro stories these are macro explanations with Oh totally there's amazing stories from my format it's much more of a macro story it's Matt it's an explainer and that's that's the format I do there are other people who do micro stories who do amazing micro stories the New York Times op doc series does amazing micro stories and cheers to them like that's him that's a great thing my format is much more of a broad geopolitical or kind of macro level academically informed approach with some micro elements that help humanize or give a face to that trend but by no means is it supposed to be a nuanced micro story about one person's story or sojourned within yeah yeah that see and this is where we go back to that kind of original idea of the power of having writer and technician come together because when I'm here writing the script I'll be sitting here looking at this script and I am immediately like this middle column I don't write a paragraph here without having something that goes there and because I know how to animate stuff and because I know how to shoot stuff I'm able to put direction here that feels exactly natural to what I would want to put there I if I was given a bunch of stuff would be much harder because I write this it's called visual first writing we write with the idea of specific visuals that we want to get and we write to the visuals we say look at this map look at this thing you know if you watch box videos you'll hear a lot of this is something and it's and it's like circling something on a document in animation and we're in a voiceover booth not looking to anything and we're saying this is a trend that bla bla bla and we're speaking to the visuals because we know what it is before we ever wrote it and so I'm not saying that everyone needs to be a cinematographer or an animator in order to do this but having a familiarity to be able to say I understand what my animator is capable of or I'm I'm I'm aware I can speak the language is going to make anyone a stronger writer I believe because concrete visual writing I think is easier to visualize but it's also just easier to understand yeah you mean like baked in like ones that are like because usually we'll have like on YouTube you can go in and put subtitles in a bunch of different languages here yeah so and that's another one so we've this is a little bit of tangent but we've found that we do these community guided subtitles where people are able to all these different languages they're able to submit them and then they can be peer reviewed and then we can give them a review as well with Google Translate so it's not like 100 percent accuracy but it's reviewed enough do we know where it's not like it's not like like a hoax or something and then we'll publish them and then we'll take that caption file and we'll upload it to Facebook in fact that's what we did with this no actually we translated these we did it with I think I might've been Hong Kong it was some other one that allowed us to penetrate this whole other market on on Facebook suddenly it was like going viral in like Brazil and and we're like whoa and that's because we uploaded Portuguese or something I don't remember the exact example so we use the internal caption system because it allows it to then spread in the algorithms of all these other markets that if we just had English subtitles burned in it wouldn't do it wouldn't be able to have that reach yeah yeah yeah yeah so sometimes those will just some stories feel like they have a natural backbone like I'm working on this Sri Lanka India fishing story right now that just it just feels like the narrative is just there comes like it there's a natural history to it it just feels very clear stories like this where I've collected ten different things and now I have to place them in some linear fashion I usually will follow a similar model which is I call it look at this thing that's the intro look at this thing and then zoom out talk about the context and then zoom back in and look at some other things so look at this thing is this whole beginning and it's it's the money it's the hair it's the suitcases it's okay you just looked at all this and like you now get it let's zoom out and talk context okay it's an explainer explainer it's history history history sound bites b-roll and now it's let's dive back in and the rest of the piece our look at this thing's but much bigger ones so now I'm in this camp and there's this whole camp where they have this like thing where they sing the Venezuelans and the Colombians are singing and having this like big bonding moment and everyone's crying and it's like I stumbled upon this somehow and and then it's now I'm talking to Colombians who are literally letting Venezuelans live in their house as a part of this informal program that is like that they're just doing that's another piece of evidence and then it's what else is it and then it's I don't know what the last piece is yeah yeah there'll always be there will always be I feel like a piece of macro that needs to go to every little thing so I'll pop some clothes out but in terms of like the big story it's usually look at this thing a big macro context and then other look at this things that usually do have a little bit of like they need facts so they need something to give them meaning yeah I would say so I would say so it helps me it helps I think the viewer after a look at this thing they're like bought-in they're like what is this and then they will sit through four minutes of history and context that is necessary they have to learn this but you've energized them by like this is very satisfying visuals that are teaching you something now you're gonna suit the hard stuff that data the b-roll the archive the dates the facts the stuff that most people want to navigate away from on the internet there they're now bought in and then and then hopefully those are ground our retention rates seventy percent so 70% of people will finish which is yeah bananas on the internet but again you earn their attention they'll stick around we're winding down let's do a few more questions and then we'll close five more okay great did you have a question or no sorry I thought I saw this okay yep yep yeah so news stuff in the US I don't know how it works in other places but in the US we have this media law precedent called fair use yeah do you guys uh no fair use but basically the idea is if you are showing that a certain piece of content or a certain topic was a part of the public conversation during a time like for example the the civil or the the kind of civil war with the FARC in Colombia in the 80s and 90s I want to show that that's a big thing so I go find three different newscasters saying the FARC has taken over big swaths of land in southern Colombia and then the next newscaster said and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes in the next guest says something like that if I put those all three together that's fair use I've now shown that it's a part of the thing as part of the like public conversation and media losses I can use that and we can use that knowledge on the internet on TV like that is fair game for documentaries for anything in other cases if I want to license a piece of footage that doesn't fall within fair use I'll have to license it license it like from a stock site or from a news organization in terms of appearance releases for people yes I need to get an appearance release from anyone who appears on camera when I'm on the border and I'm talking to this lady who's or this Jorge you know it was like I'm not I'm I don't get an appearance release and he could technically come to us and make us take it down but I don't think you will so it just depends the situation like a lot especially these migrants like I give them this big document that like signs away and it just feels very intimidating like it's if I was publishing on TV I would have to do this and I do and I and I get them saying every day am I allowed to film you they say yes that's like yeah tech my lawyers say that's not fine but I'm like my always like well technically you need this and some in still push me and I'm like man like I'm like when I'm running gun and I'm like sitting in like hey can you talk to me for three minutes and then I'm like pull up this long paper let's translate it and read it it's not gonna happen so anyway yeah my lawyers are not like the lawyers of box would love if everything was buttoned up but they've given us a little bit of leeway because this stuff is not a lightning rod for people suing us like we're telling these people's stories and like and it's never been a problem but we try whenever it's possible we do big interviews and stuff like will obviously get a release you know Vox we've had people want us to take stuff down but it's corporations who like our oh you're using our music or something like like my friend Estelle my colleague does a thing called earworm which is like a music explainer show breakdown songs and do this kind of educational thing on music and the record labels always come around and have her take it down even though she's using three seconds of a piece to annotate it which technically fair use is allowed but they push and we just don't want to fight it so we we take stuff down but no like when it's hot when it's telling people's stories no one ever comes around like that let's take stuff down anyone oh I keep forgetting I'm sorry guys so it was totally inspired by the our our previous work and specifically borders and this work but also all of the kind of animated work that we do on YouTube was the precedent for explained which is a Netflix show that are like yes it's only on Netflix and they wanted to try this new idea of explainers that pull off a topic and try to give a broad understanding of it and I would say that we've landed somewhere in the middle between kind of TV documentary and a true Vox explainer like it's kind of landed in this middle ground where it definitely has that Vox DNA but it definitely has own personality but yeah the the heart of it is inspired and it's created by like I did one of the episodes and my other colleagues kind of did some of the episode some of the people who were there at the beginning of Vox to kind of help inject some of that stylistic approach but it's very different working on a big TV crew where I was I was I wasn't going out and shooting it was directing you know and suddenly I'm like I'm not very good at this like I want to go back to like you know the touch of the camera or where I can actually think of the visuals you know like that was my kind of experience but my other colleagues have really enjoyed it enjoy the experience of being on on TV alright let's do one last last question okay yeah that's remanded her comes in so my editor Mona who's a amazing journalist and leader and she is the filter so she's the one we have a good relationship and she just has no qualms with being like this is heavy-handed you're indulging your obsession with drones like settle down like the music here's a little too much like she will go in and she she doesn't have any attachment to the story and she just sits there and pokes holes in it and strengthens it in a way that makes it a better piece of journalism but also sensitive and in fact early accurate and you know totally accurate all of these things that I maybe get lost in when I'm in the weeds and I'm in kind of the artistic obsession of it but she helps balance that out and I I mean I can't say enough about having a good editor who just who just will do that and have that relationship but also respect your vision but but but also guide guide it in a way that makes it the best it can be and the most accurate and I would be lost without her so okay alright well thank you everyone for this this has been wonderful really appreciate it [Applause]

Channel: Jerusalem Press Club

Views: 63,906

Rating: 4.8440113 out of 5

Keywords: vox, johnny harris, vox borders, video journalist, journalist, videographer, how to make videos, how to make documentaries, press, reporter, video journalism

Id: lRq6rIiGFAU

Length: 86min 56sec (5216 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019