By Ioana-Gabriela Matei | Mon., September 26, 10:06 AM
Source: Ioana-Gabriela MateiIoana-Gabriela Matei receiving course certificate from course trainers - Neil Everton and Kevin Fogarty
Every good reporter should have a little bit of Christopher Nolan inside. He should not be just a good writer, but also a good director. Why? Because in television news, images come before words. Simply filming a piece is not enough. Behind every catchy story are a reporter and a cameraperson who have deconstructed reality in frames: wide, medium and close shots. Afterwards, with the aid of a video editor, those pieces of reality were linked together in news material.
Television is very much like cinema. Yet, Christopher Nolan would have no room in television news. His world of fantasy is probably too big to fit in. Here, creativity is welcomed only in the techniques used to shoot and structure a story. The subject is always the truth. A news piece is a piece of reality, because the job of a journalist has never been other than to inform his viewers.
”The public expects us to hold a mirror in which they can see a reflection of reality", said one of the trainers we had at the Making Television News training. This Thomson Reuters Foundation course has confirmed to me that if I hold this mirror with my words, I probably bore the hell out of the viewers. So, I have to write less and let images tell the story, because they do it in a way that is a lot more entertaining.
For me, the most useful exercise was to create a short film (30-40 seconds) starting from a word like "jealousy" or "fear". No sounds accepted, just images. Afterwards, those who were not involved in the project had to guess the word. We split into teams, we came up with ideas of stories, we made story-boards, we divided ourselves into actors and directors and we succeeded! The results of this "struggle" were three short and very amusing films. They are proof that the initial phase of the transformation of 16 ordinary journalists into Christopher Nolans was completed.
I took all three films home on a memory stick. They will always remind me of an amazing week in which I gained interesting friends and valuable knowledge. Thank you, Thomson Reuters Foundation for allowing that to happen!
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