Adam Ellick, a videojournalist at The New York Times, visited my Craft class yesterday. His style is very different in many ways from the kind of video work we’re focusing on in VSW, so I thought I’d share some of the things he presented to the class during a Q & A.
When do you do a video? You do a video, Ellick said, “if you want to see it.” As an example, he showed us part of this video, which documents a little-known industry in Pakistan: those who make and sell S & M and bondage gear. First, he said, if you heard that idea, you’d probably want to actually see it. And second, he pointed especially to the look on the guys’ faces at certain moments, which are much more telling than their quotes alone would be.
Ellick said he abides by a 90/10 rule: 90 percent of the time, you don’t need to do a video. It’s those times, he said, when you say “you won’t believe this dude I met today” that only a video will do the justice to the subject. (N.B.: Ellick started out as a print journalist.)
What’s your method? Ellick said that — except in breaking news situations — he always spends at least a day with just a notebook first. Then he can get a sense of a place and of characters, so that when he returns with a camera, (a) he knows what to focus on, and (b) people are already comfortable with him. He also said that on the first day, with a notebook, he can gather the facts of a story, so that when he returns, he can focus on the emotional elements.
How do you structure a video story? As we’ve learned, it’s important to grab and hold the viewer’s attention immediately, Ellick said. After that, he said, he tries to think of what question he’s raised in the viewer’s mind, and then answer it. As an example of this kind of structure, he showed this video, about an American with only a high school diploma who started a hospital in Kashmir. He also said it’s important that there’s unfolding action (that sounds familiar…) to create tension and suspense.
What are your thoughts on narrated versus non-narrated video? (Full disclosure: I asked this question because I noticed he used plentiful narration in all of his videos.) Ellick said that he thinks narration is extremely useful to give background information, so that there is appropriate context for the characters’ emotional stories to unfold. He said he knows some people think non-narrated video is somehow superior, but that he’s come to disagree. On one of his first video assignments, he said, he was working with a print reporter who wrote an incredibly long script that he had to cut down. Even though the print reporter did not really understand video, he asked Ellick a question that has stuck with him: “Why are you afraid of information?”
Ellick also discussed this video, about the tax problem in Pakistan. (The problem being that no one there pays taxes, especially not the middle class and the wealthy, and that’s part of the reason Pakistan is so reliant on U.S. aid.) He said he’d wanted to do the story for a long time, because it’s an important one, but it took a while to find a visual hook — until he heard about the teams of transgendered tax collectors that Pakistan uses to try to shame tax evaders into paying. He ended up using that vignette as his (video) lede.
Adam Ellick came to the New York Times as a production assistant in 2005, when the video department was just getting started. He knew absolutely nothing about video [EDIT: This is what I thought he said, but according to his website he produced a documentary in the late 90s], but he impressed a higher-up there whom he’d met for lunch. “Technology is a distraction from journalism,” he said to my class, even after his years as a VJ. “Equipment doesn’t help you very much if you don’t know how to tell a story.” You can see the rest of his video work here, and on nytimes.com.
