Academy Feed

iOS 12: Plenty of potential for mobile journalists, but it may take time

2018-09-05T14:52:57+00:00

iOS 12 is keenly awaited by journalists who rely on Apple’s operating system in their day-to-day work. We asked the Academy’s mobile journalism expert Marc Settle for his analysis of what’s changed and the implications for journalists and others:

Regular readers will know that it’s that time of year again - a review of the new version of iOS, the operating system that powers iPhones and iPads. Not every aspect of iOS 12 will be covered here, just the new features which will be of most use to journalists in general and especially mobile journalists - “mojos”, the growing number of reporters and producers creating content with a smartphone.

It’s surprising to note that many journalists continue to use their smartphones simply as phones - which isn’t very smart, given the power of the device they carry with them all the time. It’s also surprising that iOS 12 will run on every device that currently runs iOS 11. This will therefore include iPhone 5s from way back in 2013 – now something of a dinosaur.

This also means that for the second year running, the oldest iPhone is not being left behind, bereft and unable to download the latest version of the operating system. It is questionable just how well iOS 12 will work on a device of that age but at least it won’t instantly become obsolete – even if #iphoneslow is likely to trend as people complain that their five-year-old phone with accumulated crud isn’t as fast as they’d like.

But the fact that iOS 12 can actually run on such an old phone is part of the reason why I write these reviews when I don’t produce something similar for Android despite it being the world’s most used operating system - on about three and a half billion smartphones globally, compared to 800 million or so for iOS. The reason is that Androids aren’t uniformly updated in the way iPhones are. Depending on the make and model, you might get the latest version of Android immediately, eventually, or quite possibly never – even on relatively new devices.

By contrast, anyone with a compatible iPhone can download iOS 12 on the very day it’s made available - assuming the demand doesn’t cause Apple’s servers to fall over as has happened in the past. All that means that this review will, I hope, be immediately useful to the vast majority of owners of iOS devices, whereas a review of the latest version of Android wouldn’t be similarly useful.

To put this in more context Android’s Oreo came out in August 2017 and yet a year later it is only running on 12% of Android devices - almost as many devices are still using Kitkat from 2013. Apple released iOS 11 a month after Oreo and within a week it was on 33% of iOS devices and on the majority after just three weeks.

There’s also the small matter that iOS is the platform of choice for most major broadcasters and individual journalists, even if an increasing number are using Android. And it’s what we use here at the ��̳, my employer - so there’s that too.

iOS 12 has been available to developers and anyone willing to join the beta programme from June 2018. Since then, features have been added, removed and tweaked. After using it for several months, the changes are clear enough for me to write this review albeit with a caveat: I’ve only been testing it on a relatively old iPhone 6S Plus as I didn’t dare risk my 8 Plus in case problems caused it to malfunction. As a result, there may be a few features I’ve missed.

What’s in it for Mojo?

In addition to finding synonyms for the word “features”, another long-standing challenge with this annual review has been deciding which new features to look at in depth, which to mention in passing and which to skip over totally. If you want an all-encompassing review, then I’d point you to @macstories.

Some mobile journalists are real experts. For inspiration, check out Nick Garnett and Dougal Shaw at the ��̳ and Philip Bromwell, Wytse Vellinga, Leonor Suarez, Yusuf Omar and Geertje Algera from elsewhere.

My focus here is on what’s new and interesting to journalists in general and to mobile journalists like the above in particular.

Video, Audio and Photos

Apple has finally updated Voice Memos. And that’s my review of the major changes in iOS 12 to video, audio and photos.

Ok, that’s not ALL that’s new, but in truth there’s not much that made me think “now THAT’S going to be immediately really useful to all the mojos I know” from these three important mojo categories. There are numerous smaller and tangential changes that may well prove handy, and plenty of tweaks with lots of potential, but beyond the revamp of Voice Memos, little jumps out at me.

The list of things that haven’t changed that would have caught the attention of mobile journalists around the world remains depressingly long. The iPhone camera still takes photos that are 4:3 and not 16:9 to match video and which would fit widescreen TVs.

The video camera still lacks an option to shoot at 25 frames per second (fps), which is the standard for TV broadcast in the UK, rather than 30 or 60 fps, which are the American standards. And there’s no way to monitor the audio while recording on the Voice Memos app.

Perhaps next year? I won’t hold my breath.

If you want to read about the changes that relate directly to video, audio and photos then you should whizz down and stop at the sub-heading “Faster, Faster, Faster”; but first I want to consider a couple of innovations within iOS 12 which have the power to be truly transformative.

But as journalists are a funny bunch (I’m allowed to say that, as for many years I was one) it’s hard to be sure how they’ll use a feature, let alone how often. The following could have hugely interesting and powerful uses for journalists or they could just be ignored by one and all. I’m going to hope for the former but I won’t be surprised by the latter.

Shortcuts

The first is Shortcuts. I’m using capital S because Apple does, and also because this could be really big. I’d go as far as to say that Shortcuts could change how we use our devices in a fundamental way akin to what happened with the explosion of third party apps in 2008.

The increased automation could lead to our devices doing something for us better and faster than we could do it ourselves. And you might not even need to type anything to get it done.

Shortcuts is based on an iOS app called Workflow which Apple bought outright in March 2017. A year and a half later it’s been integrated into the operating system itself as a way of automating tasks that could otherwise involve a lot of tapping and switching between apps. But rather than needing to know about coding, these tasks will either be suggested to users or they can build their own through a simple(ish) drag-and-drop interface in the new Shortcuts app.

Predicting how transformative Shortcuts will be is going to depend on just how well each individual learns to use it, what they want to achieve and to some extent the apps they have on their device. I hope now you’re beginning to understand all my caveats.

It’s taken me a long time to understand what I can do with Shortcuts and each time I think I’ve got it, I find new aspects to get my head around. But once users have got the hang of it, the likely result will be that they will be spending less time using their phones as numerous consecutive taps on the screen will be replaced by - at best - just one and possibly even none, given that Siri can be used to get things going.

How Shortcuts works

Shortcuts is a visual programming tool but you won’t need to know a ‘proper’ programming language or syntax, and there’s barely a {curly bracket} in sight.

Instead, you construct a “flow of actions” in the correct order to help you achieve the outcome you want. Or better still, you use a Shortcut that has been constructed by someone else to get the job done.

With some 290 actions to choose from, the possibilities are huge although they are limited by logic – for example, there’s no point asking the app to show you your latest photo and then to extract the audio from it as an MP3.

Old-school computer users could appreciate the analogy of “macros”. Others could think of this like dominoes: there can be two or there can be 22 lined up, each containing a discrete action and with one flowing to the next until the action reaches its planned outcome.

Here are some examples to make this clearer.

You could set a Shortcut up so that it gets hold of your most recent screenshot from the camera roll, opens it with tools for annotating and then add the annotated image to an email which you can then send before, finally, the screenshot is presented to you to be deleted. And you can make all this happen with one tap or a spoken word.

Another could work like this: the system looks up on a map where you are, it then asks Apple Maps for directions and estimated driving times, it then creates an iMessage to a specific contact, based on your calendar, showing both where you are now and how long it should take to get to your destination. And it sends it.

Workflows is the Apple app which will be replaced by Shortcuts in iOS 12

You can access Shortcuts in three ways; suggested to you on your lock screen or on the Spotlight search screen; powered by Siri; or within the Shortcuts app (which isn’t in the public beta of iOS 12 and is only available to developers).

The good news is that you won’t usually have to work too hard to come up with a Shortcut as it’ll often be based on how you currently use your device. The integration with Siri could well be the way many users get to learn how to use Shortcuts. Until now, the voice assistant in iOS could only act on a series of built-in set phrases and you often had to hope your diction was clear enough for Siri to work.

iOS 12 shows you Shortcuts it thinks will be useful and you can tell Siri what you want to say in order for that action to happen. You’ll find suggestions in “Siri + search” and “my Shortcuts”, based on how you’ve been using your device recently.

This means you’ll see some sensible sub-categories such as “create a new contact” or “record a new voice memo” and some that are not so sensible such as “Send message: how much broccoli do we need? to wife” which was admittedly moderately useful when I sent that message to my wife yesterday but it doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing I’ll text her too often, so a Shortcut seems somewhat unnecessary.

Shortcuts suggested by Siri – broccoli not included.

It works pretty well too. If you want to open your camera roll and see your videos, check Siri for “more Shortcuts” and, based on your recent device usage, you could well see it as an option.

Then, record your command to Siri, which could be something as logical as “show me my videos” or as surreal as “14 green bananas”. (I did the latter and it worked, much to the bemusement of my colleagues who heard me say “14 green bananas” followed by an excitable and triumphant “yes!” as my videos appeared on my screen.)

This opens up the prospect of a journalist creating Shortcut phrases that only their Siri can interpret and act upon. Bear in mind that the Shortcuts above are as of nothing when contrasted with the real power of the Shortcuts app, where one tap will set in motion a vastly complex series of actions with dozens of dominoes falling.

Its predecessor, the Workflow app itself, is still in the App Store, so I’d suggest downloading it now to help you get your head around what it looks like and what it can do before it’s replaced by Shortcuts in iOS 12. The app contains numerous useful Workflows made by others that you can download now to use.

Suggested Workflows from the iOS app. I’d like to think that Apple’s developers have corrected “less” to “fewer”.

The best users of Shortcuts could end up doing more with their phones without being on their phones as much - leaving them with more time for the actual reporting.

One very handy Workflow I’ve been using extracts the audio from a YouTube video as an MP3 and saves it to Dropbox, which would normally be quite a cumbersome and time-consuming procedure.

All I needed to do was save it to my Workflow app (as I don’t have access to Shortcuts yet), open a YouTube video in Safari and tap to run the Workflow extension. Within seconds, the audio was sitting in my Dropbox folder ready for me to use.

And with the help of Nick Garnett, the éminence grise of mojo at the ��̳, we adapted this flow so the final destination of the audio was as an M4A into the ��̳’s own PNG app. Always being aware of the copyright aspects of extracting the audio from someone else’s video on YouTube, this could be fantastically useful for any mobile journalist.

You can even make your own flow of actions using the drag and drop interface but that may well be the domain of the adventurous. Some of my colleagues in the mobile journalism world are already doing this, which means that the more collaborative among us will soon be sharing our own Shortcuts to help everyone work more efficiently.

Apple’s integration of Workflow into iOS opens up possibilities which would previously have been off-limits even to the most experienced user of the app. This is because iOS can gain access to system-level processes, such as Find My iPhone, Apple Pay or Low Power Mode. With the last one, for example, there can be an action to toggle on and off.

So expect to see your apps going big on Shortcuts by offering suggestions to get the best out of the app as well as an “Add to Siri” option. It’s likely too that before long there’ll be individual apps that collect the best Shortcuts more generally.

Some developers though may come to resent the new kid on the block - such as those who make GIF apps. There’s currently a Workflow that retrieves the last three photos you took and turns them into a GIF.

That used to be something you needed an app for. All this could lead to fewer apps being made overall – because once you learn how to build Shortcuts, and you come across something you can’t do, you may be able to build your own Shortcut more quickly than finding an app that does it for you.

Augmenting Reality

The second big change builds on something that first came out in iOS 11 – ARkit, which is Apple’s implementation of Augmented Reality (AR). This is how the camera shows on a screen not simply an object or a face but also how either of those change or move in relation to how the camera is moved by the user. ARKit helps power Memoji (which I’ll come to later).

Another simple way you’ll see ARKit on iOS 12 will be in a new app called Measure, which as the name suggests, can show you the dimensions of real objects the camera can see.

Enterprising developers who are already offering AR measuring apps should expect downloads to tail off dramatically once iOS 12 is out.

Below, I used Measure on a piece of A4, which has defined measurements of 297mm by 210mm.

Close - but is it close enough?

The real-world applications for this could be manifold but it’ll need clever developers to make apps that the average journalist can use, given that the average journalist will no more be able to code for ARKit than they could ride on a unicycle blindfolded while reciting Bulgarian poetry.

One impressive prototype showed an AR contact card where relevant information about a user was displayed around them. Apple says that eye tracking in the iPhone X has improved, opening up huge possibilities whereby what you see on a screen could depend on where you’re looking at the screen.

Furthermore, AR images and even 3D scans of real objects will be viewable within webpages in Safari. Could this herald more innovation from news sites and others where stories are augmented by relevant pop-up images and videos? There could also be interesting creative possibilities now that ARKit lets users leave a digital message in the real world for others to view at the same location later in time.

Faster, Faster, Faster

No manufacturer would ever announce that its new device is slower than its predecessor, so it’ll come as little surprise that Apple is keen to stress how much faster iOS 12 makes things work. What are trumpeted as “system-wide improvements” have led Apple to claim that iOS 12 devices will work more quickly.

Journalists (and others) can access the camera faster, which is nice but hardly transformative. Overall, Apple boasts that apps launch 40 per cent faster, the keyboard 50 per cent faster and the camera, a whopping 70 per cent faster.

And yes, holding my 2017 iOS 11 iPhone 8 Plus in one hand and my 2015 iOS 12 iPhone 6 Plus in the other, I can indeed confirm that the camera was ready to be used more quickly in the latter - by a few milliseconds. In all honesty, it’s barely noticeable and I can’t say that this will make a major difference to any journalist wanting to take a photo or record some video.

The features available in the iOS camera have changed but not if you want to take actual photos. Strange, but true: open the camera in iOS 12 and there’s nothing new it can do - although owners of dual camera models (7 Plus, 8 Plus and X) might notice improvements to Portrait Mode, where the foreground subject stands out in focus against a blurred-out background.

But open the camera in iMessages and suddenly novelties abound. In an obvious bid to appeal to the Snapchat/Instagram Stories generation, you can add all sorts of effects, shapes and stickers, even if these are only animated in the preview but not when you send or receive them. But, as I said, this isn’t available in the actual camera, only the camera in iMessage.

Stickers in iOS 12 messages

One workaround could be to add all the stickers and effects you want and then send that to yourself, save it to your camera roll and then use elsewhere - but one thing there’s never enough of in news is time, so probably not. Just hurry up and add it to the main camera, Apple.

By the time you read this, Apple may well have announced the new range of iPhones where it’s widely rumoured that the back camera will be able to do all the exciting things the Messages app is able to do on the front.

There’s one innovation that could actually be detrimental to journalists in some circumstances, although it’s touted as an extra security measure: if an iOS 12 iPhone is rebooted or powered off, the camera shortcut is no longer available from the lock screen. It only reappears once you’ve entered your passcode.

A New Tool for Visual Storytelling?

More creative journalists with the latest iPhone might be able to take advantage of innovations to the animated digital cartoon-like characters that can be made using the front-facing camera.

Previously, an iPhone X was only able to make what Apple termed “Animoji” - animations of animals like pandas, lions, and roosters (and, much to the amusement of my four-year-old son, the poo Emoji). Added to the Animoji zoo are the tiger and koala, among others. The real world uses in journalism remain minimal.

But iOS 12 takes things in a whole new direction as now you can customise yourself into a cartoon character. These “Memoji” can be designed so the animated face resembles the user, with their hair colour, face shape, skin tone, eye colour and more.

Memoji can either be disembodied heads on a blank background or can replace the user’s head with the animated version atop their torso. Combine this with improved facial detection, so the Memoji of “you” winks when you wink and “your tongue” sticks out when you stick out your tongue, and you can record a cartoon creation of yourself doing whatever you want (as long as it’s legal in your jurisdiction).

Memoji as demonstrated by digital innovator Sarah Jones (@virtualsarahj)

So how could that be useful to journalists?

It clearly won’t be appropriate for all stories or indeed all journalists, but for certain outlets a journalist could record a Memoji of themselves on location and use it to tell stories in a highly stylised and engaging way.

This is not something I expect to see from ��̳ journalists any time soon but it will be interesting to see how other news organisations use it and how it goes down with their audiences.

With photos, there are some minor but potentially useful changes to how your images can be annotated.

Go to edit a photo, tap on “mark up” and while the range of pens remains the same, press and hold on one of them to reveal options for the thickness of the nib from wide highlighter to thin pen-tip, and an opacity slider. Also, the range of colours is wider. It’s no longer limited to white, black, blue, green, yellow: now there are a hundred choices.

New nibs

New colours

Editing the photo is one thing; finding it is another. The layout of photos and videos is radically different, meaning that any muscle memory gained over the years will have to be retrained.

Until now, folders containing videos and photos were organised into albums vertically, meaning that to find a video, selfie, panorama or a timelapse you moved the screen up or down. There was also the rather helpful visual clue of your most recent media of that type being visible on the front of that folder as a preview.

Now your camera roll is still visible top-left but to see any others you need to swipe left and right. But this will only show folders you’ve made. If you want to find your selfies, timelapses or screenshots, you need to swipe the screen upwards as these are all hidden towards the bottom. But they are not “fully” there as - worst of all, in my view, - iOS 12 has done away with the image previews and merely presents the media type category by name.

Perhaps this is why “search” for photos has been improved in iOS 12; you might not be able to find things so quickly, so you will need iOS to do it for you instead with a search.

The suggestions get narrowed down as you start typing and results are more targeted with multiple keywords, along with images being grouped into broad categories – events, people, places and groups.

My own device did well with “microphone” – a 100% success rate.

Search microphone

But less so with “car” where it dropped to 50%.

Other image-related changes include iCloud sharing of links and a new “For You” tab but neither is particularly relevant to journalism.

The quality of photos you can take with the iPhone camera is pretty impressive these days but some people still like to take photos on what I believe is known as a DSLR camera. For them, importing images should be easier with iOS 12 as it’s able to spot duplicates more quickly and also letting you view the photos in greater detail before actually adding them to the iPhone.

Voice Memos

So what of Voice Memos, which I flagged earlier as the major change?

For many mobile journalists, these innovations may actually be of scant relevance as any decent mojo won’t be using Voice Memos as their audio recording app of choice. Instead, they’ll be using better third party options such as Just Press Record, Ferrite or Voice Record Pro.

And ��̳ journalists should be using our in-house app PNG which has a great voice recording component, with the added bonus of actually letting you hear what you’re recording - as for some reason audio monitoring isn’t possible on Voice Memos.

But as Apple has updated Voice Memos for the first time since iOS 7 back in 2013, the least I can do is outline what’s different.

For starters, there’s a choice of recording type in Settings-Voice Memos. In early iOS 12 betas, these were listed as AAC (smaller file size) and Uncompressed (larger file size) but that’s now been stripped down to either “compressed” or “lossless”.

Compressed audio can also be thought of as stripped down: the bit rate of a recording is reduced in order to make files smaller, although most people listening won’t be able to tell there’s anything missing. AAC compression is more advanced than MP3 compression and is the same technology that Apple Music and the iTunes store use for delivering music.

But some, be they journalists, music producers or audiophiles in general, will want recordings in an uncompressed format and will be happy to trade large file sizes for the ability to record at the highest fidelity, which is where “lossless” comes in. As the name suggests, no bits are lost.

Both options result in an M4A wrapper containing the AAC file. If quality matters - and in broadcast journalism it really should - then use “lossless”; if it doesn’t matter so much, for example recording a note for your own records, then “compressed” will be fine.

What will make a difference to a journalist will be the size of a file. Set your iPhone to record “compressed” and a five-minute file comes out at 2mb, which is small enough to attach to an email for sending.

The same five-minute file at “lossless” is a huge 40mb - far too big to email and it’ll take longer to send via other means too. It’s still a fraction of the size of a video where five minutes can be 500mb on average, but these larger audio files could prove problematic. There’s also no easy way to change from one format to another if necessary.

Staying in “settings”, there are, for the first time, choices over how long deleted Voice Memo recordings are kept. Previously, the choice was between keeping a recording on your device or deleting it - with no going back.

Now, there’s a “recently deleted” folder for Voice Memos as there is for photos and videos, so if you delete one in error you’ll be able to retrieve it for a day, a week a month or indeed forever. (But if you set the recently-deleted folder to clear recordings out “immediately”, you’ll be back where you were in iOS 11). Recordings can also be given a location-based title as soon as you start, rather than simply “new recording”.

The whole design and layout of Voice Memos is new too, with the app only functioning while in portrait mode. Even so, there’s been one simple useful improvement: the screen can now rotate through 180 degrees but the recording waveform moves to the bottom so it’s not covered by a windshield if you’re holding the device upside down to point the microphone towards your guest.

iOS 11 on the right, iOS 12 on the left

You still start recording by pressing the big red button - but for weeks I was convinced that iOS 12 had removed the option to pause: tapping on the red button didn’t do that as it does in iOS 11. Instead, that gesture stops the recording.

But I discovered that to reveal the pause button, you swipe upwards on the title of the recording to expand the screen to a larger "Card", with a design similar to that of podcasts on iOS. Further echoing podcasts, there’s a 15 second rewind/fast forward option which could allow you to go backwards and re-record over a mistake.

When you do stop recording, the file is saved automatically – quicker than iOS 11 where you’d stop, be offered the option to title it and then have to press Save.

Editing Voice Memos is different too, with functionality that echoes simple video editing on iOS. Tap the blue square to go into edit mode and all your audio will be visible in a large central window and also in a thin rectangular yellow-bordered window at the bottom of the screen.

You can make rough in and out points by moving the start and finish parts of the yellow window and then use the larger yellow vertical line on the main window to finesse them. "Trim" keeps only the section you’ve isolated; "Delete" gets rid of the bit in the middle and puts the rest together.

But as with iOS 11, there’s no undo button so if you make an error in your edit, there’s no going back. But there is a way to have a second chance, thanks to the new option to make a copy of your recording. Do this as soon as you can and as often as is necessary and you’ll always have an unedited version available - leaving you free to edit as much as you want and as badly as you want.

Another new feature is "Replace": before even entering edit mode, position the blue bar at the place where you want to drop in new audio and press "Replace". Voice Memos will now overwrite the original recorded audio (but again with no undo option).

While compiling this review, I also looked at some produced by other tech sites - and it’s thanks to MacWorld that I can even tell you about this feature in Voice Memos.

On some iOS devices, you can “insert” audio into a recording, not simply replace it. I only found out about this from their review as it didn’t show up on my iPhone 6S Plus, nor on their 7 Plus…but it did on their iPhone X.

Next to the blue square is (apparently) the icon of a diamond; tap on that and move the playhead to where you want to insert audio and then start recording. Rather than recording over what you currently have, this will instead shove everything already recorded along a bit and put in some new audio.

For those with long memories, this is what you could do with MiniDisc recorders, and as with those now defunct devices, this could be a simple way to make a recorded package, with a bit of practice.

There’s a major and useful addition to how recordings can be shared and stored, with iCloud now an option. To access the share option, tap the three dots under the name of your recording.

This means that there’s a new method for filing audio: record on Voice Memos, save to iCloud and a colleague in the newsroom using the same Apple ID can access the audio immediately.

One final thing about Voice Memos: the app is finally on iPad, which had been lacking the feature since day one, for reasons that have long been unclear.

Well, Well, Well

iOS 12 sees Apple going big on “digital wellness”, trying to wean us away from our addiction to our smartphones by offering features that show how long we’re on our device and that can limit how long we can spend using various types of app.

To me, this falls into the category of something that applies to all iPhones users and not something of specific relevance to journalists - apart from perhaps those with a career death-wish.

They may choose to use the new “time limiting” option and restrict their ability to open a video camera app to only a few minutes. If they try to exceed that, they can’t record what’s happening, no matter how good the story is.

But no doubt this will be a godsend for parents looking to wean their children from Snapgram or Instabook. There’s a simple over-ride once a limit is set but parents can password-protect it.

Also, certain apps can be moved into a category so they are “always allowed”. There’s also now an option to limit the notifications you receive at night so you don’t start checking iMessages or Twitter if you wake before you plan to.

Running out of battery can be annoying for everyone but a disaster for journalists who rely on their phone in so many ways to get their work done. iOS 12 provides even more information than its predecessor which showed only which apps used what amount of battery.

Now, users can drill down in much more detail to see not just which apps these were, but also hour-by-hour usage. This could help determine rogue apps: if, for example, one app that you barely recall using between 10:00 and 11:00 is shown to have used a disproportionately large amount of your battery, then something’s awry and will need appropriate action taken.

In addition to the above, there are plenty of other tweaks that journalists and non-journalists alike might find useful.

Notifications can be grouped by app, to prevent your lock screen becoming overwhelmed.
Your iPhone can suggest and remember for you a long password, and sync it across devices.
Your phone can warn you if you’re using the same password on different websites and apps.
A passcode sent by text message should automatically populate the field it’s needed for, rather than you needing to copy and paste between messages and the site or app you need it for.

One long-awaited development will have to wait a little bit longer: early betas of iOS 12 enabled group FaceTime calling, with up to 32 audio or videos calls at once but this was removed from the most recent beta.

When it does go live, it could help teams with planning and co-ordination with many colleagues on the same video call. But there’s still no way to record a FaceTime call on the device itself; if that ever works, that would let a journalist call and interview a guest in vision without needing to go via a studio.

Without dismissing this version of iOS as insignificant, it’s hard to argue that it’ll make an immediate material difference to how most mobile journalists use their devices. There’s a huge amount of potential undoubtedly, but that potential can only be unlocked by the individual in conjunction with their device.

Another step change will come in the next generation of iPhones and once developers have updated their apps or brought out totally new ones to take advantage of the creative possibilities afforded by iOS 12.

My Mojo Diet: Two years on

2018-08-31T14:36:38+00:00

Two years ago video journalist Dougal Shaw went on a ‘mojo diet’ (mojo stands for mobile journalism). The diet involved ditching his normal, broadcast camera. Instead he used just his smartphone to film his online and TV features for ��̳ News. Now he’s taken his diet one step further:

My ‘mojo diet’ was so good I’ve stuck to it ever since. It’s made my journalism leaner and more practical.

Gone are the days of lugging around huge bags containing my camera kit and tripod. This is a big deal when you’re working on your own. Everything I need can be easily fitted into a small rucksack when I’m filming with my smartphone. I’m as nimble as a radio journalist.

But recently I decided to shed a few more pounds. I ditched my tripod, even though it’s light, it took up a lot of space in my bag. And I also decided to abandon my battery-powered LED light, which is about the size of my smartphone - and slightly heavier.

New rig: Includes iPhone 8 Plus, iOgrapher rig and Rode adaptor for microphone

I wondered if this would free up my filmmaking. I was reminded of the ‘Dogme 95’ rules of cinema, which is followed by Scandinavian directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. They tried to make their films more naturalistic by banning tripods, artificial lights and music.

I decided to try this approach. I work for a programme called World Hacks where I conceive, shoot, edit and report short-form video features for a News audience.

My first chance to use the technique was a story about community volunteers who learn to use laser guns to catch speeding motorists.

A group of community speed detector volunteers

I filmed this piece entirely handheld, with my smartphone secured in a rig.

For GVs (general views, in this case atmospheric shots like passing vehicles), the lack of a tripod was no problem. The smartphone being light, it’s easy to hold steady - especially with a rig with handles.

I edit my videos on my Macbook, using Final Cut X. This has a very good stabilisation feature if required, which can fix shaky shots in a matter of seconds by cropping them slightly.

Filming interviews handheld was less convenient than with a tripod. But on the plus side, if you have a contributor who likes to move around, you can easily move with them.

In this interview I tried placing the microphone on top of the rig

Not using a light was no problem. I was filming in the afternoon in classic British weather, which suits mojo: an overcast day where consistent cloud coverage acts as a kind of light diffuser.

You can see the film I made here. As well as a lighter feline sub-story I stumbled across.

I don’t think the average viewer would notice the lack of tripod and lights. I immediately found that having less kit makes life easier.

But I also realised something else. It made the filming process more fast-paced and natural. The simple handheld mojo rig meant less faffing around, fewer awkward pauses while you get things ready.

This is important because any moments when you leave the contributor waiting, interrupts the flow. It gives him or her a chance to reflect on the artificial nature of filming. Their contribution can become stilted.

An interview with the founder of Olio in her kitchen using natural light

My second film using this method was about an app that allows strangers to meet up and share unwanted food that otherwise would have gone to waste.

Along with a World Hacks colleague, I arranged to follow a so-called ‘food waste hero’ as she went around north London one evening, collecting waste food from restaurants, then sharing it with people who visited her home.

On one hand, this was perfect for my new set up. My super-light mojo rig is well suited to fly-on-the-wall filming, as events unfold quickly.

As people met for the first time and went back and forth in the host’s house, I didn’t need to ask anyone to repeat their actions for the sake of television.

However, as this was filmed at night, the fact that I didn’t want to use my LED light panel was an issue.

In general I find that smartphones are very good at handling low light conditions. Filming outside, where streetlamps lit the scene, I was in fact able to get some nice, high-contrast, atmospheric shots.

But in one instance the available light I tried to use inside a shop for an interview was disappointing. It was only in the edit I could fully appreciate that these shots were a little soft and grainy.

Shots like this would have benefited from using my portable LED light

You can watch the film here.

I was also able to use this fly-on-the-wall approach to good effect in two pieces that involved filming with homeless people.

Filming with a smartphone allows you to build a strong relationship with the interviewee

The first was about a charity that helps homeless people when they’re admitted to hospital. You can watch the film here.

The second was about a scheme in Oxford designed to let people donate money to homeless people using their smartphone. You can watch the film here.

In both these stories I encountered something that often happens in mojo assignments. People who are not used to being filmed and are obviously nervous, seem relieved and relaxed when they see you’re using a smartphone, a familiar object - indeed, all the homeless I filmed with owned their own smartphones.

You can film discreetly with a mobile phone in public

The smartphone is something many people have used to film with themselves, with family and friends. If nothing else, it’s an icebreaker to talk about. Also, if people are happy to contribute, but are uncomfortable about being seen to be filmed in public, smartphone filming is perfect, because it’s so inconspicuous.

Inventor Peter Dearman

My final assignment during this modified mojo diet showed that filming dynamic action on a small and large scale can still be achieved without the tripod.

I was making a film about a part-time inventor who had developed a way to power refrigerated lorries with liquid nitrogen.

Using my handheld mojo rig, I filmed experiments with miniature pistons in his workshop. I captured trucks being loaded with pallets full of milk by forklift trucks. And I filmed cylinders being pumped with liquid nitrogen as white clouds poured out.

You can see all those moments here.

The lack of a tripod was not a problem. Being light, it’s easy to hold the phone for a steady shot. Or I could simply lean my small rig on a steady surface.

A lorry being filled up with liquid nitrogen

Does this method make for films with a more natural feel? I think so. When we experience our day-to-day lives, we don’t have completely steady tripod views. So a little movement in a film is arguably perfectly natural (as long as it isn’t so shaky as to be distracting).

Nor do we normally encounter people in real life who are perfectly studio-lit, with three-point lighting. So I would argue removing tripod and lights can add to the naturalism, as long as you take precautions.

Incidentally, one drawback people often point out about mojo is that there is no zoom. (You can swap lenses, but there is no adjustable zoom). Mojo practitioners will tell you “your legs are your zoom”.

If something is happening far away, you have to physically go there to film it. That’s why mojo is not suited to wildlife or wedding photography, for example.

But here again I would say, this is just like real life. Our eyes can’t zoom. Filming mojo isn’t just practical, convenient and a great way to keep your subjects relaxed, it’s inherently naturalistic.

You can get more mojo tips by following Dougal on Twitter: @dougalshaw��̳

Progress in VR: when the content is more interesting than the technology

2018-08-30T14:05:07+00:00

If you want to make virtual reality more real, it helps if you can mix it with a bit of real reality. That’s what happened when the ��̳ took its new VR project to the Royal International Air Tattoo in Gloucestershire.

Setting up their tent a few yards from a runway on which planes were taking off and landing in front of thousands of spectators, the ��̳ team offered a chance to escape from all that – into a Lancaster bomber on a raid over Berlin during the Second World War.

The combination of sights and sounds through the VR headset with the wind blowing through the tent and the background noise of planes made for a powerful visceral experience. One woman took off the headset and said the VR had been so immersive that she could even smell the aviation fuel in the Lancaster bomber.

Here are some other reactions, together with an explanation of the project from ��̳ VR Hub producer Dinah Lammiman and VR specialist Chris Long:

Many of those trying the project at the air show were new to VR. What was impressive about 1943 Berlin Blitz was that people emerging from the headsets were as likely to comment on conditions in the Lancaster, the age of the air crews or the length of the flight as they were to say anything about VR.

If VR producers can make something so engaging that their audience’s attention is on the content rather than the form, the medium must surely be coming into its own.

The ��̳’s guide to VR

��̳ VR Hub

The ��̳’s VR app

The making of a 360 video ��̳ documentary

Learning through technology, with the help of old-fashioned human contact

2018-08-03T13:46:23+00:00

First impressions of the Connected Learning Summit in Boston: it’s bigger, smarter and has better coffee and snacks – zucchini muffins! – than the equivalent gatherings in the UK.

Three days of talks and demos are promised in the plush surroundings of the MIT Media Lab. Before the first session I chat to a media consultant from Tokyo, a woman running a community learning organisation in Chicago and the founder of a learning startup, who, with her friend, a media professor, has driven for seven hours across New England to be here. It’s an eclectic mix.

The conference announces itself as the first annual Connected Learning Summit (slogan: Create. Play. Mobilize.) Its tone and subject area are defined in the first event, a conversation between the director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito and Baratunde Thurston (“Futurist comedian, writer, activist”).

Baratunde explains why he's speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, apologising that he’s only half-qualified: “I was one of those kids who loved to take things apart. But I could never put them together again.” He describes the importance of humour as a bridge-building tool in learning: “laughter is a leading indicator of effective communication …you can’t shape the world if nobody is engaging.”

Boston, from the MIT Media Lab

Designing experiences to engage learners is what the conference is all about. “I don’t teach,” a teacher says, “I just create an environment in which learning can take place.” And the conference is full of evidence that this approach can produce impressive results. There are people who work with schools, museums and with minority groups, using technology to help explore science, the environment or local history. In many sessions, project leaders report heart-warming outcomes.

But whether they’re using tablets, VR headsets, location-based apps or online tools, these techie approaches to learning are all labour-intensive. I don’t think I saw one idea that looked like it would pay for itself as a startup business - because they all needed too much human love and attention to make the good things happen.

So technology isn’t an easy fix for helping the under-served groups that the conference was interested in. But if tech doesn’t provide a quick - or cheap - fix, at least it’s good to know that old-fashioned human interaction and one-to-one attention is still a valuable commodity in today's AI-driven world.

I was there to talk about the ��̳ Academy Studio Directing Experience, a VR project I produced which is designed to give a first taste of television studio directing to anyone who thinks it’s a skill they’d like to learn. I gave people a chance to try it out and had some enthusiastic responses: what I like best is when someone gets a low feedback score and is so determined to try again straight away that they don’t care about other people waiting to have a turn.

Trying the ��̳ Academy Studio Directing Experience

The studio directing project was one of many VR and AR (augmented reality) initiatives presented at the conference. The technology is no longer a novelty, though it’s still evolving fast, moving towards lighter, untethered headsets which will soon make existing hardware seem quaintly cumbersome.

If the hardware problems of VR are on the way to being solved, one impressive project pointed the way towards solving the social problems of VR too. Today, you feel isolated during a VR experience, which isn’t great for use in a classroom or group training setting. Julian Korzeniowsky, one of five developers on a Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center graduate program, talked about his Voyage project, a classroom experiment in which children in a science class are put in a virtual world together and given tasks by a teacher who monitors the group using an iPad. This video gives a good account of the challenges and the results. If groups of learners can work together rather than being in separate virtual worlds, the possibilities multiply. As progress continues in both VR hardware and software, school 'trips' could be more imaginative, cheaper and easier to organise than those in the real world are.

Collaboration was a theme of the conference. TimeWalk by Ted Barnett, a Silicon Valley executive, invites groups of school children to work together to build historically-accurate 3-D models of their home town. They start with old photographs and use a variety of software tools to turn them into a model of the town in Unity - which can then be navigated with movement that can be recorded.

Similarly, a discussion of the use of Minecraft (now owned by Microsoft and available in an Education Edition) in classrooms raised possibilities for collaboration. One teacher showed a Minecraft model that his pupils had built of the psychiatric unit from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which they were studying.

There must be opportunities for the ��̳ Academy to use technology to encourage more collaborative work by groups of learners. After all, everyone operates as part of a group in their work.

It was a big, busy conference, and participants were constantly having to choose what to see and what to miss. If I had my time again, perhaps I would have fitted in the talk on User-Generated Meal Photos as a Benchmark for Nutritional Estimation; or even the one on Managing Randomness and Collectible Card Game Playing as Collective Cognitive Achievement. I did attend and enjoy a talk by an academic who’s made it his business to watch or read every single incarnation of Star Wars - movies, TV series, novels, comics and plenty else - as a study in “transmedia” culture. It’s taken him two years and he reckons he’s still got about five per cent of the material still to go.

Now that's what I call a classy conference breakfast

Apart from better funding, there are a couple of other ideas that British conference organisers could adopt from Connected Learning. First, for the Q and A at the end of a session, why not just set up a mic in the middle of an aisle and invite people to form a queue behind it to ask questions? It avoids all the business of pointing and passing a mic to “the man at the back, no not you…” Second, it’s a great idea to cut down on the warm welcomes and other time-wasting by big cheeses at the start of a conference and get straight down to business.

Finally, a two hour lunch break looked over-generous, but everyone soon found themselves having interesting chats with random strangers. We learnt and we connected - which is what Connected Learning 2018 was all about.

Secret of the impossible drone shot revealed

2018-07-09T10:52:27+00:00

Scroll to the bottom of this blog post for Conor McNamara's video about how he filmed some amazing shots at the World Cup. Better still, read Marc Settle's account of what's so impressive about Conor's work and especially what he's been sending back from Russia before you watch how Conor did it.

I’ve trained hundreds of ��̳ staff on how to use smartphones for news or social media but I can’t keep tabs on everything they do with the training unless I catch their output by chance or they let me know.

��̳ Sport’s Conor McNamara is high-profile enough for me to see his work on the ��̳ News Channel or on the ��̳ Sport website. He’s also good at telling me when he’s done something that might interest me.

He’s become one of the best at the ��̳ in using a smartphone to go above and beyond his official duties, as commentator for Radio 5 Live or Match of the Day. He’s getting great value from his smartphone and giving great value to the online audience and his followers on social media.

His content ranges from the moderately simple - using an app to drain the colour apart from one element in a photo to the more advanced – a multi-frame video app, to tell a story quickly and informatively, to the very impressive – a match preview with moving graphics.

And he does it all himself! Which proves that mobile journalism is a craft that more ��̳ staff with high-end iPhones really ought to be doing.

But his latest is something else. As I write, he’s working hard in Russia at the World Cup. (Some might not consider commentating on football in the best seat in the house hard work, but there’s more to it than just turning up five minutes before kick-off …apparently.)

Recently Conor shared something he’d made which left me open-mouthed in wonder, confusion and respect - as I had no idea how he’d done it.

The first time I saw his latest creation, a static image that moved around him and his ��̳ colleagues in Russia, I wondered if he was using a drone. But then I had second thoughts: how could he use a drone inside a Russian stadium, and besides, that couldn’t capture a static image, could it?

And then Conor took it up a notch. You really need to watch this and see if you can guess how it was done (the text and graphics were added by 5 Live colleagues).

Now, the big reveal

Conor has kindly let us in on the secret in this special video he’s made for the ��̳ Academy – between his World Cup duties. Watch and be amazed:

If you’d like to find out more about how Conor juggles his social media work with the other demands of his working day, then his comments at this meeting of the European Broadcasting Union in Geneva are worth watching.

While Conor’s 360 videos and “bullet-time” photos may not be right for everyone, they do show what can be done with a bit of effort, a sprinkling of expertise and a whole lot of enthusiasm.

��̳ Academy’s smartphone training

For ��̳ staff: book at place on the smartphone for News course

For ��̳ staff: Marc Settle’s online course on smartphone journalism

New York City: Still spreading the news

2018-05-25T07:57:19+00:00

Each year, my colleague Lisa Heyamoto and I take a group of students to visit news and media organisations in New York City, diving headlong into the hottest issues being debated across the industry.

University of Oregon students in Times Square

After 18 meetings in a busy week, here are three key themes that emerged from our recent trip:

1. Traditional players are shaking things up

“Fortune favours the brave” may sound like an MBA cliché, but this notion was very much in evidence at traditional media organisations like Condé Nast, NBC, Hearst and Reuters.

Reuters (established 1851) has come a long way from the days of delivering stock prices by carrier pigeon. Like a number of publishers, they’re experimenting with providing “flash briefings” on voice controlled digital assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home. They get 17,000 listens per minute on their Alexa delivered news briefing, Dan Colarusso, an executive editor for Reuters TV told us.

What website do you think gets the biggest traffic for Hearst Magazines, a stable which includes Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health and Marie Claire? The answer is Delish.com - a digital only product - which covers food news, recipes and features for “the home cook.” There’s no print edition to support Delish: instead, the focus in on digital partnerships (such as a new one with Twitter) and distribution via its website and major social media networks.

At the time of writing, a video about How to make banana pudding cheesecake bars has had seven million views on Facebook alone in the week since it was published.

Finally, with NBC’s Left Field, a digital video outlet deliberately based several miles from the corporate HQ (mimicking an approach taken by Qatar based broadcaster Al Jazeera a few years ago when they launched AJ+ out of San Francisco), it’s clear that many of New York’s older media entities are actively embracing opportunities to get into new editorial, digital and physical, spaces.

2. There are over 300 ethnic and cooperative media outlets in the city

“Combined circulation of daily and weekly community and ethnic publications reaches 4.5 million people - more than half of New York City’s population,” the Mayor’s office has noted.

More than 200 languages are spoken in the city and around two in five of the population are immigrants. Almost two million of New York’s 8.5 million people speak languages other than English. It’s against this backdrop that community media plays an often overlooked role.

In 2016, the Mayor’s office awarded a $1 million grant to the sector, to help community media embrace digital skills and business models. Outlets like World Journal - a Chinese daily founded in 1976 and distributed nationwide, are diversifying by publishing materials such as Brooklyn Weekly, a Chinese business directory and bilingual medical manuals.

This vibrancy contrasts with concerns about the state of local journalism in the city, but the sector is not immune to changing market forces. As the co-directors of the Center for Community and Ethnic Media Karen Pennar and Jehangir Khattak told us, there used to be four Bangladeshi papers; now there are 17. But where these used to be sold at Bangladeshi stores, they’re now offered for free.

Competition, the willingness of audiences to pay for news content and the need to reach younger audiences: these are issues in all sectors of the media.

3. Great journalism continues to have an impact

At the cutting edge of news delivery, Reuters TV offers an algorithmically generated experience for TV viewers, with audiences able to select the length of the bulletin they want to watch. Bulletins range from five to 30 minutes, with each bulletin covering the same stories, yet offering “a different version of each story and how deep you want to go.”

With a reach of up to four million people, average engagement on Apple TV and Roku Smart TVs is 22 minutes, we were told. On mobile it’s about 12 minutes. These numbers reflect Reuters’ ability to offer audiences an impartial video product which Dan Colarusso, described, as “global news, seriously told.”

Equally serious, though more traditional in format, the city’s ethnic media often cover stories not found elsewhere. A 2014 story (originally published in Korean) about elderly Koreans being kicked out by the police of a McDonald’s in Flushing was later picked up by the New York Times, as was a series on the toxic chemicals used by workers in the city’s nail bars.

ProPublica's Lost Mothers investigation

The non-profit ProPublica won two Pulitzers this year (among many other awards). Its incredible series on maternal mortality in the U.S. - Lost Mothers - has not only receiving considerable recognition, but the series - co-produced with NPR - is changing the conversation.

As ProPublica noted last month:

“Citing Lost Mothers, state and local lawmakers around the country have adopted a flurry of bills aimed at reforming how maternal deaths are identified and investigated. Indiana and Oregon passed laws creating maternal mortality review committees to scrutinize deaths and near-deaths among expectant and new mothers, and to make policy recommendations to improve maternal health. Similar bills are pending in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey.”

And on the last day of our week’s programme, a visit to BuzzFeed News highlighted how reporting by Julia Reinstein meant that the Boston Marathon had revisited its decision not to award prize money to a number of women runners.

Journalism in New York, as elsewhere, is not without its challenges. But it’s also an incredibly vibrant field, full of great people with big ideas delivering impactful work. For our students, hearing about it gave them confidence that journalism remains a profession they can commit to for the long-haul.

Triumph from tragedy: The making of a feature documentary

2018-05-24T15:08:38+00:00

The premiere of a feature-length documentary in London last week was a triumph for first-time film-makers Jimmy Edmonds and Jane Harris.

The ��̳ Academy has followed the making of their film, A Love that Never Dies, which centres on the tragic death of Jane and Jimmy’s son Josh in a road accident in Vietnam in 2011. After their bereavement, the couple undertook a road trip across the States, filming and interviewing other bereaved parents.

Publicity: the final step in making a film

The Prince Charles theatre was almost full. A show of hands during an introduction to the film revealed that about half the audience were themselves bereaved parents. It was a measure of the very particular appeal of this film.

Jane and Jimmy have struggled to finance and distribute their film because of industry scepticism about how much its ‘difficult’ subject would attract a general audience:

Making your own documentary isn’t a route to riches, Jane and Jimmy cheerfully admit. But they still hope that the cinema tour they have lined up following the premiere will show potential distributors, whether for cinemas or on-demand video services, that there is an audience for their film:

In a question and answer session with the audience after the screening, Jimmy mused that death hasn’t always been a taboo subject: while polite Victorian society was comfortable talking about and photographing death but not sex, we’re the opposite.

One of the reasons Jane and Jimmy wanted to make the film was to cope with the isolation they felt after their bereavement, as friends drifted away, hoping they would soon achieve ‘closure’. That wasn’t how they saw it, and so they embarked on the making of the film as a way of meeting other parents who had lost children.

I asked them whether they had ever felt like giving up on the project. They both admitted there had been hard times, particularly when they realised they would have to expose more of their own grief on camera. It was “awful putting ourselves into the story, but we had to do it,” said Jane:

As to what advice Jimmy would give to anyone thinking of embarking on their own documentary project, he says that there are limits to how much you should worry about your audience: “you need to make the film on your own terms, in your own way.”

A Love that Never Dies is being shown at cinemas around the country, with Jane and Jimmy present to talk about the issues raised.

The ��̳ Academy’s record of the making of the documentary includes five short films made at different stages of the production.

Celebrating the new sound revolution

2018-05-07T10:22:52+00:00

Nobody ever admits that the media rivalry between sound and vision is serious but it’s been a talking point ever since radio challenged the primacy of newspapers. Then in the television age, radio people denied that they were the poor relations of film and TV types. They joked that radio had “the best pictures” - those it created in the listener’s mind.

The ��̳’s Sounds Amazing conference showed that audio is now full of genuine confidence - if not gaining the upper hand on pictures, then certainly giving them a run for their money.

Matthew Postgate, chief technology and product officer for the ��̳’s Design and Engineering department, opened the conference with a big claim about the primacy of audio: unlike vision, “sound is pervasive whenever we’re awake”. Ears never close: they must be more important than eyes.

He reported that studies have shown an audience’s experience of the immersive quality of an audio-visual experience is more effectively improved by better sound than higher picture quality.

Matthew then identified two trends that are helping audio: first, there’s the ever-increasing pervasiveness of media, promoting portable, inescapable audio. Second, there’s the increasing immersiveness of media experiences, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) being at the cutting-edge, which exploit audio’s new technologies - such as binaural sound, discussed later in the day.

Next up at the conference was James Robinson, the producer of Tracks, a nine-part ��̳ podcast that was later broadcast on ��̳ Radio Four. It’s a drama in 44-minute episodes telling the story of an air crash by using extensive sounds of planes, cars and other carefully-placed effects to build an atmosphere behind comparatively sparse dialogue.

Robinson played a clip that involved a car crash. He admitted he was still worried: “is it clear what’s going on?” he asked. “It’s fine to lose the audience, but only for a moment.”

James said there’s “an explosion in online audio” (and he wasn’t talking about his plane crash), with three times as many people listening to podcasts than five years ago. But ��̳ Radio is still on a different scale: 10 times as many people listened to Tracks on Radio Four than as a podcast.

To understand the precise relation between pictures and sound on TV, you needed to hear the next presentation, a double act between ��̳ colleagues Kate Hopkins and Graham Wild, sound designer and sound mixer respectively, both of whom had worked on Blue Planet and other ��̳ natural history series.

Kate showed an amazingly complex screenshot (below) of the tracks she laid for Graham to mix on a film. They were made up of location sounds, other existing audio and foley (specially recorded sounds for particular spots in the film). She played an example of a strong visual sequence, of cities at night, whose pictures were given to her to edit completely mute. The finished sequence was a rich mix of sounds, some matching the pictures, but others, she explained, emphasising shot changes and sped up shots rather than anything pretending to be naturalistic.

As the mixer, it’s Graham’s job to combine Kate’s tracks with “hundreds” of music tracks and multiple takes from David Attenborough's commentary lines. With so much sound to play with, a moment of silence in the finished film is prized by a mixer. “If I can get silence in, I’m really happy,” Graham said.

It turns out that sound editing is affected by the size of the screen you’re expecting the film to be viewed on. Bigger screens mean slower editing because it takes the viewer a moment to look around the shot.

That Kate and Graham were talking to professionals was obvious when they answered an audience question: how long did they get to work on each Blue Planet episode? The answer - 15 days to track lay and two or three days to mix - produced a round of respectful applause.

There were more comparisons between radio and TV in the next panel, from Mohit Bakaya, commissioning editor, factual for Radio Four: “television understands what it’s all about: it’s about the pictures,” he said. Radio should be about the sounds. But there hasn’t been enough attention paid to that. There’s too much use of “haphazardly”-chosen library music, Mohit said. “There’s a huge opportunity for us to think about what audio does well, in the way that film-makers have done for years.”

Producers can enhance their work through sound “to get people to feel as well as think their way into a story”. He’d like sound to be used “to create hermetically-sealed universes” and he wants to commission programmes that “tap into the emotional side of radio, rather than just the thinking side”. Podcasts could benefit from the same approach, said Mohit, and be more than just “chat, chat, chat”.

An obvious new frontier for audio is the internet-enabled speakers which a few months ago were called “digital assistants” but whose field is now, more grandly, known simply as “voice”. Mukul Devichand is the ��̳’s new “executive editor, voice” (which, he admitted, made his mum think he’s the producer of a talent show). He said the new devices change “the nature of our relationship with the internet to a conversational one”.

Mukul gave a live demonstration of an experimental “skill” (as Amazon calls apps for Alexa) that the ��̳ has developed for an Echo device. It uses the rushes of an existing ��̳ interview with Matthew Walker, a sleep expert. Walker’s answers were analysed and linked to possible questions that a user might ask - things like “why do we need sleep?”

If the device recognises a question, it jumps to the appropriate sound-bite from the interview. More impressive than the general questions was the skill’s ability to respond to more obscure ones like: “Alexa, what about Margaret Thatcher?” which successfully cued a reference to Lady Thatcher’s famously small sleep requirement.

For a preview of where the new world of voice is taking us, Mark Savage, a ��̳ music reporter, spent four weeks with seven of the devices in his home. He describes the experience as “living in an Orwellian nightmare”, but it wasn’t all bad. Talking to the internet lets you “raise your eyes up from your phone” and interact with your family.

But his early enthusiasm waned. Mark found none of the devices were much good at understanding his Northern Irish accent. More fundamentally, when offered the chance to pick from almost any piece of music just by calling its name, he found he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to hear.

How we made a 360 video documentary in Africa

2018-05-04T07:59:58+00:00

The ��̳’s VR Hub is a small team at New Broadcasting House in London, working to demonstrate how virtual reality could become a valid part of the ��̳’s output. To do that we’ll be creating a number of ambitious VR projects over the next twelve months.

In February, we finished our first 360 video documentary, Damming the Nile. The project uses a ‘headset first’ philosophy. By that we mean that it was written, shot, and edited to work best when viewed on a VR headset.

It’s a two part series, of 12 and 16 minutes duration, taking users on a trip down the Nile with Alastair Leithead accompanying them. With Alastair presenting, there’s a real heart to the story, which is about a dispute over control of the Nile’s waters. We wrap that story in an immersive 360 video journey down the river.

While we were working on the production, the VR Hub brought out a ��̳ VR app, which is available on Gear VR and soon Oculus Go. It allows us to deliver high quality 360 video content to the mobile VR platform made by Oculus and Samsung. Damming the Nile is available in the ��̳ VR app, along with some other experiences which the ��̳ have made, on bbc.co.uk/virtualreality.

The camera

The ��̳ has been making 360 videos for a while but usually using small cameras like Thetas, GoPros, or Samsung’s Gear 360. We chose instead the Insta360 Pro camera and a Sennheiser Ambeo to record 360 sound. (If you’re in the ��̳, an improved version of the kit we built is now available for hire from Production Services.)

The Insta360 Pro is essentially six cameras in one. Each camera fires at the same time and the image is captured through a super wide angle lens. Its total field of view is so huge that everything around the camera is actually seen and recorded twice - from two different perspectives. Using a clever algorithm, the images are then stitched together to create a spherical ball of footage. It uses the same ‘rectilinear’ format that maps of the earth use, basically a spherical format mapped onto a flat surface. The net effect on a VR headset is that you can look in any direction and see what the camera could see at that moment - and in 3D.

'Marvin' hanging out above Blue Nile Falls. The hat kept him from getting too hot and it humanised him too. See, I called a camera 'he'.

Strictly speaking, this is 360 video, not virtual reality. In true VR, the aim is to simulate as much of the human condition as possible: in real life we can pick things up, move around, prod things and watch as they react. We can look wherever we want and can move through our world. To achieve that in VR, you have to build your content in a game engine. Everything will look, in some capacity, like a computer game, but what you lose in realism you gain in immersion and interaction. We’re also building this kind of experience at the VR Hub but Damming the Nile isn’t that: it’s 360 video. The viewer can look anywhere they want but they can’t move unless we moved the camera while we were filming. They’re fixed to the point where the camera was. 360 video allows us to capture a scene for real then build experiences which add to the illusion of being there.

A couple of years ago this was already possible but it wasn’t easy enough to bother with on a news production. It was just too difficult, cumbersome and risky. With new cameras, creating 3D 360 video is still difficult but it’s a more realistic possibility for small and nimble productions.

So what did we learn?

Alastair on Lake Tana, Ethiopia

If there was one take home message from this entire trip, it’s that going the extra mile to use the Insta360 Pro for each and every shot is almost certainly worth it. Smaller ‘action cameras’ are an exciting tool for 2D filmmakers, but in 360 they cause an immersion dip that just isn’t worth it, no matter what vision you had for a nimble and interesting shot.

I also confirmed my belief that that 3D is definitely worth pursuing. It creates something believable and beautiful - something truly immersive. So since we can get it, we really should get it.

Having your subject and your scene close to the camera is the best way to go. The shots I like the most in the film are the ones which made me feel most nervous as we shot them.

“The subject is too close to the camera,” I’d think as the contributors wander clumsily around the rig (not you Alastair!). That’s because in the past, 360 cameras had a significant ‘dead zone’ around the camera: you’d get stitching errors, parallax issues, and a bad viewing experience if your subject strayed into this area. So you’d want to keep the subject away from the dead zone, but close enough to appear more than an incomprehensible smudge of pixels in the VR headset. A blind tightrope walk between stitching disaster and useless sludge ...360 film-making was fun!

Hiding from the camera behind trees

But with the Insta, having the subject in close proximity creates pleasantly surprising results. Our shot on the train feels just right. You could really believe that you’re there and yet on the shoot, the camera felt way too close for comfort. The same is true for the Egyptian temples: they feel reachable, touchable. At times you may even forget you’ve got a phone strapped to your face!

But once we’ve achieved the illusion of being there, are we done? Is that enough? We could immerse you in a wonderful rainforest waterfall, but for how long could we hold your attention there?

Alastair with Marvin in Khartoum

We need to keep the story moving along, which may mean dragging the viewer away from whatever scene they’re currently engrossed in. And that can be frustrating for them. Are we taking them away from a place they’d only just got to know? Could we slow the pace right down so they can just enjoy the moment? An immersive scene can overwhelm the senses to the point that the story is briefly forgotten about: instead the viewer is content to just be in that particular moment and looking at some aspect of the shot that you, the storyteller, never paid much attention to. So are we aiming for immersion or story? And if we’re trying for both, how can we bring the two together? (Alastair also talks about this in our behind-the-scenes video).

These are the considerations you have to make as you’re writing the script and unpacking the story. We structured the documentary as predominantly image-led, with Alistair narrating from scene to scene. The relationship between the camera and the production crew is an interesting problem. We treated the camera as the fifth member of the crew, even naming him Marvin to really humanise him. At key points in the story, Alastair would do a piece to camera, which is a very different thing from a traditional PTC for news. It’s more like talking to one of your friends - that’s certainly how it feels when you watch it back in a headset - so if Alastair had used the conventional tone of a news piece, it would have just been odd.

For the most part, we hid the crew out shot, but this was only to create the best view for Marvin. We didn’t make it a rule that we should stay hidden. We actually wanted the audience to understand there was a crew taking them from place to place. And from a practical point of view, it’s impossible to hide on every single shot, so we made a feature of the crew being a part of that journey where it made sense.

Thinking about all of these problems inevitably opens a can of worms, and there’s an infinite supply of worms in the VR/360 can. Each could be diligently inspected but then there’d be a danger we’d overthink it to the point that we’d never make a 360 video again.

I inspected the camera after a take because it has a tendency to get hot whilst shooting more than 15 minutes

The exciting part about finishing a project like this, is that through inspecting the can of VR worms, you’re left thinking of many other ideas that might work well. For example, now that we can shoot 3D 360 video in close proximity to the subject, what subjects might work best? Since the subject can get inside your ‘personal space’, does that open up opportunities in fictional storytelling? Since immersive 3D video is achievable now, can we create experiences which exploit immersion more than story?

Practicalities

I should probably share at least some practical learnings. First, you probably won’t create quite as much data as you might expect if you’re shooting on an Insta - especially if you’re used to shooting on a hacked together GoPro rig. Data management is much more streamlined when you’re shooting on just one high speed SD card. As a result, the edit is certainly quicker, but here be dragons.

The new tools that allow you to quickly get ‘a stitch’ out of your 360 shots (integrating the output of the different cameras in the Insta), mean you can review footage as you go. Inevitably this leads to an assembly being created, even while you are on location. But there’s a danger is in using this assembly as the basis of your edit - for reasons that are way too dull to go into here. I’d recommend getting back to your edit suite and stitching everything you’ve shot into 4K. Don't make selects and render individual parts of your shots, just stitch the whole thing on the most powerful machine you can find, then import everything into Premiere Pro. From there, create proxies of your renders and edit with these. This requires a lot of computational power, but it will put you a good position to get the post production done with fewer (but still some) headaches.

(If you want more on of why I think the above workflow works best, I’ll be happy to share. Or if you think I’m wrong, please shout and we can discuss the alternatives.)

Update

I only wrote this blog a week ago and it’s already out of date. Insta have announced they’ll be releasing a plugin for Premiere Pro which would have saved our production an enormous amount of time. Details of the new workflow are here. If it works as well as they claim, then I highly recommend that you create your edit in the way they describe. I’ll be investigating this workflow properly soon.

In conclusion, if you liked this torrent of thoughts on VR/360 and are inspired to try your hand, come and talk with us at the VR Hub and maybe we’ll make something awesome together.

Video: The Making of Damming the Nile

The ��̳ VR app

How to watch Damming the Nile

��̳ Academy guide to VR production

With the law on your side, it still takes determination to get the story

2018-04-06T07:59:11+00:00

Journalists on a UNESCO training course in South Sudan. Photo: Frederique Cifuentes/UNESCO

Access to information is one of the most important aspects of media freedom, enabling journalists to produce accurate work. A recent report by UNESCO says that 112 countries currently have freedom of information laws or similar legislation.

Marius Lukosiunas from the Freedom of Expression and Media Development Centre at UNESCO calls the adoption of these laws a key to transparency within governments: “having laws for accessing information is highly important for people around the globe. This is part of a human right - the freedom of expression right. If your right to access information is not guaranteed so the freedom of expression right is not fully implemented.”

The UN General Assembly has adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which includes the goal of ensuring public access to information. But it isn’t enough for governments to pass freedom of information laws. Implementation mechanisms are required to make sure that such guarantees work in practice. The laws are no guarantee of access to information when authorities can easily disobey them.

Afghanistan passed legislation in 2014 that ensures the country’s citizens the right to access information from government institutions. But journalists in Afghanistan still complain about a lack of cooperation from public authorities and long delays in providing information they have requested.

Zaki Daryabi is the editor-in-chief of the Etilaat-e-Roz newspaper. The local paper has recently published several investigative pieces on social and political issues in Afghanistan. I asked Daryabi about his experience of getting information from governmental departments: “Afghanistan’s access to information law does not have enough executive guarantees,” he said. “We wanted to produce an investigative report on the absence of members of parliament in Afghanistan and requested information based on the law. We waited long but got nothing. Then according to legal procedure, we filed a grievance to the complaint committee of the access to information law. We still haven’t heard anything from the Afghan parliament. The law doesn’t specify what the next step should be if the grievance submission is ignored.”

Zaki Daryabi, editor-in-chief, Etilaat-e-Roz

On the one hand this is about the law and how it works; on the other hand, we are talking about journalism - a profession whose core principle is digging out information - and in that, there’s no substitute for persistence. Effective and powerful media outlets will always depend on journalists who are passionate about what they’re doing and work hard to acquire high-quality information.

Furthermore, the emergence of social media and citizen journalism has raised the bar for professional journalists in mainstream media. We are expected more than ever to provide accurate information based on credible sources that are not easily available. According to the ��̳’s editorial guidelines, accuracy in all output is a fundamental principle and we should try to gather first-hand information and provide secure evidence.

Working as a journalist for more than a decade has taught me that being persistent is essential if you want to get the right information from the right people at the right time. The existence of mostly-approachable press offices in both government and non-governmental organisations in the UK makes life easier for journalists and helps us gather information more painlessly than my fellow journalists and I experience in Afghanistan. Yet even in the UK, you will not get the required fact or figures or have officials provide you with first-hand information without chasing persistently.

Working in the ��̳ newsroom, I don’t rely on just sending emails to the press offices or to the officials I want to speak to: I keep contacting them via phone, text or other channels until I get answers. In some cases, I would get no answer to my first inquiry or sometimes the answer is incomplete or ambiguous. I will then follow it up and try to be clearer and put emphasis on the importance of the requested data or getting the right person to speak about a story.

The author in the ��̳ newsroom

Sometimes I bid for guests for several hours until I get them for our programmes. It’s tough and stressful. However, being persistent has long-term advantages: authorities and their press offices know you by your persistence and this builds the relationship. In future, when new information is about to emerge, they may inform you in advance.

UNESCO has proclaimed September 28 as International Day for Universal Access to Information. Marius Lukosiunas told me that ahead of the day, UNESCO is holding global awareness campaigns to promote freedom of information law and train journalists in how to use it.

“It’s very important for governments to put in place a number of promotional measures on access to information laws,” he said, “to inform not only journalists but also the larger population that this kind of law is available”. Nonetheless, the freedom of information law can only be implemented when journalists are committed to doing so and that requires professionalism and being passionate about provide high-quality information to audiences.

Najiba Feroz on combatting the harassment of female journalists

Trusted guides - a new role for journalists?

2018-03-27T09:17:52+00:00

With professional news content so often jostling for attention in the chaotic world of social media, the role of the journalist has changed:

“As journalists and news organizations, realise you don’t control the narrative,” said Charlie Warzel, senior technology writer at Buzzfeed, “we’re not gatekeepers, we’re guides.”

That was his message to ��̳ Fusion’s Social Media and Broadcasting conference. Warzel presented an alarming glimpse of the future - much of it as predicted by Aviv Ovadya, a technologist at the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Media Responsibility.

Ovadya describes himself as “a misinformation engineering and design consultant”. That means researching and warning about ways in which social media can be misused.

Charlie Warzel said that Ovadya and others he’d studied predict a “coming crisis” in media. With the current news about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, you might think it's already upon us. The conference themes around social media were timely - whether in relation to privacy or fake news.

On the latter, today’s fears may seem mild compared to future dangers of video manipulation, for instance. Software already developed allows the creation of fake videos that substitute faces, lipsync footage to new audio tracks and manipulate real footage with animated elements.

Warzel showed how an animated insect could be made to ‘land’ on the leaves of a plant, shot in real video and - extremely convincingly - make the plant sway in response to the tiny weight added to the leaf. And that can all be done using technology that you don’t need to be a Pixar engineer to operate.

The side of social media that’s to do with fakery is “so savvy”, Warzel warned, that “the way we cover the information wars is crucial”. With acknowledgement to Stranger Things, he referred to it as the world of “new media upside down”.

Afterwards I asked him what “infowars” mean for public service organisations like the ��̳:

Watching Warzel’s presentation, it was easy to believe we live in a malign online world. I asked him how real the dangers are in most people’s everyday online experiences:

What’s important, Warzel says, is that, whether as journalists or ordinary users, we don’t just glaze over and stop using our critical faculties because it’s all so confusing: “you just start to give up - and that is probably one of the scariest things”

Ending on a positive note, he left his audience with some key messages to remind us that the infowars are not lost - yet:

Charlie Warzel’s report for Buzzfeed News on infowars

A new way of learning to work with children

2018-03-19T12:29:35+00:00

The ��̳ Academy's new Working with Children course breaks the mould of traditional e-learning. Scripted by Jon Hunter (The News Quiz, Mock the Week) with characters designed by comedian Henry Paker (Radio 4), it features a penguin, a Brummie dog and a pigeon. No cats though - the budget didn’t stretch to that.

When the existing course was due to be updated after three years we decided to take the opportunity to try out a new learning design approach with the aim of creating a more memorable experience.

The object of the Working with Children course is to safeguard and protect any children that come into contact with ��̳, whether as audience members, guests or contributors. Our core learning outcome is to empower ��̳ staff to confidently apply the ten ‘golden rules’ of child safety (the ��̳ Code of Conduct) when working with children.

Our challenge as learning designers was to work with ��̳ experts on the subject to create training that was highly memorable and would deliver successful learning outcomes.

Our priority was to communicate the ‘golden rules’ in a way that learners would retain and remember. This meant that a significant part of the course needed to be based around scenarios that staff might find themselves faced with. We thought carefully about how we could present the scenarios in a way that learners would be able to recall easily.

We chose a game approach because it’s more immersive and engaging than traditional e-learning using text and video. Our brains aren’t hard drives and can’t just recall huge swathes of information. But we do learn from experience.

With this in mind, we decided to depart from the traditional ‘data dump’ approach and focus instead on creating a short, fun and visually engaging experience that people would remember and be able to apply in their day to day jobs.

We did this using the ‘experience, reflect, act’ model (Kolb,1984) which is based on learning from experience, reflecting on the experience and applying the learning in a new situation.

This is the essence of scenario-based, or experiential learning with feedback to support reflection and drive behavioural change. To be effective, the feedback needs to relate directly to the learning outcomes. For our course, this meant that each scenario was followed by the relevant Code of Conduct statement to reinforce the learning.

We wanted to inspire staff with a creative concept and an emphasis on narrative storytelling and interactivity to support knowledge retention. The training we designed does just that. There's an interactive ��̳ festival map (second picture above) consisting of various festival zones (��̳ Radio, CBeebies, Children in Need, Vloggers, Hospitality) featuring ‘what would you do’ scenarios that staff might face when working with children. The final zone, an ‘information point’ (above), provides practical guidance in the form of an infographic with key information along with links and a downloadable version of the ��̳ Safeguarding Children policy.

This is a serious topic but we used light humour in the scenarios to engage our learners with the subject and ensure the learning outcomes were met. We used animation as this would allow more flexibility with scenarios than film and it seemed more in keeping for a course on Working with Children. Feedback comes courtesy of feathered and canine friends - as well as children. The animation style was inspired by those created for Radio 4’s Small Scenes sketch series, with its mix of animation against a real background.

We tested the concept with ��̳ staff and incorporated their feedback into the course. Testers loved the interface design, both visually and for its sense of fun and adventure, as well as the simplicity of visual and audio signposting through the text alerts which guide you to where to go next.

“We wanted to take the user on a journey through a variety of scenarios that encourages them to think about how they relate to the Code of Conduct,” said Caroline Brant, Head of Safety, Security and Resilience, Child Protection and Safety. “We wanted it to be short, fun and interactive.”

In short, we applied the ��̳’s mission, to inform, educate and entertain, to the design of the course. We hope you’ll think we succeeded.

Anyone who works with children at the ��̳ in whatever capacity needs to complete this course as a mandatory requirement.

Unforgettable: A new measure of TV programme success

2018-03-13T15:02:45+00:00

Remember Blue Planet II?

Blue Planet II went out around four months ago now, and the original Blue Planet an amazing 17 years ago (the day after September 11 2001) but for many, both series still linger strongly in the memory.

In fact, if you think back to everything you have watched, listened to or read in the media over the past week, month, year, or even across your lifetime, the chances are there are a few things that have particularly stuck in your mind.

With changes in media including the rise of on-demand or binge viewing, a decline in shared viewing, more ways of watching and the vast increase in ‘noisy’ competition, for producers, becoming part of the select group of memorable content-makers is perhaps more challenging than ever. It’s simply more difficult to stick in people’s minds over the longer term.

But that ability really matters to the ��̳. When we looked at what drives people’s perceptions of the value they get from the licence fee, what they can remember having experienced has a particularly strong impact.

��̳ Audiences decided to explore this further - to identify which media content is most readily recalled by the audience and why, and to see what we could learn about how to make what we do more memorable in a crowded marketplace.

We started by asking people to think back over their lifetimes and tell us what they could remember on TV, radio, and online. (��̳ staff can get a flavour of what they told us here.) There was clear evidence of what psychologists call the 'reminiscence bump', whereby there are more memories from childhood, adolescence and early adulthood when people are forming their identity than from later adulthood. It also became clear that although the ��̳ dominates the memory space of the older audience, this wasn’t the case for those under 35. We are at risk not making the memories of the future.

The timeless Time Lords

As well as what people remember we also wanted to know why they remembered it. So we spoke to a section of the audience in depth over a period of months. We talked about what they could remember - and perhaps just as important, what they had forgotten. We wanted to see what elements of an experience had made it stick in their mind.

Context

First, we found that context is important in determining what’s recalled: who you’re with, the time of day, the mood you are in and so on. Shared media experiences often felt more special (as they get rarer) and are therefore more clearly recalled, particularly where people ‘make an occasion of it’ such as a Eurovision Party or a bake-along with Mary Berry - both of which were examples mentioned in our talks with viewers.

In fact, the specific context of consumption is sometimes more salient than the memory of the content itself, particularly for radio. People can remember the smell of dinner cooking at their grandma’s whilst watching EastEnders more than they can remember what happened in the programme.

Relevance

Second, we found that content that’s relevant to the person in some way is more likely to be remembered. This can take a number of forms: it can have ‘personal relevance’ in that it resonates with your own identity or interests (for instance, a black woman said she particularly remembered Scandal because it had a strong black female character in it). Relevance can also be ‘local’ relevance where people tend to remember places or accents they know (Peaky Blinders for those in Birmingham). Then there’s ‘temporal relevance’ which taps into a particular period in history (so there was high memorability for the drama 24 reflecting the fear and uncertainty that was felt around terror threats in the early noughties).

Poldark, remembered from August

Characters

Strong characters are also likely to be remembered over time, particularly if they are relatable, aspirational or have changed significantly over time or in terms of their personality. The story arc in Breaking Bad is a good example of this. People who are challenging/annoying also leave a greater trace, as do those who have some sort of distinctive style that makes them stand out from the crowd.

Emotion

There’s also a close link between emotion and memory. Exciting or distressing media experiences stick in the mind, helping explain why drama titles and news events often top the lists of media memories. This can be understood from an evolutionary perspective: the experiences that give us the greatest positive or negative feelings are worth remembering as they will guide our future actions. We found this to be true in our research as well. Highly exciting or distressing media experiences were more likely to be remembered.

Originality

Being seen as the first or distinctive, challenging and stretching existing genres and formats, also increases the likelihood of being remembered. That’s why Monty Python has stuck in the mind for decades after it was first broadcast.

Controversial

There is also a memory premium on being controversial or unexpected. Content that shocks can stay in the mind for a long time. Many episodes of Brass Eye from the 90s still linger in people’s minds.

Packaging

The way media is packaged (with credits, theme tunes, jingles, iconic imagery, soundtracks and the overall look and feel) also affects the likelihood of it being remembered. That means short-form video or audio presented as items, clips, competitions or features can also be memorable in their own right - and make their ‘parent’ brands more sticky.

Rehearsal

A phenomenon called rehearsal is a key mechanism of memory encoding (which is why we revise for exams to try and make things stick). The more an audience hears, sees, talks, or reads about content, before or after it airs, the greater likelihood it has of staying with them. A media provider can heavily influence this through marketing and PR, with teasers or clips, interviews, articles, shareable content and so on.

Unforgettable: Val and Chris

So what does this all mean for the ��̳? Well, the reminiscence bump (more memories being retained when you are young) is a real issue. We already struggle to attract younger people to our content but knowing that this is the time of their lives when many of their lifetime memories will be formed gives us added reason to win their hearts and minds. Otherwise, we risk losing them forever.

But improving the ��̳’s memorability is not just about age. The focus on context has made us think about how we can better reflect other periods of life such as when people are leaving home, forming relationships, having children, retiring and so on. Can we help make more of an occasion of the viewing experience to enhance the context? For example during Eurovision we provided party packs with sweepstakes and scorecards for audiences to host their own judging panels.

More generally we’re using the insights from this project to help create a ‘memorability culture’ at the ��̳ to get staff thinking about how to increase our memorability. And we’re exploring the opportunities offered by sign-in and personalisation to target audiences with content they personally connect with and thus affect memory. How we can shape our social media and marketing strategies and improve our approach to packaging and branding to maximise memorability? For example, after Glastonbury 2017, the ��̳ pushed audiences to ‘relive’ their favourite moments – increasing the likelihood of creating a lasting ��̳ memory.

The study also highlights that distinctiveness is a real opportunity. Being original increases the ��̳’s chances of being remembered and gives commissioners and production teams a new impetus to take risks.

How they make The Crown sparkle

2018-03-12T08:37:54+00:00

Claire Foy as the Queen is prepared for her next shot

Everything about The Crown is big and ambitious, from its 400 sets to its 32 awards. Then there’s its massive but secretive budget. Netflix hasn’t commented on speculation that it's £9.4 million an episode but writer Peter Morgan in a recent BAFTA talk is reported to have suggested it’s more like half that. That's still pretty good going.

The Crown dramatises the story of the royal family in public and in private since the Queen and Prince Philip married in 1947. Preproduction is already under way for the third season, adding another ten hours to the twenty already released by Netflix. And a fourth season has already been agreed.

Not quite Buckingham Palace yet

At a Royal Television Society event in London, key members of the production team offered insights into what it’s like to create this monster production.

For editor Pia Di Ciaula “every episode is treated like a feature film”. She appreciates the relatively generous schedule and budget, especially when it means that if an early cut of the film feels lacking in a dramatic element, there’s provision for shooting for a couple of extra days. As she said: “I don’t want to work any other way now.”

Eastbourne, Cape Town or Elstree?

For visual effects supervisor Ben Turner, there were special challenges. To recreate the royal yacht Britannia, Ben organised a drone shoot around the ship, which is now retired in dock at Edinburgh. By integrating thousands of photographs he was able to bring the yacht to the screen. But even then, what became a single Britannia sequence had to be filmed in half a dozen locations: the sun deck on a cliff on the south coast of England; a corridor on a tug off Cape Town; some of it on sets in Elstree. And when an actor steps from one shot to another, it needs to look like the same time and place.

All those locations mean that the extras will be different people. But director Ben Caron said he’s pretty relaxed about that kind of thing: “I don’t really believe in continuity,” he said, to audience laughter, adding more seriously: “if the drama is compelling enough, I don’t think you’ll see continuity mistakes.”

The costume department's year-by-year fashion archive boards

Production designer Martin Childs faced a dilemma in the first episode: the Queen’s wedding was actually a relatively modest affair since the royal family didn’t want to appear profligate at a time of post-war austerity. But Martin was worried that viewers might think the low-key celebrations on screen were a sign that the production didn’t have the resources to represent the full pomp and spectacle of a royal story (though any concerns on that front will have been dispelled by the lavishness of set pieces in later episodes).

For Martin, a project like The Crown means having to pace yourself, to allow the look of the series to evolve. In reflecting Britain’s growing prosperity over the decades, Martin said, “you have to save some colours for later.”

On the question of how accurate the series is, for all the impressive work that went into the authenticity of the shots and the sounds, the production team agreed that it was the drama that counted more. As costume designer Jane Petrie put it “it’s not a documentary, you need to find the tone and the mood of it.”

Director Ben Caron shares a jokes with Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) and Antony Armstrong-Jones (Matthew Goode)

I asked director Ben Caron to explain how the schedule is organised on a ten-part series with several directors each shooting more than one episode:

For editor Pia Di Ciaula, times when the production is on location are as busy as any. Working on episodes directed by Stephen Daldry, her job is to provide daily assemblies of the rushes for the cast and crew. She adds in visual effects using green screen and sound effects (foley):

So what’s it like to work for Netflix as film-makers? According to Ben and Pia, it’s a very ‘light touch’ relationship:

If you want to hear more about Netflix’s commissioning policy, especially in relation to non-US producers, there are interesting insights from the company’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos in this podcast.

Sarandos tells some of his own story to explain how Netflix grew from DVD distributor to its current world-spanning role. Host Marc Andreessen and Sarandos compare the cultures of Hollywood and Silicon Valley and discuss how Netflix makes them work together.

The good news for film-makers outside the US, according to Sarandos, is that Netflix's policy is to encourage productions to be as 'localised' as possible, believing that will make them most appealing to viewers around the world.

Facebook down, online comedy up - and other Middle East social media trends that journalists should know about

2018-03-09T12:54:38+00:00

My sixth annual round-up of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) social media trends has been published (written with University of Oregon student Amanda Lam).

Here are four top trends that journalists and news organisations need to know about:

1. It's all about video

To reach out to MENA’s youth, you need to be aware of their apparently insatiable love for video.

YouTube is viewed daily by half of young Arabs, according to the 16 nation Arab Youth Survey. Meanwhile, the Dubai Press Club found that video is the most popular online activity for young Arabs. Those between the ages of 15 and 24 spend an average of 72 minutes a day watching videos online.

Back in 2015, I wrote about YouTube’s growing popularity and about the potential of online video to add “to the stickiness and understanding of news content”. Research by Northwestern University in Qatar (NUQ) suggests that news audiences are indeed migrating online: “the news-viewing TV audience declined by 20 percentage points since 2013 with a nearly identical rise in news-viewing online,” they note. TV news is still ahead of online news by 67% to 55% but it looks like only a matter of time before online overtakes TV.

2. Social video is not broadcast

In 2014, I commented on the emergence of online comedy stars in the region. Since then, this genre has continued to grow (see below). Two popular comedy providers, EyshElly and Salute Sa7i, each have more than three million YouTube subscribers.

Alongside this online comedy explosion, the fastest growing video segment is “short-form (few minutes long), amateur digital content curated by Arab youth and distributed on video platforms,” says the Dubai Press Club.

3. Older social networks may have had their time in the sun

Five years ago, there was already talk of ‘Facebook fatigue’. Usage of the social network which, with Twitter, was identified by some as having played a pivotal role in the Arab Spring, was starting to wane in some markets.

Fast forward to today and it looks like these older, more established, social media platforms are being usurped by younger rivals. Although Facebook has grown its MENA user base by 264 percent since 2012, journalists might consider de-emphasising the importance that they attribute to this traditional platform. Reach among Arab nationals was down from 94 per cent in 2013 to 74 per cent in 2017. Since 2015, among nationals, Facebook usership dropped from 76 per cent to 55 per cent in Saudi Arabia, also dropping in UAE and Qatar, NUQ found.

4. The future is Instagram, Snapchat and messaging apps

Despite the decline in Facebook usage, Jonathan Labin, managing director of Facebook Middle East says users are engaging with a wider range of Facebook products. Lest we forget, Facebook’s social media portfolio includes Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram.

In the MENA region, there are currently 63 million Instagram users, accounting for ten per cent of total global users. That’s remarkable since MENA is home to just over three per cent of the global population.

Instagram is also growing fast among young people in the region, with daily usage up 20 per cent year-on-year according to the annual Arab Youth Survey.

Snapchat, another visually oriented social network has 33 million users in the Middle East, according to Snapchat’s own data, as reported by Wallaroo Media. It too has grown quickly in the region, with the result that last year, Snapchat opened its first Middle East office in Dubai in order to work more closely with advertisers and partners in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

WhatsApp also continues to expand its reach in the MENA region. It was the most popular social channel in 2017, based on usage among Arab Nationals, NUQ data shows.

Messaging services are a growing source for finding and commenting on news, as well as other issues such as conversations around food, family and religion. And, of course they’re also a means for newsrooms to source important eyewitness media.

The popularity of group messaging, coupled with the wider usage of chat/messaging apps and newer social networks like Instagram and Snapchat cannot be overlooked. Their star is in the ascendancy, but whether that continues in 2018, we will have to wait and see.

Damian Radcliffe is the Carolyn S. Chambers Professor in Journalism at the University of Oregon. Amanda Lam is studying public relations and journalism at the University of Oregon. Social Media in the Middle East: The Story of 2017 is available for download from the University of Oregon Scholars' Bank and on Scribd, SlideShare and Academia.edu.