News Gathering Process:
Recently I was working on a story that focused on foster families. I went to a local 5K race that raised money for organizations that help foster children and foster families. After talking to several foster parents, I realized that state funding is a problem that confronts foster parents. They need all the financial help they can get, and they face struggles in providing for their families daily. Their story is complex, but it’s one that is generally overlooked. I wanted to tell this story in a meaningful way to explain to people just what they have to go through to help their foster children succeed.
I shot some video of the families, but I was looking for a way to tell the story that would have more impact on the viewers. One of the foster parents gave me a few pictures of local food distributions and clothes drives; having these pictures was a powerful storytelling tool. The photos allowed me to reach out to the audience and actually show them what was happening. Instead of telling the story, I could show it and have viewers experience it firsthand. The photos document the foster parents’ lives and show the tiny details that are typically overlooked by many. The photos enable the viewer to experience the foster families’ situations firsthand. Each picture was a valuable asset in telling the story.
Unfortunately, I didn’t end up using the photos because I didn’t know how to incorporate them into my story. I had some great video of foster parents and their children, and I didn’t know where to tie the photos into the story. I wanted to include the photos in my piece because they had the ability to tell the story that words don’t have the power to express. However, I was unable to visually connect the video with the pictures. As a result of this, I think my story lacked impact. The photographs had potential to add depth and variety on the audience. If I used the photographs I think my story would’ve left a longer-lasting impression on the viewers.
While I was working on this story I realized the importance of using a variety of media to tell a story. A story can be told a number of ways; you have to find the most effective way to tell it. This story could’ve been more effective and had a greater impact if I integrated the pictures with the video. The pictures would’ve set the tone for my piece and added emotion that the video couldn’t evoke. I think my story was still meaningful in the end, but I could’ve taken it further to let the audience really experience for themselves what foster families encounter and overcome. The photographs could’ve helped me set the scene of my story and guided the viewers in visualizing this scene.
Journalism Reflection:
I learned more about my strengths and weaknesses as a journalist from my piece about foster families in Mid-Missouri. I need to learn how to incorporate different types of storytelling elements into my pieces. I wanted to use both video and pictures to tell the story of struggling foster families, but I stuck with video because I couldn’t use both effectively. I wanted to improve on converging different types of media to tell one fluid, concise story. I searched for good examples of visual storytelling, and one that I found seemed to jump out at me more than others. A journalist covered a volcanic eruption in Indonesia. The pictures taken to capture the action and reaction of this event were compiled into a video slide show. The slide show taught me about composition, capturing the action and a reaction, and finding visually stimulating images to push the story along.
Several of the images really jumped out at me. They forced me to imagine the extent of the situation and made me think about how people are really affected. The photos offer a visual representation of what's happening. Some of these photographs contain gory or gruesome content; it's hard for me to imagine being in that position, but it makes me wonder about the people who are actually affected by the eruption. The pictures add a sense of reality to the story and they bring the viewers to the scene, which enables them to experience the catastrophic events.
The order the pictures are presented in is important. They can be sequenced to tell the story in chronological order, or they can be put in an order to show the action and how people reacted to the situation. In this slideshow, the images are presented in a chronological order that traces the start of the eruption all the way to then end, where the aftermath of the explosion is documented.
The photos used vary in content. The slide show starts with the explosion, then it cuts to the reaction of a young Indonesian girl, followed by the devastation in a nearby village. The devastation is displayed through images of injured cows, their bodies covered in ash and blood. The destruction is also portrayed through pictures of families walking through remains of their homes, as well as pictures of villagers relocating to refugee camps.
This slideshow masters the technique of capturing an action, the volcano exploding, and the reactions of the people. It tells the story without words; from watching the slideshow you can tell what happened, the devastation caused, and the outcome of the event. You can feel the pain of the young girl who watches as her village is turned to ash, and you can’t help but feel sorry for the mother who covers her baby as she runs from falling ash. From looking in the eyes of the elderly woman who sits in the truck, you can see her thoughts. She is deep in thought about how the land that has been her home for more than sixty years has been wiped away in a flash. She thinks back to all the memories and the life she knew, and wonders about how different her life will be now. Her facial expressions tell a lot about her thoughts, and just from looking at this picture viewers are exposed to a deeper, more complex story than the overlying events.
Each of these images portrays a story with greater depth and detail than the story on the surface. Looking at these photos inspires me to capture this much emotion in my own stories. I want to be able to use photographs in my video pieces to expel as much emotion as I can. I want my viewers to be affected and impacted by my stories, and to do so I need to use thought-provoking images that tell a deeper story.
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