MULTIMEDIA BROADCAST
In the photo above, I record a voiceover for a broadcast news video about a movement started by a group of mothers to protest for affordable housing in Oakland. I traveled an hour to Oakland at 6 a.m. at a moment’s notice to get video footage of people protesting the mothers’ eviction. Photo by Yipei Fang
When I joined journalism my freshman year, I did so because I loved writing and wanted to learn more about photography. I soon learned that there are many more ways in journalism to tell a story.
Since then, journalism has opened the door to amazing new media, allowing me to experiment with different ways of reaching my audience, including podcasts and broadcast videos.
POLITICS AT THE DINNER TABLE
My first attempt at broadcast multimedia started as an enterprise project among friends. Towards the middle of my sophomore year, I and three others who were passionate about politics noticed that political news was not always accessible to high school students. Gnarly issues like trade deals and foreign wars came with decades of backstory, and political analyses in popular media outlets often do not have the average high schooler in mind.
We decided to fill that gap ourselves by starting a political podcast by high school students, for high school students. Our goal was to synthesize and break down political news for the average high schooler.
In our first episode in September 2018, we discussed the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China. We wrote our scripts and conducted research beforehand and ultimately recorded our conversation with our phones. At the end of our discussion, we played an interview that we conducted with Professor Kenneth Faulve-Montojo, a lecturer for the political science department at Santa Clara University.
Although my technical skills have improved since this early podcast, it taught me to tailor my voice and script for the ear and represents my first foray into multimedia broadcast, as well as my ongoing passion for making political engagement accessible to youth.
ON SITE, IN THE MOMENT
Since starting work on a longform article about the Bay Area housing crisis, I have kept a tab on all happenings housing-related – rent going up, “tiny homes” being built and homeless encampments being cleared.
When I heard of a group of mothers called Moms4Housing protesting their eviction from a vacant home they had been occupying in Oakland, I felt inspired to share their story with the student body.
On the evening of Jan. 13, the day the eviction was planned for, I saw on Twitter that the moms had sent out a call to rally at the vacant house, and hundreds of people had responded.
I immediately drove an hour to Oakland, but by the time I got there, the moms had received notice that the sheriffs would not be coming to evict that night, and the crowd of 300 protestors dispersed.
However, about 20 people remained to stand guard over the house. I interviewed several of them, shot video and joined a group text to get alerts from Moms4Housing.
The next morning at 5:37 a.m. I was woken up by a text message from the moms. The sheriffs had come at the break of dawn with military gear and armored vehicles to evict the moms, and the moms needed help – now.
I got out of bed, grabbed my camera and got in the car.
Once I was on site, the sheriffs had left, but several supporters and one of the moms, Dominique Walker, remained to give a speech about the mothers’ movement. Using both my iPhone and camera for different situations, I took a combination of still shots and video and interviewed Walker, as well as several people involved in the movement.
Previously, the scope of videos made for Harker Aquila had been short, detail-oriented features on individual teachers or students. I hoped to take this video in a different direction by using voiceover reporting and interviews to put viewers in the moment of the protest and feature a variety of voices.
After filming and interviewing, I drove back to San Jose to start my school day. When I got home from school, I wrote a script and recorded myself speaking into my iPhone. I used InDesign to add animated data visualization into the video, showing statistics about the number of vacant homes and rate of homelessness in Oakland.
When I struggled to make my voiceover sound more natural and engaging, I took a hard look at my script, swapping out words that I had trouble enunciating clearly or that slowed down the pace of the narrative. In some cases, I chose to let my visuals tell the story. When my adviser equipped me with a Blue Yeti microphone, I re-recorded the audio for better sound quality.
Above are stills from the video. Hover over the images for more detailed descriptions.
Read the article here and watch the video above.
on Best of School Newspapers Online
VOICES FROM THE COMMUNITY
After months spent researching the homelessness crisis in the Bay Area, I heard that a two-mile encampment for unsheltered individuals was being cleared out by the city of Santa Rosa. I knew I had to document the story of this community before it would be dispersed forever. I traveled two hours each way and spent an entire day at the encampment, talking to people living there, taking their portraits and filming their stories.
When I came home, I made this video putting their narratives in conversation with one another. I chose to use overlaid text and natural sound rather than a voiceover so as not to overshadow the voices of the people I interviewed. I also intentionally left in some of the background noise from the highway next to the encampment to give viewers a sense of what it sounded like to live there.
For more on my interviews with people on the Joe Rodota Trail, visit News Gathering.
Watch the video to the right.
Above is a still from the video: In order to provide context to Joseph Vicino’s story of being priced out of his home after the Tubbs fire, I included statistics about the increase in rent prices in the county after the fire.
Watch the video above.
IN CONVERSATION
When I and two other reporters interviewed U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna in October 2019, we recorded the entire interview to give the student body another means of tuning into the conversation. I edited the video for ease of viewing, condensing the interview to the most pertinent questions and focusing on Khanna’s responses. The interview had to take place in a rather busy Panera Bread, making audio editing a challenge, but I welcomed the chance to stretch my technical skills. I included a video clip of one of Khanna’s town halls, which I covered with another reporter, at the beginning of the video to give a sense of his role in the community.
For more on my interview with Rep. Khanna, visit News Gathering.
AROUND CAMPUS
In my junior year, when I was news editor, I took the lead on the Photo Frenzy project, making slideshows of photos taken by the journalism staff to play at the beginning of school meetings. Every week last year, beginning in mid-October, staff members sent me at least one timely photo of campus life from every person on staff, and I edited them with text and music to create a new five to six-minute slideshow. In addition to improving my multimedia editing skills, the slideshows served three purposes: to show the school community our coverage; to give our publications more name recognition and to accustom and train our staff members to be constantly taking photos of events and life on campus.
Watch one of the slideshows above.
For more on how I streamlined the Photo Frenzy process, visit Leadership & Team-Building.
For more on how we engage with the school community, visit Entrepreneurship.