Abstract
As the title suggests, this textbook serves as a reference guide for producing professional, nonfiction, and audiovisual narratives. Author and Columbia Journalism Professor, Duy Linh Tu, recognizes a need for contemporary professional journalists and journalism students from legacy print and “digital-first” industries to learn fundamental audiovisual storytelling techniques. His textbook offers a comprehensive way to meet that need.
The book is organized into three parts: an overview of the contemporary multimedia news landscape (Part I); foundational video, audio, and editing techniques (Part II); and strategies for arranging these elements into narratives (Part III). The chapters across the book include interviews with professionals from the print, film, audio, documentary, and digital industries. The chapters also include photo examples of successful and unsuccessful applications of each production technique. In Part II, the author provides relevant, easy-to-follow production exercises as well as a suggested workflow for postproduction. Additionally, the author provides a link to a companion website for this text, presumably with raw footage examples, however, the website is not currently available.
Part I clearly explains that this is not a textbook for broadcast journalists. Although local television news stations also have a job title called “multimedia journalist,” this author refers specifically to journalists who seek employment by companies from the legacy print or digital-first industries. Legacy broadcast companies, Tu points out, primarily format stories for television newscasts, whereas print and digital companies are free to select what he calls the “best medium” for each story. Indeed, much of the language in this text shows that the author is distancing himself from television news as he explains that “we will be ignoring the techniques and style of TV news, a format that does not work well online.” As such, this textbook provides instruction for obtaining the audiovisuals necessary to package a story but does not address script-writing techniques for reporter narration.
Part II, the longest section, presents in careful detail the fundamental elements of professional audiovisual communication. As a broadcast journalism professor and a former local television news producer, I believe that this section is useful to audiovisual storytellers across all news media industries. This book is clearly written by an experienced photographer. Channeling Herbert Zettl’s Sight, Sound, Motion, Tu’s technical section provides an excellent overview of modern framing, lighting, focus, sequencing, audio, and artistic considerations that are often overlooked in other introductory texts in exchange for dissecting written journalistic styles.
In Part III, the reader graduates to a discussion of narrative forms. Here, the author explains the challenges of the inverted pyramid structure to audiovisual storytelling. There is one additional exercise in this chapter that focuses on this theoretical discussion. Tu also dedicates the longest chapter in this section to documentary format, using his own documentary as a case study. The author does not present standard broadcast structures for written narratives such as the diamond or the hourglass, nor does he address the concept of writing to video. By ignoring the unique, written language of broadcast storytelling, the author limits the reader’s understanding of and appreciation for the reporter track in this journalistic format. While television news packages may not be the best medium for every kind of news story, the reporter track is still widely considered a best practice by broadcast journalists for many stories. It seems a shame to deprive legacy print and digital-first content producers the opportunity to learn and appreciate such a common feature of this style.
The last two chapters, while relevant, are misplaced: Part III includes a chapter on mobile phone photography that fits better with Part II, as it returns to a discussion of production techniques. Similarly, the final chapter in the text, outlining the video adoption strategies for various print and digital companies, belongs in Part I where Tu defends the importance of learning these techniques in the first place.
This book is written by an experienced nonfiction, audiovisual storyteller for the benefit of professionals outside the broadcast tradition. The author sees that legacy print and digital-first industries are incorporating audiovisual storytelling into their products whether or not the professionals have enough experience in this field. As such, he is lending his expertise to these professional communicators in the hopes of avoiding poor application of the techniques. While this text actively separates the act of writing from the act of communicating through audiovisuals, it does appropriately recognize a need to immediately educate multimedia journalists so that they develop a deep appreciation for their “new” storytelling medium.