Group items tagged

Here are three slightly different versions of the same story, "Mom Goes to War," which I photographed last summer with reporter Mark Brunswick while working at The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune. In the story, Maj. Patricia Baker, a helicopter pilot in the Minnesota National Guard, prepares to go to Iraq for her second deployment, and her son Zach talks about his mother leaving. The first version uses only natural sound, while the other two use loops from GarageBand. I did a limited amount of music editing to fit it to the video.

Tracy Boyer is an award-winning multimedia producer, specializing in Flash development and multimedia production. She is obtaining her masters degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying Human-Computer Interaction in the School's Information Science program. Previously, she was a multimedia producer at Roanoke.com, served as the UNC correspondent for CNN.com and interned with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2007, she was selected to participate in the Poynter Summer Fellowship. Boyer graduated with a multimedia degree from UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her passions lie in travel and multimedia production with a focus on video, audio and Flash-based interactives. See more of her work at www.tracynboyer.com.

The Ethics of Mixing Music and Videojournalism Regina McCombs, a Poynter Institute visual journalism instructor, has created a powerful illustration of how soundtracks can affect a video story -- illuminating the debate as to whether they have a proper place in videojournalism. In her article, "See How Music Changes a Story," she shows three versions of the same video story, "Mom Goes to War" (featuring a pilot preparing for her second Iraq deployment and her young son). The first is with natural sound. The second adds a slow, somber keyboard track. The third features an upbeat guitar/percussion track. (Both scores are GarageBand loops -- demonstrating how easy and accessible it is for even someone with a tin ear to provide professional sounding music background.) McCombs poses the all-important question: how do the alternate versions change the way you react to, and feel about, the story?