A Platypus's Vision Quest
by Don Doll, S.J.

Some of you have probably heard of a "platypus" -- the duck-billed mammal that lays eggs. It was so startling when discovered that scientists thought it was a fraud. Tom Burton, photographer for the Orlando Sentinel, thought it an apt metaphor for a still photographer attempting videography. When Dirck Halstead, a Time Magazine photographer, began encouraging still photographers to transition to video, he adopted the term Platypus for his workshops.

My sole intention when I signed up for the first NPPA Platypus workshop at the University of Oklahoma in March 1999 was not to do video but to learn how to capture better sound for a new project. My goal was a large format book featuring large photographs accompanied by text gathered from interviews. Accompanying the book would be a CD-ROM as I had done with my Vision Quest book and CD-ROM.

After Vision Quest was published by Random House's Crown Publishers in the fall of 1994, a digital workshop I attended pointed to the educational value and the interactive advantages of a CD-ROM- especially to children who will not plow through a coffee table book but will eagerly embrace the interactive technology of a CD-ROM.

When I began the Vision Quest project in the early '90's, I audiotaped interviews with my subjects using a professional tape recorder and microphones. I only intended the interviews to be transcribed for editing the text in a printed piece and so didn't pay much attention to ambient sound. Only later as we began assembling the pictures and sound for a Vision Quest CD-ROM, I discovered to my chagrin that less than half of my audio interviews were usable. That experience created the resolve to 'multi-purpose' the resources I gathered on my next project, and the desire to include video interviews on a CD. It occurred to me to use the new mini-DV video camera for my interviews since the sound is recorded in near CD quality. So I accepted Dirck Halstead's invitation (made during the 1998 Southwestern Photojournalism workshop where we were both speakers) to attend the first Platypus workshop in the Spring of 1999, intended for still photographers transitioning to video.

At the workshop, we learned (and I knew) that 'talking heads' are inherently boring. More importantly we learned how to shoot a sequence for video. A single shot rarely works out in a video edit. So a sequence to be useful must have a wide, medium and close-up with the emphasis on close-ups. The serious videographer has the opportunity to show with "B-roll" what an interviewee is discussing.

I found it to be a powerful medium. You can hear folks discuss what is meaningful in their lives, and hear it in their own words with their inflections and turns of phrase. However, we still photographers struggled with shooting sequences and holding shots long enough (six seconds felt like an eternity). Some of the members of our group came back with beautiful compositions on video. But our instructors would say: "It's beautiful but it doesn't move."

I found it particularly difficult to shoot video because my favorite lens is a 21mm on my Leica M-6 camera. I once did a count of my photos published in the two articles I did for the National Geographic, and 60% were taken with the 21mm lens. I thoroughly enjoy 'layering' a photograph and packing it with information. Two examples come to mind: Tea Break on an ice floe" [National Geographic, June 1984] and "Migrant workers" from Day in the Life of California.

The beauty of a still photograph is that one can hold it in hand, study it leisurely, discover and delight in all its visual detail. However, in video the image can't be studied, there's not enough detail and it remains on the screen perhaps for six to eight seconds before the viewer is bored, and wants to see more. In video, the wide shot tends simply but necessarily to establish location. And it does help to 'layer' it - i.e., with visual information in the front and back of the frame. But now the videographer takes over, and directs and controls what the viewer sees by pointing his camera at the visual interesting details of a scene, and has fun doing it. The viewer is taken for a ride.

During the final week of the Platypus workshop we joined NPPA's professional videographers. We saw marvelous examples of video journalism as we reminded ourselves that we were all storytellers. Dirck had arranged an interview with Tom Bettag, producer of ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel. Tom explained what it would take to produce a program for them. I wrote it off as well nigh impossible. Nor was it something I was sure I wanted to aim for. It was clear after the workshop what it would take to master this medium.

My two-and-a-half-year documentary on Jesuits around the world was about to begin. My aim was show how the Jesuits are living out what some Church commentators think are new directions the church will take in the new millennium. We chose three: inculturation, faith doing justice and interreligious dialogue. We decided to begin with inculturation in an area that I knew well, Native Americans, with a look at how the Jesuits were respecting the people and culture of the Lakota people on the Pine Ridge reservation.

I purchased a Sony TRV-900 for its compactness, and outfitted it with a Beachtex XLR adapter, a Sennheiser MK66 shotgun mike, and a Lectrosonics wireless transmitter and receiver. However, I knew I didn't have shooting video sequences down. So I invited Rolf Behrens, one of the best instructors at the Oklahoma workshop, to mentor myself and Liz O'Keefe, former editor of the National Jesuit News, on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation at Red Cloud Indian school to begin our project.

For five days we shot video from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and had nightly critique sessions with Rolf from 7 p.m. often till midnight. After Rolf left, Liz and I stayed on for another ten days, interviewing and shooting B-roll. When we finished shooting and began logging the interviews, I began questioning my wisdom in attempting video. I wondered what was I doing leaving behind 30 years of experience of still photography to attempt to make what I was convinced would turn out to be a cut above home movies. In fact, I went into a semi-depression realizing how many mistakes I had made on the shoot, and how much I had missed, and how many times I didn't know how to conceive what to do next.

However, I knew we had to edit our material to understand what was useful from our shoot. So Liz and I asked Rolf to edit our 'Pine Ridge' take. We decided on a 10-12 minutes piece based on Rolf's estimation that it takes a day to edit a minute of polished video. We ended up with a 22-minute video entitled "Dreaming the Possible", a phrase taken from one of our interviewees. The positive response of 300 Jesuits, who can be a critical audience, to our first attempt at video was affirmation that we might be on the right track.

But I still wasn't sure.

Liz and I were scheduled to continue our story in El Salvador to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the killing of six Jesuits, their cook and her daughter, by the Salvadoran army's elite Atlacatl battalion. In the meantime, I purchased a Canon XL-1 because of its increased ability to monitor sound. And besides, I discovered there is no way to be unobtrusive when shooting video - one of my reasons for choosing the smaller TRV-900. The amount of cooperation of one's subject that video requires is astonishing to a still photographer.

So Liz and I spent 21 days straight in El Salvador shooting 12-14 hours a day. We had planned a day off on the coast but a chance to review the archives of a free-lance videographer arose, and we transferred news footage of the aftermath of the Jesuit killings. By the way, if you are planning a video shoot, don't leave without plenty of mini-DV tapes. I had thought that 30 one-hour tapes would be plenty for our shoot. I had to purchase 10 more hours at 3x the NYC rate. Luckily they were available at a high-end camera shop in San Salvador - where the sales folks were fascinated by my XL-1.

We returned to the States with 40 hours of tape to be transcribed, and again contacted Rolf Behrens to assist with the edit. After reviewing the footage, Rolf suggested assembling a 5-minute 'teaser' for Tom Bettag, Producer, of Nightline. After a few weeks of editing we showed the teaser to Tom along with 8-10 minutes of raw footage. When Tom saw the footage of Peter Cassidy's (AKA 'Ernesto') visit to his El Salvadoran family of origin, he reflected that he would like to hear from Peter's American adoptive mother. Tom thought we needed an 'American' narrator voice.

The next day I conducted a phone interview with Peter's mother, Kathleen Cassidy, who proved to be an articulate New Jersey social worker. Our team, Liz, Rolf and myself, reported back to Tom Bettag who then commissioned us to travel to Princeton, NJ, that weekend to interview Kathleen and get 'B-roll' of Peter with his American classmates. Kathleen proved to be a most reflective narrative voice. With that accomplished, we were assigned to the first of three senior Nightline producers, and we went to work editing using extensive lists of 'episodes' and 'topics' that Liz prepared to assemble the script. The audio from the interviews would be laid down first in our editing program, Apple's Final Cut Pro. Of course, editing the interview from the transcribed printouts meant we had to check each sound bite for clarity and intonation. Once the script was approved, Rolf began laying down the sound track and inserting the B-roll with minute attention to subliminal gestures and sounds leading to the next scene.

It was a thrill to gather in ABC's control room the night of November 18th, 1999 for the broadcast of "Finding Ernesto" to some five million viewers.

But it was also unsettling.

Where did the program go? It was gone over the airwaves. It was astounding that over 700 people either attempted to get online with Kathleen and Peter or emailed Nightline immediately after the show. However, it seemed like vaporware.

On the other hand, the satisfying aspect of doing a book or a photographic print is that it's an object. You can point to it, sign it and give it to people. But then a moderately successful book like Vision Quest which had a press run of 15,000 reached only a fraction of the audience of broadcast TV.

So where am I in this world of video? I now find myself after a year finally feeling comfortable shooting a video sequence. But I am still a long way from even minimal competence in the nuances of editing a half-hour broadcast piece.

Firstly, the way we've been constructing our pieces, we've laid down the sound track first, i.e., a narration using our subjects' own words. So it's about writing, and putting together a script with 500 pieces of a puzzle. I've never enjoyed writing nor assembling large puzzles. So that's difficult.

Secondly, it's about timing, pacing and rhythm, and I've never played any instrument aside from a radio! That makes me nervous. Three-dimensional chess is an appropriate analogy for the editing process as one stitches the sound to the pictures in a story telling timeline. The video editing process sometimes makes me long for the days when I returned from a still assignment with perhaps a 100 rolls of film, and three days later, I had made my 'selects,' wrote the captions for 25-40 frames, and was basically done. With the amount of video we are shooting, it takes weeks to log the footage with descriptions of scenes, and transcribe any narration.

So why do video?

It is a powerful way to tell a story, and it truly gives 'voice' to your subjects. They tell their own story. Along with sound and music, strong emotional content is conveyed powerfully, and it has the potential to reach a very wide audience. Many people now think that still photographers should add video to their repertoire of skills because the new broadband internet access will open new markets as webmasters want their sites to come alive with sound and moving images.

One last question. Is it possible to do still photography and videography on the same story?

I have to admit I am spending so much energy and time trying to get good video that it's difficult to even think of using the Leica camera around my neck-if I carry it. It's not unlike trying to shoot color and black & white on the same shoot. I have definitely emphasized video over still photography on our first three programs. So I am not a very successful Platypus if it means doing both still and video equally well on the same assignment. I am not sure it can be done well, unless one doubles the time spent on the story. However, it does feel good to join the species, Platypus, and to have laid one egg, [the Nightline piece] after shooting video for only six months.

Don Doll, S.J. is a Jesuit priest, educator, photographer and digital filmmaker. His work has appeared in publications such as National Geographic magazine and the Day in the Life book series.

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