My second internship was based on a completely different framework. I was not to produce any headline content for daily publishing on web videos. What Telemundo does, is to produce entertaining newscasts with extraordinary, curious, sensationalist stories around Latin America. And I was not to videotape events nor to interview the people involved, but only to watch an expert do it and learn from it, and later, edit the packages.
I felt such a difference. Samuel Arias has over twenty years of working with international networks. He has a production plan pre-approved by his boss in Los Angeles. When a production plan is approved, he schedules interviews and video shoots. He must script the package under a determined layout, a format he dominates perfectly. He has a style-book as guidance. He supervises every step of the production, and is very demanding in the post-production; I was pushed to be more creative in my editing, using logical sequences of shots almost every time. I finally felt I had a boss.
I learned to use international Spanish: cleaning my language of regional idioms and getting rid of my accented Spanish so that anybody from any Hispanic country could understand my comments.
Samuel Arias was very thoughtful as an instructor; he would explain all the tools of the editing program, every step on the production plan writing, every detail to be taken care of in the means of delivering a satisfactory product to the buying agencies. He would explain the reasons after every decision and recognize the job and initiative of everybody in the office. He was very strict of a boss, yet very aware of the capacity of his employees. And I really appreciated this.
Working with Telemundo also opened me the doors to a TV network in El Salvador, Grupo Megavision. So every Monday and Thursday I got to hang out at the TV station and be there during the evening newscast live broadcast. I got the chance to interact with nationally well-known news anchors, producers, and reporters. I had the opportunity to expand my network, and I took it.
I was grateful that I went from standing all day outside Forensics to get the images and the stories of those mourning their relatives, to go meet the family who found a Virgin in a beehive or the boy with no arms working as a carpenter to make a living.
The one thing I did not appreciate much of working with Telemundo was the sensationalism. Every day we were to produce a package for a very “yellow” show for Estrella TV. Sometimes it would be the same story we worked on for presenting at a national level, or for the newscast of the same international network, but we would have to exaggerate the story punch lines in the script and choose the most explicit images we got. I learned then how to make a crime scene bloodier, a sad story more miserable, how to turn a motivational story into a feeling of pity.
Now... we shall call things by their name. What is this then? Is it news, or simply costume-masked entertainment?
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Recap of Multimedia Internship
This internship faced me up with the truth of every news reporter. It opened my eyes to the moral issues our job requires you to solve in silence. It helped me to eliminate some double standards I could not let in the way of my job. The experience was enriching, it made me mature personally and grow as a professional on the field. I was the reporter on the streets, the eyes of those who could not be there when things happened. I also got to be the editor, the selector of images, giving shape to the clay.
One thing I did not appreciate at all was my relationship with my boss. She is a really nice person, and I did not have any social-related problem with her whatsoever; yet she showed little to zero interest on my job. Out of the six weeks I worked for the newspaper, she took off three for vacations. Whenever she was in the office, she would answer e-mails and get on facebook, twitter, and other social networks, and stay logged in all day. To me, other than for some specific assignments and commands, my boss was non-existent. She did not care much about getting to know me or teach me anything, really. My co-workers were my guidance and tutors, I learned a lot from them.
A few other things I could criticize are that the multimedia department does not work with any production plan at all; they do type up scripts, but they never file them; they have a digital archive of all video content produced, but they do not keep a high-quality physical archive of all the material they shoot and the content they publish. I attribute this to the fact that they have only five years of working on the production of video, and they have had not a school of production other than experimenting and practice. They do what they can with the resources they have.
I was proud I could help the producer of the weekly Chef show by designing a production plan chart for him. He had a little idea of how it should look like, and he made the videographers write down on a piece of paper the time codes of each cut, so it would be easier to edit the show later. Yet the chart facilitated this time-code-keeping and made the editing faster. At the end I felt like it was not only me learning, but my coworkers were able to learn something from me too. I felt useful.
A good learning experience after all. :)
One thing I did not appreciate at all was my relationship with my boss. She is a really nice person, and I did not have any social-related problem with her whatsoever; yet she showed little to zero interest on my job. Out of the six weeks I worked for the newspaper, she took off three for vacations. Whenever she was in the office, she would answer e-mails and get on facebook, twitter, and other social networks, and stay logged in all day. To me, other than for some specific assignments and commands, my boss was non-existent. She did not care much about getting to know me or teach me anything, really. My co-workers were my guidance and tutors, I learned a lot from them.
A few other things I could criticize are that the multimedia department does not work with any production plan at all; they do type up scripts, but they never file them; they have a digital archive of all video content produced, but they do not keep a high-quality physical archive of all the material they shoot and the content they publish. I attribute this to the fact that they have only five years of working on the production of video, and they have had not a school of production other than experimenting and practice. They do what they can with the resources they have.
I was proud I could help the producer of the weekly Chef show by designing a production plan chart for him. He had a little idea of how it should look like, and he made the videographers write down on a piece of paper the time codes of each cut, so it would be easier to edit the show later. Yet the chart facilitated this time-code-keeping and made the editing faster. At the end I felt like it was not only me learning, but my coworkers were able to learn something from me too. I felt useful.
A good learning experience after all. :)
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Contagious Sadness
The next day, Wednesday, I was to work on my previous day assignment. I went to forensics and waited for information about the victims, just as if I was one of the mourners. Under the sun, the wait is longer. I learned to hold my tears when being next to a complete family begging for information, praying out loud in drowning pain. And words run out then; I learned when empathy trumps professionalism, it is better to become a silent witness.
The forensic in charge informed the families and the media that the majority of the bodies had been identified and were to be hand over in only a few hours. Therefore my boss ordered me to stay and wait for them to receive their relatives, to “catch the images.”
By far, the saddest moment of my summer, was to interview the mother of a victim, whose son in law and grandchild died too in the same massacre. Her soul was completely shattered, her motivation almost ghostly, her faith so weak. She was broken. Her family and thirteen other families were broken. Now how do you show that on the news? Is it necessary to portrait this part of the reality, as a mean to create awareness and empathy among the population? How far into her story is a reporter to dig into? How much is it allowed to audit someone’s mourning process? Would I, as a person, answer all these questions in the same manner if it was me who had lost my daughter?
The forensic in charge informed the families and the media that the majority of the bodies had been identified and were to be hand over in only a few hours. Therefore my boss ordered me to stay and wait for them to receive their relatives, to “catch the images.”
By far, the saddest moment of my summer, was to interview the mother of a victim, whose son in law and grandchild died too in the same massacre. Her soul was completely shattered, her motivation almost ghostly, her faith so weak. She was broken. Her family and thirteen other families were broken. Now how do you show that on the news? Is it necessary to portrait this part of the reality, as a mean to create awareness and empathy among the population? How far into her story is a reporter to dig into? How much is it allowed to audit someone’s mourning process? Would I, as a person, answer all these questions in the same manner if it was me who had lost my daughter?
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