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Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/How I make video newsreels for social media - so you can too

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Title ideas

  • How to make a Wikimedia video 'newsreel' for social media
How I make video Wikimedia newsreels for social media - so you can too
  • How you can make video newsreels for the Wikimedia movement
  • ...

Summary

I've been making short video newsreels about Wikimedia for a few years, I thought I'd how you how I do it so you can do it too.
  • ...

Body

This is a 'silent newsreel' I made about the value and purpose of the public ___domain.

Have you ever seen a video on social media that taught you something? Did that video have big fat text on the screen? Did you need to turn on the sound to understand what what being communicated? Just a few years ago, Facebook tweaked their user interaction and enabled video that auto-plays on your Facebook feed with the sound off. The result influenced video production globally and revived the 100+ year-old 'silent newsreel' as a way to communicate information to people on their phones (there is a good analysis of this style of video here). As a video producer for the Wikimedia Foundation, I've produced a few of these types of videos, and I wanted to share what I know so that the larger Wikimedia community can do this too. Basically, you need to aim to make a video that's 10 seconds to 3 minutes in length, can be understood with or without the audio on, and starts giving you information right away because in all likelihood your audience's thumb is ready to swipe up to the next thing.

So this is what a 100-year-old newsreel looks like:

This is a silent newsreel from 1918 made by the great early film director Dziga Vertov. By the way, does anyone want to add captions on Commons? I don’t speak Russian, but I’d love to know what the intertitles say.

You can see stuff happening with people in it, and then you see text that explains the stuff you saw (in this case you need to speak Russian to understand it). Today's video editing software makes it relatively easy to imitate this format using digital video and photography.

Part 1 - Write your intertitles

Intertitles are text that the audience sees on screen. When I set out to make a newsreel, I usually write these first and then that functions as my script that I can use to narrow what kinds of imagery, sounds or music I may want to use. This sounds easy, but to make it good can take some time. What are you trying to communicate? What's your topic? Draft what you want to say. Generally I find that to be able to read the text on your phone, it has to be BIG FAT TEXT and that means that you have to write little skinny sentences. It's kind of like writing one or two haikus. Usually I end up with maybe three or four short sentences of text to put on screen. Sometimes you have to chop the sentences in half and let the audience read the first half of the text before you show the next half. This gives you the opportunity to show half a sentence with one image and then swap to another image and show the second half of the sentence. This notion gives you a way to think about how you may want to write, and what in what order you may want to show things to your audience. Usually there's a call to action (like the link to a website) at the end of the video.

This video for Wiki Loves Monuments is made of still images, music and short sentences of text that is placed over the images.

Part 2 - Music

Now you should find some music. If you are a musician, you can use music you've recorded, otherwise you need to find some. Try to find instrumental music that you would be comfortable hearing over and over (while you edit your newsreel). I have used all these sites to find media that's public ___domain, cc0, cc-by or cc by-sa so that it's free to remix and is compatible with Wikimedia projects:

Part 3 - Find or record your media

Look at your script/copy/intertitles. What visual media would illustrate what you want to communicate? Are you talking about an event? An abstract idea? Look at the copy you wrote, and that should give you an idea of what kinds of subject matter you may want to search for or create. You can make a video that uses only text:

If you decide to shoot media on your own, here are my crash-course suggestions:

  • Try to keep the camera or phone steady.
  • Make sure you record b-roll (extra footage of the event) that illustrates the setting, inside and outside.
  • If you record an interview, record it in a quiet room, and use a lapel microphone.
  • If you record a presentation where someone is speaking into a microphone, there may be an audio mixing board that you can plug into.
This is an example of a ‘silent newsreel’ that uses live footage with interviews.
This Spanish-language newsreel uses only b-roll, and no interviews.

Stillmagery from Wikimedia Commons

You can use video that you shoot or video you've found, or still images.

This format works well even with shaky video you shot on your cellphone, because the text ties it together, so don't be afraid to shoot footage of

dig for b-roll on vimeo, or shoot your own

Links to b-roll

Free b-roll

Part 4 - Fonts, subtitles and captions

(working on this)

Today if you make a video for social media, you have a high chance that people will be watching on their phone, and that the sound will be off, so intertitles, subtitles and captions are key to communicating with video on social media. . What I’ve learned about this style: it helps to have FAT BOLD FONTS (I use OpenSans or Montserrat) for innertitles and when people talk, I use bold yellow subtitles with a blurred dropshadow. if there is text in the background, italicize the titles you use.

Mention the technical that I use

Part 5 - Edit everything together

Timeline frame rate aspect ratio- show bad examples

When making a video like this, you have maybe 4 things you can use to communicate: on-screen text, visual imagery, audio (things like music and sound effects which affect mood) and dialogue (things people say). What order for each of these works best? Generally I find that you can put everything into an editing timeline and then trim it all down that works.

It's a good rule of thumb to read any text you put on screen aloud, so that you know people can read it for that amount of time.

add bit about motion graphics...

Part 6 - Conversion

(working on this)

explain .webm vs .mov

add section about exporting version without titles so that others can fork it.

Part 7 - Captions, forking and formats

(working on this)

-conversion

video2commons

- Amara

Below are a few examples of silent newsreels I’ve made for the Wikimedia Foundation:

Indaba
test


This is a newsreel that uses only text. This type of video can be cheap and fast to produce. The music was reused from a previous production.
This newreel uses text and a few images with a few of video filters to make the point that images can be remixed. Note that the text and images are paced to the beat of the music, which must be done carefully so that everything appears in sync. If a few frames are off, it can feel off.
This was made using footage sent in by volunteers. Each shot needed written approval from the shooter for a joint copyright agreement with WMF so that the video could then be shared on the Wikipedia social media accounts.
This newsreel was shot by a contracted filmmaker who was also hired to shoot interviews for five days at the Wikimania 2016 conference. Upon completion of photography, she sent the appropriate shots via Google drive to me to be edited. This was produced within a few days of the end of Wikimania, and with significant planning ahead of time to clear a schedule to be able to turn the footage into a final video while Wikimania was still fresh. The video incorporates footage shot by a volunteer and by videographers at Wikimania. That footage was downloaded from YouTube and Vimeo and credited appropriately. Versions were produced with burned-in subtitles to play on social media.
This silent newsreel uses public ___domain images from Wikimedia Commons and advertises Wikipedia's Instagram account. It’s under 15 seconds per Instagram's 15 second video limit.
The WikiArabia tech meetup in Ramallah 2016. This required creating an Arabic transcript of all the dialogue recorded, and then translating that to English, picking the phrases that might work for the edit, and then having a native Arabic speaker time the phrases, then make the edit, then run the edit back by the Arabic speaker to make sure it's timed well and that words aren't cut off. Hired a local production company to shoot for one day.
The 2016 Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem. The video shooter was given a short list of questions to ask everyone - Who are you? Where are you from? What is a Hackathon and what are you working on? Covering the who, what, when, where why and how of the event. They interviewed about 6-7 people and then the footage was edited for the best parts of the interviews.

...

Victor Grigas,

Wikimedia Foundation video production manager and storyteller

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