Slug & Lede

After watching the “EPA Coal Emission Standards” story by the Las Vegas Sun, I find myself confused whether this was made by professionals or high school students. There were portions within this story that I think could’ve had a much greater emotional impact and there were parts which I felt would’ve been fine but one element of the shot was distracting.
In the opening shot we see a crowd of people talking amongst themselves. The place looks absolutely packed with protesters. They suddenly and quickly cut away from this clip after about three seconds to people in the council talking. Why? I really felt the best way to start this off would’ve been to actually show the crowd for longer and without the voice over starting right away. It’s busy, it’s noisy, and to me it’s interesting. You don’t have to start explaining it at the absolute beginning, let the scene sort of pull the viewer in first.
Following that we get a few of a map showing the location of Mesquite, which is understandable and a helpful tool to show the location of this event. However, could they show a little more stylish map and do it in a way as to avoid the poor expanding map effect that was choppy? A static image would’ve been fine.
We then hear from Lori Faldmo, a protester. This clip worked well in my opinion and I wouldn’t really change any of it.
In the second interview with Bob Amoroso I had a little issue with the background noise. Maybe it’s just that my attention is shifted easily sometimes but I could hear some sort of speech being given in the background. Once I heard it my attention was turned away from Amoroso’s words towards trying to understand what was being said in the background. You don’t really have a lot of control over background noise of course, but maybe this interview could’ve waited until this speech or whatever it was ended.
The bar chart they used to compare the planned coal plant emissions compared to the EPA standards was just ridiculous. First of all, how many people have any idea what PM10 is? That term isn’t common speech and should at the very least be spelled out instead of abbreviated. The yellow and red bars with the plain text are an eye strain. If you’re going to use a bar chart use something with at least a little style to it. This story is from 2008 and that chart would’ve been iffy in the 90’s. Might I recommend Smartdraw?
To get off the negatives I will say that the clips from the protesters stating their arguments to the council was a wise idea. It showed the variety of objections that protesters had and showed some strong emotions.
Finally, I have to say this: photo effects are good ONLY when they’re animated smoothly. This old, grainy stuff doesn’t even cut it with a lot of high school television and is unacceptable at the professional level. Some of the photos were very well done too which makes me sad: the line of men holding their heads during the meeting would’ve been really great as a static image.
Now I know the Last Vegas Sun is a newspaper and the journalists conducting this work write more than they create videos. It all comes down to one single word though: convergence. Yes, this is a newspaper, but today you have to be able to work all forms of media. You can’t get away with work like this.
Thankfully not all their videos have this level of quality. To compare I watched “Inner Beauty School”, a more recent story and was pretty impressed. Hopefully “EPA Coal Emission Standards” was an exception in their videos instead of the standard.