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

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' 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 write this to share how you 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 innertitles 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 copy

This sounds easy, but to make it good can take some time. What are you trying to communicate? What's your topic? 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 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.

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). 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:

• https://musopen.org/ - Mostly western classical music, mostly cc0-licensed
• http://freemusicarchive.org/ - music under various licenses. Lots made just for video.
• https://www.jamendo.com/ - music under various licenses. Unfortunately searching by license has been removed, and you have to be logged in to see the license of any track, but much can be found here.
• Wikimedia Commons:
  • https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Audio_files_of_music
  • https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikiradio/
• http://freesound.org/ - This is primarily sound effects, but sometimes you can find bits of music. Uses various licenses.

Part 3 - Find your media

(working on this)

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

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

• try to keep the camera 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.

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

(working on this)

You have images (still and video), music, possibly dialogue and text to use to get your ideas made. What order for each of these works best? Generally I find that you can put everything into an editing timeline and then trim 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.

Esto es un editatón de Wikipedia - 'This is a Wikipedia edit-a-thon' - a newsreel made in Spanish. A video shooter was hired to document the event for one day, and was instructed to only photograph art that is in the public domain. The video shooter used a Canon c100 and a DJI drone to photograph the event. Music comes from Dub Terminator which was licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 on Jamendo.com.

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