By Andrew Zajic
Andrew Zajic is the Independent resident “Mobile Journalist,” a hybrid videographer who uses mobile devices to create video packages. How did he do it? Why did he do it? Read on…
How did you come up with the idea for this contraption? What is your experience using the Droid Bionic?
It was the night before the “Do I Look Illegal to You?” protest and I had nothing to shoot video with except my Droid Bionic. I had done some test with the Bionic because it boasted 1080p video, the first cell phone to take video in that level of high definition. I had no experience with this phone yet, so I had to experiment and see what happened when I held it close to my face; how well it would automatically focus and how well it records when I walk to my kitchen and back to my room, and then back to my kitchen again. After some tests, I was stunned. I am use to shooting with a Nikon D7000 or D300s, but this cell phone was taking video that was pretty damn close to both of those.
I quickly found drawbacks. The first one, I turned too fast around a corner when the Bionic was recording. Ouch. The video lagged on quick pans. It was not a huge problem, since pans are not encouraged in journalism…and a fast pan is a cardinal sin. The second and much more serious drawback was how much my hands shook trying to keep the video still. I had sniper hands like the hero Solid Snake in Metal Gear, Solid when he first fought against Sniper Wolf with the PSG-1 sniper rifle. Snake had the convenient drug, “pentazemin,” to relax his muscles and steady his shot, but I was nothing like that in my inventory. Even when I held the camera and put my elbows together the video still shook and I knew I would look abnormal when I would interview protestors and students. I needed a solution and thus my steady-cam contraption was born!
I was home at the time when my steady-cam was still just an idea. When I climbed down the stairs barefooted and speed-walked over the un-carpeted basement, I had it in my head that I needed a C-clamp to hold the phone sideways. The real trick I had to come up with how to weigh down the clamp and the more weight there would be pulling down on it, the steadier it would be. I considered locking a one C-clamp onto another one holding the one and then another to make a chain of clamp. I scrapped the idea quick because even I thought it was crazy.
So then I thought, why not use weights to weigh down the C-clamp. Where was Captain Obvious when I needed him? Anyway, I wanted to use a 25 pound dumbbell, Bad idea. It got tiring to lug it around while holding it with one hand against the bottom of the clamp. I got my eight-pound bell ready to go. (There are fifty pound bells too, just so you know). It worked pretty well when I manually held it all together with two hands.
If I wanted to hold the contraption with one hand, I would have to tie the dumbbell and clamp together, but my father would kill me if I used his rope. I found some extension cords buried in a box that he would not notice if gone.
And that about wraps it up!
Do you see a future with mobile journalism?
Of course, I do. The video technology on a cell phone, most likely a smart phone, is only going to get better. The advantage of the iPhone over the Droid is that it has fantastic camera accessories that amplify the zoom on the camera, so the zoom is by a lens and not done digitally. What that means is that lens on the camera is not moving; it is the cell phone zooming in on a section of what is seen. The Bionic is stumped on camera accessories, it just does not compare with that of the iPhone. I would have gotten the iPhone 4 or waited for the iPhone 5, but I was just disappointed with the iPhone 4.
As for mobile journalism, it is difficult and sweat-inducing to carry camera equipment like the Nikon D7000 or D300s with a tripod and other accessories like a microphone. Most of us carry cell phones anyway, right? But not everyone has a smart phone with 1080p video resolution. When you have set up your tripod and your Nikon camera, you’ve just wasted 10 or 15 minutes, because I usually have to do tests to make sure the sound is working and so on. You are also limiting yourself to the area you have set up. During the “Do I Look Illegal to You?” protest, I saw journalists setting up and shooting with a huge Sony video camera for broadcast television. It was clunky and it had to stay in one place. The cell phone cuts a lot of the time and hassle out of the equation. The TV broadcast journalist could not move around as much as a guy with a cell phone could. I could follow the protesters as they walked through crowds in the academic mall and then around the library building. The broadcast television journalists were stuck where they set up. They could disassemble the camera from the tripod, then put the tripod somewhere else and then hook the camera back on, but that eats up a lot of valuable journalism time.
With mobile journalism, the video puts the viewer right in the action all the time. All I have to do is make a steady-cam from a C-clamp, a dumbbell and then tie it all together with extension cords and I’m ready to go. Resourcefulness and compact technology is what counts here. Mobile journalism, or mojo, would never exist without them.
