(Literally) Building a better frame for mobile journalism

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So you’ve got your phone or tablet. You’ve downloaded the $38 in apps that you need to be an effective mobile journalist.  You’ve ordered your iRig Pre, your 37mm lenses, your shotgun mic, your lav mic, your wireless receivers. But you have a problem.

Your phone doesn’t hold any of these. Unless you use gaffer’s tape. The phone — and it doesn’t matter if you’re an iPerson or an Android — is designed to be sleek and to move in and out of your pocket with ease. It lacks the things the we need to make production better — a mount for a tripod and shoe to hold accessories.

The cases designed to be phone cases aren’t designed for mobile media work. So an industry of phone and tablet frames has sprung up. There are a lot of options out there. None of them are perfect. Some of them aren’t even good. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to fit square pegs into round holes, and here’s what I’ve found:

1) The thinner the case, the less space you have to add stuff on.

2) The more stuff you need, the bulkier the case needs to be (running the risk of making something mobile un-mobile).

There are purpose-sized frames. These are designed for specific phone or tablet forms. I’m fond of the iOgrapher, which allows me to mount 37mm-sized telephoto and wide-angle lenses and has three cold shoe mounts on it so I can attach lights and audio equipment.  It also has a mount so I can screw it on a tripod or a monopod. My colleague, Steve Rice, really likes the iPro lens case, which fits around your phone and uses a bayonet mount to put on Zeiss-glassed lenses.  The downside to the iOgrapher is that it doesn’t let me use the better quality iPro lenses. The downside to the iPro is that it doesn’t let you mount accessories on it — and it doesn’t mount to a tripod on its own. The downside to both is that they’re designed to fit a specific device. When I upgraded from an iPhone 5s to an iPhone6, I had to get a new frame (iOgrapher did not produce iPhone 6 cases quickly). When Steve jumped from his 5s to a 6+, he had to order a new case. Same thing with the mCamlite metal cases, which are practically indestructible. Get a new phone and it’s another $120 for a frame.

Then there are the universal frames. These are designed to fit (most) any frame. I use a Beastgrip frame for my iPhone6 and for the LG2 and the Nokia Lumia 920 I sometimes shoot with. It has mounting holes for a tripod and to attach other pieces of equipment and one cold shoe mount.   You’d probably like the Beastgrip, except they stopped making them. They were available on Kickstarter, then Etsy for a little bit. The guy who created it on a 3D printer did a new Kickstarter for a Beastgrip Pro (it will have a better build quality and be able to handle a depth-of-field adapter to mount DSLR lenses). Those are supposed to deliver in August and he’s taking non-Kickstarter pre-orders. There’s the UniGrip Pro, made of aluminum and able to fit pretty much any phone and attach to a tripod. But it has no shoe mount on it (though you can buy some attachments that will do that) and I’m not entirely convinced that it will hold my phone if it takes a shot. There’s the ShoulderPod S1, beloved by Glen Mulcahy at Ireland’s RTE’. They have a handle you can use to do pans, are adjustable and can attach to a tripod. But you can’t put gear on them.

There’s the MXL VE-001, which is an L-bracket that a tripod mount on the bottom and a universal clamp for phones along with two cold shoe mounts. It’s sold with a crummy shotgun mic, but you could replace that easily and it comes pretty close to being good. And it works OK if you’re needing to be mobile. But there’s only two mounts (a light and a wireless receiver), and no place to hang a pre-amp.

So many imperfect options. What do you?

You hack it. You order a bunch of stuff from different places online and you build something that works for you, generally at a fraction of the price.

Here’s what works for me:

1) A Vello L-bracket with two cold shoe mounts. It has a nice handgrip and the knob on the bottom can be mounted on a tripod. But there’s no place to mount my phone (unlike the MXL version, this doesn’t come with a universal clamp).

2) A UniGrip Pro universal phone mount. I like the fact that it’s aluminum and it has a tightening knob on it. But I’ve also seen this done with the top part of a ShoulderPod S1.

3) A Vello three-shoe Y-bracket.  It secures into the L-bracket’s top shoe and holds my wireless receiver, a light and the iRig Pre (note I had to epoxy a shoe onto the back of the iRig; in a later iteration, I’ll file the screw in there down a bit more to make it more flush). You could also accomplish this by using a triple-strobe mount (mine is from CowboyStudio); it’s really personal preference. Using the Y-bracket or the triple-strobe mount keeps the side shoe on the L-bracket open for a shotgun mic. Attach that puppy to a TRRS splitter and run it straight into the phone when you’re not using the wireless receiver and you have a pretty decent piece of machinery.

The Vello L-bracket holds an iPhone 6 and has the Vello Y-bracket and an iRig Pre attached. The Y-bracket is holding a Sennheiser wireless receiver and a really bright light.

The Vello L-bracket with a UniGrip Pro mount holding an iPhone 6. Attached is a  Vello Y-bracket and an iRig Pre attached. The Y-bracket is holding a Sennheiser wireless receiver and a really bright light.

 

I’d use this set up if I were doing an interview using the phone (the huge light makes it kind of top heavy). Total cost for the frame as pictured: $31.88. The price goes up when you start adding lights and mics. But less than $32 for a phone frame when a BeastGrip costs $70, an iOgrapher $60 and the ShoulderPod alone costs $35 isn’t a bad deal.

A few other configurations:

This one is slightly more subtle in terms of the light. It’s able to be easily handcarried but still has the virtues of terrific audio with the iRig Pre and the Sennheiser on there. It’s a good street rig and the tripod mount on the bottom makes it a good interview rig, too.

The Vello L-bracket with a UniGrip Pro holding an iPhone 6 and a CowboyStudio triple-strobe mount. The mount has an iRig Pre, Sennheiser wireless receiver and a much more subtle light that's suitable for fill lighting.

The Vello L-bracket with a UniGrip Pro holding an iPhone 6 and a CowboyStudio triple-strobe mount. The mount has an iRig Pre, Sennheiser wireless receiver and a much more subtle light that’s suitable for fill lighting.

I’d call this next one the “street hunter,” and I think that it illustrates a lot of mobile journalism’s potential. It’s fairly compact, brings light and improved sound to the table and can be used with a tripod or as a standalone piece of equipment.

The Vello L-bracket and UniGrip Pro mount holding an iPhone 6. The Vello Y-bracket is holding a RØDE shotgun mic and a small light.

The Vello L-bracket and UniGrip Pro mount holding an iPhone 6. The Vello Y-bracket is holding a RØDE shotgun mic and a small light.

 

This last one shows the original Beastgrip with a Y-bracket on there. There are people who swear by the Beastgrip because it allows you to mount case-mounted lenses such as the iPro on there. I don’t like moving around shooting with it. I think it’s great in a fixed position, as pictured below, and it works better than any of the other mounts if you want to turn the phone into something that approximates a GoPro. The Beastgrip/superclamp/ballhead combo below has been mounted on a truck’s siderail, a boat’s bowrail , a bike’s handlebars and on the actuator arm of a commercial mixer.

An iPhone6 mounted in the original Beastgrip. The Beastgrip has the Vello Y-bracket attached, holding a light and the RØDE shotgun mic. It's mounted on a Manfrotto super-clamp/ballhead combination.

An iPhone6 mounted in the original Beastgrip. The Beastgrip has the Vello Y-bracket attached, holding a light and the RØDE shotgun mic. It’s mounted on a Manfrotto super-clamp/ballhead combination.

We’re doing it wrong: The mobile journalism problem

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I teach mobile journalism. I work with companies that want to do mobile journalism (Cellphones! Reporters! Action News!). I’ve tested more than 700 apps in two years (and took the spousal asskicking that came with that).

I talk about mobile a lot, and I’ve come to this conclusion: We’re doing mobile journalism wrong. We’re trying to fight the last war. The technology is rapidly improving, but we’re using mobile journalism for something that it’s not really designed to do.

An example, ripped from the headlines, as it were:

A manager at a TV station was very excited about the camera improvements in the iPhone6 and he purchased them for his reporters.

“They’re not producing the quality that we can run on the air,” he fumed to me a few months later.

“What did you buy for them?” I asked.

“Phones.”

And that’s the problem right there. The camera on the iPhone6 is great (so is the camera on the Nokia Lumia 1020, by the way). But it creates a wide field of view, can’t zoom and the phone doesn’t provide broadcast quality sound. Unless you supplement with other tools, you’re not going to get the results you want. The people who are doing broadcast-quality mobile journalism that’s actually being broadcast? They’re not just using a phone. It creates a paradox: The more quality we add, the less mobile we become.

Except that we’re acting like the phone can be a thoughtless replacement for shoulder cameras and DSLRs.

There are four advantages that we have using mobile tools (given the current technology):

 

1. Mobile gives a force multiplier effect. Think of a story — tragic or otherwise — where you’ve needed to flood the area with assets. Let’s say you’re a newspaper that has a vibrant online site, a strong social media presence and six photographer/videographers. There’s a bank standoff. You can spare one photographer and that person has to really be in a fixed position in case something happens at the front of the bank. But you have 30 reporters in the newsroom. They probably all have mobile phones. And even if we don’t equip them with all the extras, we can use them — and their phones — to gather the kind of quick-hit video and interviews that resonate over social media.

2. Mobile gives us a single production platform. We can break the story process into five parts: gathering, assembling, editing, publishing, reacting. Typically we’d report on a camera or audio recorder, transfer a card to a laptop and assemble and edit there, transmit either from the laptop or through a sat transmitter and then watch social reaction via phone or laptop. Mobile consolidates that. It takes out minutes, and in our hyper-tiny-fast social news cycle, minutes mean beating the competition. Producing on a mobile platform reduces our time-to-publish.

3. We can go direct to social fast. This is where the brand battle is going to be increasingly won and lost, as flagship products such as newscasts and websites become places for deep story details. That hyper-tiny-fast-social newscycle lives on Twitter or whatever evolves in that space next. Mobile platforms are built as social tools and can help us get accurate information to the audience ahead of our competitors.

4. The app universe lets us build novel content. Content doesn’t look the same when we build it from a phone — and that’s a good thing. On a desktop, we’d do a photo gallery, with a click-for-next-photo architecture. Great for pageviews. Painful to do on a mobile handset. Using a collage app like Diptic or PicPlayPost, I can take my slideshow and put into a collage and show you my entire visual story in a glance and you decide how you want to interact with it. Or, using PicPlayPost or Diptic Video, I can create video collages that play videos all at once or sequentially and tell my story that way. It’s something different. I can use 360 Panorama to do an immersive 360-degree shot to show the breadth of damage at a natural disaster or what a football field looks like at halftime of a big game.

I don’t mean to say that we should abandon the pursuit of broadcast-quality pieces shot on mobile devices. Far from it. But there’s a better way to use mobile tools than just trying to reconstruct the past.

I’ll serve up some examples over the next several weeks to try and prove my point.

 

 

Takeaway from the PBS Mediashift webinar

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Remember, there are four strengths to mobile:

 

1. It’s a force multiplier. We can drastically increase the ground we cover by equipping reportersm producers and production assistants — basically anyone but the videographer — with mobile phones and the wherewithal to use them.

2. It’s a single platform for all phases. Mobile allows us to save time by consolidating all our processes into a single place — the phone or tablet. Time is a competitive advantage in today’s micro-news cycle climate.

3. Mobile lets us go direct to social media quickly. We can create touchless content that allows us to avoid production bottlenecks during breaking news situations. It also allows us to demonstrate that our brand is working between newscasts or article pushes.

4. We can create novel content. Mobile-produced content just looks different from what our legacy media products look like. The diversity of apps means that we can create new forms of packaging our reporting that’s designed to be consumed more quickly than traditional content forms.

And, last but not least, here’s the apps:

[thinglink 648205416345370625]

Mobile Ninja: Swords, throwing stars and apps

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If you were at Journalism/interactive, here’s the list of apps from the Mobile Ninja training:

The red flags of the first job (or any job)

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Ah, April. Students are interviewing, interviewing, interviewing. Recruiters are visiting campus, students are being asked to Skype interview. There’s lots of excitement — and not a few red flags.

Anyone who has ever had a bad job knows the red flag. You tend to see them in hindsight, but when you look back you go “How could I have gone to work at a place that did X?”  My favorite was the department admin who was handling the scheduling of my interview and wouldn’t provide me a list of whom I’d be interviewing with. I pulled out of the applicant pool.

Then there was the boss who offered me a job and said “You have 24 hours to decide. There are plenty of other people who want that job.”

I took that job. It turned out she was a lousy boss.  I should have known.

After a lot of experiences, I’ve found a simple rule: Little things usually indicate big things. A high turnover rate recently indicates that management is doing something to move people out. Why? Flying in the night before the interview and the business has no one to take you to dinner or at least coffee? I question both how organized a company is and how much they care about people. Does the person I would be working for treat the administrative stuff poorly? I tend to think they won’t treat anyone who works for them well.

The way bosses act can be indicative of a company’s culture or values. If a company tolerates a person who treats employees badly, is it a place you really want to work for?

Here are four red flags. None of them are deal breakers. But they should cause you to think.

1. The potential employer doesn’t value your time. Look, everyone’s time is valuable, yours and theirs. And you want someone who feels like your time is an investment. Phrases like “squeezing you in,” and actions like repeatedly scheduling and re-scheduling the appointment show a lack of respect for your time. It also speaks to disorganization. A friend tells a story of going to an interview and being forced to wait in the lobby for an hour after the interview was supposed to start. She was told by someone’s admin that they had forgotten her interview. Why would you want to work at a place like that?

2. They say things like “We deliberately understaff to make sure that everyone has enough work.” HUGE giant red flag here, since it translates to “We don’t have enough people to distribute the work to and we don’t want to hire more.” Go to this company and you will work like a dog. I worked for a company like this once and we had weekly meetings where people would go around the table rating their workload from 1-10 and the most frequent answer was “11.”

3. You don’t get a straight answer in the interview when you ask “What will my first week/month look like?” Smart employers have an onboarding process — a way to get you acclimated to the company. Smart managers who work at places that don’t have formal onboarding processes will still have a plan: “After doing paperwork we’ll grab some lunch with some of your new co-workers, then you’ll do a little online training. On the second day…” If you hear an answer of “We just drop people in the pool and see if they can swim,” think twice. It’s not a deal killer, but onboarding programs — or people who think about doing that — are signs of smart management.

4. Don’t let them change you. You are who you are. A friend relates doing an interview at a TV station and the first set of the day’s interviews went well. Before the second set with senior management, the news director pulled her into a bathroom and tried to get her to change her hair. Unless you’re going into TV, your example won’t be that extreme. But if someone wants you to change basic things about you — your approach, your personality, a part of your physical appearance that is part of your identity — you want to have a moment of pause.

Special Bonus No. 5: Distrust anyone who says “I’m a straight shooter,” or “Let me be frank with you.” Because they’re not and they won’t. They’re trying to project an image. Every time, every time, I’ve had a potential employer use those words I have lived to regret taking that job.

What’s in the bag? Mobile hardware

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Last time I blogged about the apps that made it through the year on my phone. I promised to do the next piece on what’s in the kit itself.  Lots of pictures in this one, words beneath in case you don’t like ThingLink.

But let’s talk kit theory. There’s a lot of different ways that you can construct a kit, but when you’re talking about mobile journalism, you’re facing the conundrum: the more quality you add to the production — via lights, sound equipment or tripod — the less mobile you become.  My kit is a reflection of that. It’s light enough that I can carry it for hours without breaking down, but it has a lot of stuff in it for those “just in case” moments.

First, let’s talk about the bag, which has been dubbed “Old Ironsides,” because of the patch (the patch and pin are for the 1st Battalion, 36th Infantry, 1st Armored Division; I have a former student who is serving as a combat medic with the unit and I keep it on the bag to to honor her and to remind myself that I really don’t have bad days).

[thinglink 610295344089006081]

It’s a Vanquest Javelin right-shoulder sling-style pack. I prefer the sling since I don’t like stuff around my waist (or in my lap if I’m squatting down). And the overall weight of the pack would be awkward around the front of my waist.  I’ll configure how I need to before I start shooting and then bring the bag around to my front so that I can get into the front compartment where I keep lenses and the other things that I’ve found I need quickly during shooting.

Going compartment by compartment, here’s the front top pocket (it’s the one with the patch on it). This is “ready gear,” stuff I need quickly.

[thinglink 610295391266537473]

I keep my telephoto and wide-angle/macro lenses in there. That’s not exactly true; the angle of view is so wide on the iPhone and iPad’s default camera that putting a 2x telephoto lens takes the view field back to what we see with our eyes, so the telephoto is on almost the whole time.

I keep gaffer’s tape in there, and I’ll use it to attach lights to walls, attach my pre-amp to a tripod leg.

I use a cold shoe rack to expand the space to mount accessories. Mounting a wireless receiver AND a light can be impossible on a frame with a single-cold shoe mount. This mitigates that.

I use a Joby GripTight mount if I’m doing something simple with the phone and don’t need to put lighting or sound equipment on it. It snaps around the phone and lets me put it on a tripod or monopod.

There’s a pocket knife in there for those knife emergencies: cutting tape, cutting apples.

Randomly, there’s an Apple Lighting to SD card reader. If you’re field editing on an iPad or using a system like Videolicious’s enterprise-level product that breaks up small files for transmission, you can use this to take video from your shoulder cam or DSLR and load it on to the tablet. Truth: I keep it in there for emergencies and because it’s light, not because I use it all that much.

Next up: The main compartment. Or the kitchen sink. It’s where the bulk of my equipment goes — and the bulky equipment. The bag has Velcro rails and comes with dividers that can attach to make it configurable. I’ve broken mine into two levels. The top level is things I reach for a lot: pre-amp, frames, mics. The bottom level is a heavy-but-useful clamp.

[thinglink 610295410853937153]

I love me my iRig Pro, which allows me to put XLR-cabled audio equipment to use. It serves as a pre-amp, lets me adjust gain externally and converts analog to digital signals.

The RØde VideoMic Pro is a compact shotgun mic. It can connect to your phone or tablet via splitter or you can run it through a 1/4″-XLR adapter to pass the sound through the iRig. The mic uses rubber bands to suspend it from the frame to reduce vibration. They are tricky a pain in the ass to reattach if they pop loose.

I’m a fan of the Sennheiser ew 100 series of wireless microphones.  They have pretty good range and an automatic channel scan to find the channel with the least interference. The package I bought has a body-worn transmitter, a receiver and a wireless transmitter for a stick mic, which is worth the price of admission.  In the bag, they live in a cable pouch from WaterField Designs (as a shameless plug, for which I receive no you should totally buy their bags, which are designed and made in the United States. I have two of their briefcases, several laptop sleeves and a bunch of their pouches).

I carry two frames in my bag, a BeastGrip and an iOgrapher. I use them for different things, and until I switched to an iPhone 6, the iOgrapher was my go-to frame (the iOgrapher is specifically sized to the phone, and I was using a 5s frame; they’ll have 6 and 6+ frames ready soon, I’m told). The iOgrapher has those huge handles on the side which make it easy to shoot actively with and fairly easy to self-stabilize.  It also has a ring for the 37mm lenses that I use and 3 cold-shoe mounts. The BeastGrip is a 3D-printed universal frame that uses sliders and expanders to fit most phone frames (my iPhone 6 barely fits in there, but it does fit). It’s got some handholds on there and numerous attachment points for clamps, lights, etc.  The company is coming out with a new version, which doesn’t really look all that different from the old one, but has the ability to mount a DSLR lens on it. 

My stick mic is a RØde Reporter mic. RØde will tell you that it has all sorts of shielding to make it omindirectional but primarily pick up the conversations. Here’s what I know: It creates beautiful sound. I use a Sennheiser wireless transmitter at the end of the stick mic and it’s portable, great for interviews, audio pieces or just gathering sound in places where the shotgun is awkward.

I’ve built the bag to have two levels. The lower level of the main compartment holds a superclamp with a double-ball joint head. I use this in conjunction with the phone frame to mount the phone to rails or boards or the running board on a truck. I’ve also used it as a second tripod on multicamera shoots.

So that’s the big stuff. What you don’t see is the various charging cords and external battery I have stashed in the side pocket.  I’ve used the Mophie PowerStation XL, which I’ve found great at retaining power but not as good at multiple rounds of charging, and certainly too expensive at $129. I’ve recently switched to an IntoCircuit Powercastle, which holds the charge just as long and is much better about charging multiple times and it’s less than $25 at Amazon right now.

 

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