Cinematic Journalism: Enhancing or distorting reality?

The Economy of a Tent City from Travis Fox on Vimeo.

With the rise of independent journalism and decrease in cost of high-level cinematic equipment, many media-makers are blurring the line between ‘filmmaker’ and ‘journalist’. These folks use cinematic techniques — like sweeping emotional music, shallow depth of field, and heavy use of color-correction — to enhance their journalistic storytelling abilities in a practice that has come to be known as ‘cinematic journalism’.

Critics of cinematic journalism call it emotionally manipulative, or say that it loses objectivity and distorts the truth, or say that by making real life look too much like the movies, actually distances us from the very subjects it hopes to bring us nearer.

One site which is hosting a lot of the discussion about the pros and cons of using these techniques is dslrnewsshooter.com. The video above comes from a recent post that calls into question whether this is anything new at all.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 4:50 pm. It is filed under NOVAC Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

2 Responses to “Cinematic Journalism: Enhancing or distorting reality?”

  1. Jason says:
    June 25, 2010 at 11:04 pm

    Do you offer your members the kind of cameras that are mentioned in this article?

  2. Andrew Larimer says:
    June 29, 2010 at 10:19 am

    We don’t have any yet, but we hope to get one or two soon.

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