My news critique is about a story that reported on an attempted rape victim in Huntsville, Alabama. The victim, Kelly Dodson, was interviewed on July 28, 2010, by Elizabeth Gentle, a reporter for NBC affiliate WAFF-48 News. The purpose of the story was to inform local citizens about the tragedy that happened in their community. This report was meant to inform others of the attempted rape in order to establish awareness amongst citizens. Throughout this critique, I will be speaking on both the good and bad aspects of the news report.
I will first discuss the elements that I felt could have been better or different. The news report started with an establishing shot of reporter Elizabeth Gentle. The shot was centered, but Gentle was more off to the left, which made the shot more unbalanced. I would have made the shot tighter, which would have better positioned her within the frame. Besides the obvious pronunciation errors done by Gentle, everything else in this shot seemed to fit together nicely. The exposure and white balance in the frame were done nicely, and the camera focus also sufficed. Throughout the report, I noticed problems with lighting due to the use of inside shots (footage inside the home). Consequently, the outdoor shots were a tad bit unfocused as well, but the inside shots were the ones that caused some of the footage to be noticeably darker than the others. With there being two different shots with two distinct lighting results, we see the consistency of the video being significantly affected. In addition, many of the shots had loud background noise that in a sense "broke the veil." To further explain, the background noise more or less played a role in taking away the captivity of the news report.
Further along in the video, I noticed that there were not many uses of B-roll shots. Specifically in news stories, B-roll is an important technique used to indicate simultaneous action or flashbacks.