Video story about musicians, customers and “overseer” Dianne Herald who populate “Bobby’s Idle Hour,” a Nashville dive bar where original music is featured on Thursday nights — and sometimes when someone spontaneously picks up one of the eight house guitars.

By JOE GRIMM

I’ve spent the past five days, some of them working on the video above, in the Advanced Multimedia Boot Camp at the Freedom Forum’s Diversity Institute in Nashville. I want to share some simple thoughts about multimedia journalism.

* It can be powerful.

* It takes a lot of work.

* I need a lot of practice.

About a dozen of us had a day of review on things we had learned in the basic boot camps, held at various times over the past year. Then we were given assignments and three full days to shoot and edit mini-documentaries of three to five minutes. That seems like an inordinate amount of time — three days for three minutes — but I have to tell, you, some of those days lasted 12 hours.

My colleagues did some good work, will show up on the Diversity Institute Web site and I will note at the top of this blog when the videos are posted.

This is the video that I made with Sara Shipley Hiles, a bright and creative freelancer and adjunct professor at Western Kentucky University. Did I tell you that, in most cases, it took two of us to make these little documentaries? Believe it.

It took that much time to gather all the video, stills, archival material and audio — and to then edit, organize it and try to polish it. You need an incredible amount of material to make a good video. We shot almost two hours of video, more than a hundred stills from the bar we were assigned to (lucky draw) and two hours of archival material. Some of our colleagues shot even more. The audio gave us fits and we still don’t see the piece as polished, but the deadline came and we had to stop.

We know that, with practice, we will make fewer mistakes, gather more efficiently and edit better and faster. It is up to us now to take what we have learned and start practicing it. I hope this will lead me to post more multimedia on the JobsPage. It had better.

Multimedia feels so right as the way to go, but there are surprisingly few print journalists getting real training in it. That seems to me to be dangerously neglectful. Few are as lucky as we were to have trainers like Val Hoeppner and Anne Medley and the resources of the Diversity Institute, but the lessons are out there by way of on-the-job training, tutorials, Lynda.com and other workshops. Gaining the skill seems to be well worth the time and a smart investment in journalism’s future.

I welcome your critiques. I have nowhere to go but up.

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