Bart Noonan senior cameraman of Reuters, spends a lot of time visiting the Reuters Bureaus around the world. His job apart from being a cameraman is to train staff cameramen and women for Reuters and for the Reuters Foundation - the charitable aspect of Reuters.
tvcameramen.com spoke to Bart about his training course and his views on mini cams and DVCPRO.
What kind of training do you do?
We do two kinds of training. We do training for our staff cameramen and producers around the world and we do training for the Reuters Foundation, . For the Reuters staff we concentrate on teamwork, because a cameraman is always going to be a 
better cameraman and a producer will always be a better producer if they know about each other's job and if they work well with each other. We play volleyball not golf. For the Foundation we do training for camera operators and producers from broadcasters all over the world. TV stations are alerted to the fact that there will be training courses in their region and they are invited to send people along. Each TV station gets to send one or two people. The training concentrates on visual story telling as well as writing to pictures.
All the training that we do, for our staff and for the foundation, is focused on producing good TV news stories.
Why is there a need for a course like this?
People are coming up on a diet of 24-hour TV news channels where, in a lot of places, the production is quite low and tends to be sloppy and, I am not talking about the BBC but in a lot of countries where they run a lot of news, the standard is low. The editing is bad, there are jump cuts all over the place, sloppy camera work, people are not using the tripod and there is no natural sound on one of the two channels. It’s just a lot of stuff that people are not doing. And now that the mini cameras are out, this allows almost anybody to become a news cameraman overnight, and so many of them haven't a clue. If you go back into the 80s or even the 70s, the way people did TV back then, it was like little movies. A whole generation has missed out on what is considered to be the fundamentals of story telling, so basically we are trying to re-introduce people to good strong story telling.
And how do you do that?
By teaching them how and when to shoot a hand held wide angle shot or when to stay away and be on the tripod. When do you want to use a narrow depth of field to concentrate the viewers attention and when do you want to be really sharp that you don't have to worry about focusing? Close-ups are the hardest shots to get but these are the strongest ones to use, natural sound can make the story for you; you have to keep your ears and you mind open, there are many different ways to do a good story. You try and teach people to write with the microphone. You try and tell people to do things simply, don’t do complicated moves, so when you have beautiful reality in front of you, you can get it cleanly. You try and teach people about lighting because the cameras are so sensitive these days that, if you know what you are doing, you can then walk into certain situations without any lights and still get a great shot with just the available light. People think that the idea of proper three-point lighting you only use for documentaries but any piece can be made better even with a little light.
Teaching framing is always the tricky bit, and so is teaching them how to have a feel for things but a lot of what we do you can teach easily. If somebody really wants to do the job and if they are interested then they also have the interest in learning.
We also try and teach people how to edit creatively, trying to keep them away from all the big don’ts. People do not understand that there are about four different ways to do jump cuts and they keep doing it. We try and tell people how to avoid doing that; you have to know where the story is going. Beginning, middle and end, but to begin you must know where you are going to end.
That’s just some of the things that we teach.
Apart from the creative stuff you also teach technical stuff?
Absolutely, we teach people what the contrast ratio is and how they should plan their shooting days and where the sun is going to be. We try and teach people how to move smoothly with the tripod, what microphone to use in certain circumstances, how to hide a microphone while you still have it taped on somebody’s clothing. We try and teach them little technical tricks, like if you have a three-stage tripod, then leave the bottom set of the legs extended about 4-5 inches and leave it that way all the time. When you are in the field you just lift the top set of legs and as soon as you lift them up the camera is at the height to shoot a head walking past the camera. If you only pull up the first set of legs then the camera is at armpit level. We teach people how to use the menus on the new cameras, we try to give people basic engineering classes, but the idea behind everything we do in these classes is to show people how to tell a story.
We also cover a lot of things about safety; we try and encourage people to take a free Red Cross class so that they have basic first aid knowledge. A lot of people think that because they do not work in a war zone there is no need for them to know first aid. This especially happens here in Europe as there are so many set pieces, like the European summit and conferences where all this wiring, cabling and staging is set up temporarily and a lot of people tend to treat it as permanent. You have cables in places where they shouldn’t be, or flight cases are used as camera platforms which is not safe and occasionally people fall of them. If somebody cuts themselves you should know how to stop the bleeding. So we try and get into safety a lot.
How is the response?
From within the company, generally speaking, it has been quite good. We had people who where considered border line by their bureau chiefs who after attending the class have come along spectacularly and within Reuters have won "Story of the Month". For the Reuters Foundation we have had some great emails, one woman in India recently who was in one of my classes two years ago said that she uses her class notes as the Bible every time she does a story.
We had less success in situations where the level of English is not that great. We translated some courses into Russian, Spanish, Chinese and we generally tend to be a bit less successful there because of the language problem and because a lot of the tapes we use as examples are in English.
A situation that is a bit difficult to overcome is in places like Asia where people are very accustomed to a kind of learning where an instructor will stand up in class, give the information, and expect the class to give that information back at the end. They expect real specific things, like a sound bite should be 15 sec long; you should always end with a stand up. You should always start with the natural sound up, so in places where people expect that, it’s a bit of a re-adjustment for them because this is not the way that I teach. It's very much a give and take sort of thing. I want people to ask questions because I like to try and challenge them. I tell them there are no rules, just tools and tools should be used for the right job.
What is your personal motivation in doing this course?
When I started out in 1983, nobody actually sat down and said this is what you need to do and this is what you shouldn’t do. I learned at a small local TV station and I learned by trial and error. I had people yelling at me when I did things wrong and complementing me when I did things right. I learned the hard way. I also want to give something back for all the good translators you get in different countries, for that driver who got me out of a fix in Bosnia, for that somebody who always gets me out of Baghdad in one piece. I also always find myself re-concentrating on my job after I have done a class because you have to have a very clear idea in your mind in order to explain it to somebody else. So I always have a fresh approach to my own job.
There is a big debate going on about the new mini cams. Cameramen are concerned that clients are hiring less experienced people with unprofessional equipment because they are cheaper. What is your personal view in this?
I look at it in a different way. People who are shifting video on the Internet are going to be using these kinds of cameras, and I think that is a fact of life. I also think that it's up to the professional cameramen to distinguish themselves through their work in order to maintain their value. You can give any kid some basic training and a mini camera and they will be able to cover something. Now, if they are going to be able to tell a good story with pictures, that’s another story. I think the small cameras have their place, it is the year 2000, and we can use it in places where if you take out a big camera you are going to be a target. I did the riots in London on the 1st of May and I did it a bit differently. I wore muddy jeans and I did not shave for five days and I shot it with the mini cam so I fitted in with the demonstrators. Sky got two cameras busted, BBC got attacked, CNN got attacked and I think a Japanese crew got attacked but nobody bothered me because I looked like one of the demonstrators. That would not have been possible without a mini cam.
Reuters uses DVCPRO. What do you think of the DVCPRO?
Panasonic have been really good to us in terms of listening to our problems with it. We re-fitted all our cameras with new viewfinders instead of the ones that we where originally issued, and a lot of the crews are a lot happier with their cameras since that had come along. The laptop editor has performed quite well for agency style work. I edited some finished broadcast pieces for our financial division and it was all right for that, so generally speaking I am pretty pleased with it. I only tried out the SX when it first came out and I also found that to be good, but our bosses chose to go with DVCPRO.
How does it compare to the Betacam?
In a lot of ways I prefer the DVCPRO, the gain is a lot cleaner and there's more control of how I customize my camera to my preferences. There are certain controls on the Betacam which I prefer, mainly the placement of the audio channel1 level control on the viewfinder. Betacam are great cameras, I have used them for 10 years and I still love them and I still do client jobs on Betacam. Good dependable cameras, the 400a is a classic camera, the 200 is a classic camera if there were ever one, great cameras. But I am also happy with the DVCPRO.
