Matt Eich from Ohio University won College Photographer of the Year in 2006.
As a side note, this contest is hosted and judged at the University of Missouri. Mizzou-Rah!
He was 20 years old when he won this contest. His girlfriend, Melissa, was 19. It was news to them when they found out Melissa was pregnant. Soon thereafter, they were married and they both moved to Portland, OR for Matt’s summer internship.
With help from their friends, Matt and Melissa created a documentary available on MediaStorm called Love in the First Person. In it, they describe the changes in their lives and how they coped. The video in the documentary is mainly them talking in a room with an unmade bed or pictures of them going about their daily lives. Wedding photos also made it into the documentary as it was one of the major occasions of their lives in the past few years. It is a very casual movie. They don’t dress up or make sure their hair is perfect. It’s real life. It’s their life.
This got me thinking. Not only did it tie in with a previous post on young marriages, but it also got me thinking that this was the way to tell stories, even in TV news. When interviewing someone, it’s essential to dig deeper than what you’re trying to cover. Understand their lives. Understand their background. Relate to them. Figure out what makes them the way they are. If you can show someone in their natural “habitat”, it makes them that much more real to the viewers. 53-year-old Mabel is more able to relate to 65-year-old Henry in another part of Missouri because the reporter tells the viewers that Henry is a farmer and he lost his right pinky toe when he was 14 because of a tractor accident. But the reporter wasn’t there to cover the loss of his pinky. He was there to talk about the economy and how the current economic crisis has hurt his farm. By bringing in the short anecdote about his missing toe, a reporter can make him real. He is a real person. Seeing this documentary made everything my Broadcast 2 teacher has been talking about set in. I finally get it. You could call it an “ah-ha” moment.
Everyone has a story. It’s my job as a journalist to tell it.
