Professor Robb Montgomery.
The Professor Robb MontgomerySmartphone: A Powerful Content Creation Tool of the Present and the Future — a meeting with Filmmaker and Journalism Professor Robb Montgomery.
By Sheila Turabaz
Diplomat Magazine has invited filmmaker, journalism professor and author Robb Montgomery to celebrate the 5th edition of The Hague’s annual Embassy Festival.
During this anniversary edition, Robb offered a unique insight into the interesting features that a smartphone has to offer for creating and editing high quality movies. Robb is a professor specialized in mobile journalism. This relatively new form of media emerged as a result of technological advancements in mobile gear (most notably the smartphone) and grew in popularity due to the rise of social media.
It entails the use of a smartphone to capture, edit and share content with an audience, which nowadays is possible in high definition because most smartphones are equipped with advanced cameras.
Although based in Berlin, Robb has trained more than 10,000 journalists over the past 10 years in numerous countries how to tell stories visually through graphics, design, video cameras and more recently, smartphones. He has authored two books on video storytelling and is the founder of the Smart Film School. The Smart Film School is an e-learning platform containing video tutorials about mobile journalism, social videos and how to make a documentary film. The trainings are not only aimed at journalists, but also professionals working in communications, teachers and students.
The core objective of these workshops and video tutorials is how to tell a story a visually: “Once you know how to do that with your camera, being able to then put those shots into visual sentences using the grammar of filmmaking gives any storyteller, whether a text-oriented reporter or a scholar a new toolkit to be able to communicate to the way people are getting information, which is on their phones, (…) visual and social”.
The course packs are tailored based on different users’ needs and attracts a wide audience, because according to Rob “(…) everyone has a story to tell, everyone’s got a smartphone. What’s missing is the ability to identify a story, to know how to do the (visual) reporting and how to put it together in a watchable video, creating high quality films that can be persuasive and informative at a high level”.
More information about Robb Montgomery’s work and the Smart Film School can be found on wwww.robbmontgomery.com.
