Producing professional video on a smartphone can be a very liberating experience and lead to creative new ways of storytelling. There are plenty of apps out there to help you shoot, edit, and distribute your work right from the smartphone, but a new app for iPhone and Android, ViMoJo, wants to put it all together in one seamless app.
ViMojo gives you tools for shooting, editing and sharing video all geared towards video journalists. For shooting, the app gives you manual control of your phones camera. You can manually set and lock focus, exposure, and many other camera settings. Once you are done shooting you can use the app to edit that footage together and add transitions, graphics and titles with easy to use tools built in. You can manage the audio levels and import other sounds like voiceover and sound effects and then share your work with many platforms, or export the project as a video file.
This is an app that has the potential to disrupt the way we think about video journalism. Many people, both in the industry and out, know that you can produce high quality video with a smartphone, but still treat it as a novelty. They'll argue that it may be good for breaking news, or social video, or Facebook Lives, but wouldn't produce a full hour long special with it. ViMoJo's easy to use tools and amazing results will likely change those people's opinions.
Utilizing smartphone technology is not only a way for news operations, large and small, to lower costs and, but also a way for them to increase the size of their reporter footprint, find stories that otherwise could not be covered with a traditional set up (large crew, news truck and so on) and reach new audiences utilizing new platforms.
ViMoJo makes it very easy to make the transition to working on a smartphone, and as a journalist this will open many new opportunities and stories that you couldn't get before, and ultimately, mobile journalism, has the potential to change the way we think, produce and consume news.
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