Nick Night Lady Gaga Tall Video

I’ve been a proponent of vertical/tall video since the very first shoot I did with the Canon 5D MkII. As a visual artist, I don’t think we need to be constrained by the TV frame or movie theater formats for video. Holding on to presentation ideals based on outmoded distribution channels is not what I call moving forward with multimedia. That’s why I’m glad to see inspirational cutting edge shooters like Nick Night posting vertical video segments like this one of Lady Gaga for ID Magazine. … Continue Reading

Motion Magazine Concepts

At last year’s Collision Conference in Hollywood, I presented a demonstration showing how to make a simple motion magazine cover with Canon 5D files and Adobe Photoshop’s Animation timeline:
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World Cup project trains up new African photojournalists

The World Cup hasn’t just been about the soccer – it’s also brought many opportunities for the people of South Africa, and other nations on the African continent.

One of those opportunities was the Twenty Ten project, designed to train new African journalists from 34 countries, then get some of them covering the event and its impact on the wider community.

Dr DJ Clark, course leader of the MA in International Multimedia journalism run jointly by universities in the UK and China worked with Israeli photographer Jonathan Torgovnik to conduct some workshops with some of the rising stars from Twenty Ten, and has written up his experiences.

There were, of course, obstacles to overcome:

“With equipment costing sometimes two or three times more than in developed countries and agonizingly slow internet speeds it was quite a challenge for us to help the entrants produce work of any quality.”

The multimedia pieces produced by those rising stars can be seen on the Twenty Ten website.

In an interesting move in these days of give-it-all-away-online, the content that’s been produced thus far can be viewed for free on the website, but is also for sale in high res formats.

Don’t let multimedia bury the story

Helen Kaiao Chang has written a thought-provoking piece at About Freelance Writing, on the nature of multimedia and its relationship with the wider story.

In short, during the judging of some journalism awards, Chang looked at online entries with a variety of multimedia elements – and had to stop and do a double-take when she realised she hadn’t necessarily considered what each multimedia element had added to the story.

She’s hit on something I think is very important. Having all these tools available to us, and having the hardware on hand to record everything we want almost simultaneously, means that it’s getting easier to grab as much media as you can imagine.

But journalists of any sort need to remember that the story itself comes first. The multimedia might look or sound amazing, but if they don’t add to or explain the story, is it right to include them at all?

Putting together a package means making choices. Some stuff is going to be worth including, because it advances the story and provides what the audience needs. Like the best wordsmiths, multimedia journalists need to kill their darlings, and cut out the stuff that doesn’t help tell the story. No matter how amazing it looks.

Superb multimedia essay by Paolo Pellegrin: Iranian Memoir

I love Paolo Pellegrin’s slideshow Iranian Memoir, which you can see over at Magnum Photos.

The story is simple, but compellingly told. Pellegrin’s powerful images of modern Iran and Iranians are shown alongside audio interviews with Iranian-Americans whose parents fled the country during the 1979 revolution.

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Barbara Davidson’s “Frozen Land, Forgotten People”

Even if you only have five spare minutes today, I urge you to spend them watching Barbara Davidson’s heart-wringing audio slideshow Frozen Land, Forgotten People.

It’s the story of the residents of huge chunk of Arizona which was declared a “no development zone” by Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner Robert L Bennett back in 1966. The ban made it illegal for the residents to do anything to improve their living conditions – and stayed in place for 40 years.

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