Conceptualizing a series
Tracy Boyer of Innovative Interactivity discusses conceptualizing a series, and roles each team member had in their series Age of Uncertainty, which recently won Documentary project of the year in the POYi’s :
Boyer writes:
Age of Uncertainty, in my eyes, truly exemplified the potential of multimedia storytelling. This series was the direct result of passionate journalists combining their different talents to tell one story using multiple mediums.
Editor Carole Tarrant supported each producer and his/her own aspirations for the series by providing adequate time to perfect each part. Multimedia editor Seth Gitner successfully orchestrated the online coverage and pushed each producer to attempt something new. Having such strong support and encouragement really allowed this package to become more than just an “on-the-side” features story.
Photojournalist Josh Meltzer produced his first video series, consisting of four chapters, by documenting a woman caring for her husband with dementia. Meltzer also produced eight other videos and provided beautiful photography for each written story. By capturing dozens of hours of footage over a span of nine months, he successfully presented each subject’s story with the care and respect it deserved.
Reporter Beth Macy thoroughly researched multiple story-lines to give unique perspectives on Roanoke residents faced with different variations of healthcare crises. By scouring press releases, attending meetings and following-up on leads, Macy found poignant stories that, together, told the larger story of how Roanokers were caring for their elderly.
I was in charge of creating the interactive components on the site, which consisted of the introduction piece, the three assessment tools, the memory game, the video player, and the “Geography of Aging” map. The map consumed most of my time as we had high ambitions to visually display aging statistics for every locality in Virginia over 30 years, and then compare Virginia to the rest of the nation both in terms of demographic statistics and medicaid spending.
Database editor Matt Chittum processed all of the data for my map, as well as produced the map on senior care centers. To display the map data, he had to learn how to filter government data and parse it for an XML document, which was an incredibly daunting task.
Seth Gitner pushed himself to learn Drupal to serve as the CMS for this site, which was a big first for us. He was also responsible for the design and production of the entire site.
In terms of conceptualizing a series that spans several months and/or subtopics, I would recommend concentrating on finding the right story subjects to tell specialized cases that help make up the larger story. Then, brainstorm on graphics, images and other multimedia elements that can heighten the user’s understanding of the issue.
I strongly believe that our willingness to learn was the key to this project’s success. As long as there is a set of dedicated and passionate journalists, there is great potential for a powerful multimedia package.
Fighting season in Afghanistan
Fighting season in Afghanistan by Canadian photojournalist Louie Palu.
Not to be missed – Left Behind
Left Behind, by Dai Sugano at the San Jose Mercury News. This multimedia piece is not to be missed.
Thanks to Richard Hernandez at Multimediashooter for pointing it out.
The Afghan mission in memoriam
The Globe and Mail’s Peter Power tells the story of Sgt. Robert Short.
Audio comparisons, and coming soon on the 5d Mark II
An audio comparison using the 5d mark II’s internal audio, a Sennheiser MKE-400, and a Rode NTG-2 Shotgun via “exposed light” on Vimeo.
Also, the Rode Video mic, which I am currently using, and fairly satisfied with for the time being.
That being said, Beachtek has a preview on their website of a new adapter with 2 xlr imports that attach to the bottom right side of the camera that looks to be about the size of a small battery pack. Word on the street(or forums) say that it will have a 48v phantom, and allow headphone monitoring. The unit is scheduled to be released first quarter 2009, and may be the answer we’re all looking for.
Non-profits and multimedia
Some of my favorite campaigns, viral ads, and multimedia packages from non-profits.
Please feel free to add to the list below:
http://www.helpchildsoldiers.com
http://www.condition-critical.org/
http://vimeo.com/1023900
http://eyesondarfur.org/
http://www.invisiblechildren.com/displaceMe/
5d Mark II video mode tutorial
5d Mark II
This tutorial isn’t perfect, but more of an ongoing bible for the 5d Mark II.
Pay close attention to the comments and updates at the bottom as they are
subject to change.
The refugees of Dadaab
The refugees of Dadaab by Toronto Star Photographer Lucas Oleniuk, writer Michelle Shepard, and editor Randy Risling.
The Great Debate
I hate to bring this up, but at the same time I feel I have to.
Sonya N. Hebert of the Dallas Morning News has an incredibly powerful 5 part series on life and death in 21st century medicine.
But what about the music? Where do we stand on this? Does the music evoke emotion that isn’t already there?
This became a great debate at a recent course I was a part of, and in the end, no one really had an answer. Most agreed that music was okay in funny, feature pieces, but it wasn’t fair to use it to further tug at our heartstrings. Some felt it made them feel manipulated, like someone was trying to pull the wool over their eyes. Others felt it okay as we are constantly making these decisions with the way we shoot, our choice of light, composition, and even when we choose to click the shutter.
I’m wondering where people stand on this, and, if one day there may be a common set of guidelines pertaining to newspaper and multimedia storytelling.
Until then, we march to the beat of our own drum…
Go ahead, Talk to your camera
Through the use of speech recognition technology Shuttervoice lets you control your Digital camera by your own voice.
The VJ Movement
The Video Journalism movement is recruiting qualified freelance video journalists from throughout the world but, have an immediate need for additional journalists in the following countries:
UK
Germany
Italy
France (outside of Paris)
Russia
USA (outside of New York, Chicago, Texas and California)
Brazil (outside of Rio)
India
China
South Korea
Japan
What it is:
The Video Journalism Movement, an online international video news network, is looking for freelance video journalists to contribute stories for our launch in early 2009. The VJ Movement seeks to be a platform for international news that goes beyond headlines and attracts viewers who are frustrated with the way mainstream media covers international issues.
Required experience:
The ideal freelancer will live outside the United States. He or she will understand the culture of their region, know its language, have access to key leaders, and know how to tell character-driven and explanatory stories that connects facts and add context to headline news. They will have excellent research, reporting, shooting and editing skills. They will be eager to experiment with the power of the web to foster communication between viewers and journalists. They will embrace our core philosophy about news: There is more than one truth. We prefer that they have experience reporting about conflicts, religion, environment, natural resources, immigration and refugees, or technology.
Apply:
Please send a resume that includes links to your video work to Emily Kopp, reporter/coordinator at ekopp@vjmovement.com. Please include your name and location in the subject line. No calls please.
Photos of the Year
The annual MSNBC photos of the year.
Building a Visual Sequence
I was first introduced to Gerri’s Game(Pixar) by my former boss Scott Anger at the LA Times. Scott asked me to tag along at a multimedia crash course he helped to teach at CalState Long Beach.
To teach visual sequencing we used Gerri’s game, an animation by Pixar that, without words, brilliantly tells the story of an old man playing chess.
Carefully watch and count the shots. Wide, medium, tight, and not a word needed to tell this wonderful story. A perfect example of visual story telling.
Why storyboard?
The Knight Digital Media Center tells us why, and how to storyboard.
There are many way to do this, but the point is DO IT! It narrows your focus, and allows you to set goals to achieve better results.
Jenn Ackerman
The multimedia work of Jenn Ackerman, a documentary photographer working in Dallas, Texas.
The Places We Live
From a release at: http://www.aperture.org/tpwl/
In 2008 more people live in cities than in rural areas. One third of city dwellers, more than a billion people, live in slums. In The Places We Live, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen presents sixteen homes in four different slum areas: Caracas, Venezuela; Mumbai, India; Nairobi, Kenya; and Jakarta, Indonesia.
Van Mon: The Forgotten Existence -Ehrin Macksey -Freelance
From Ehrin Macksey:
About 11 months ago I met a journalist here in Hanoi, Vietnam. He told me about how there were these pockets of leprosy villages in Vietnam and how he had visited one. This peaked my curiosity, because in the 2 years I had lived in Vietnam I had not heard of them. He gave me some contacts of some doctors that worked with these Villages and that is how this project started.
After months of meeting different people and collecting my facts, I finally got permission to visit one of these Villages, Van Mon.
I went back to this Village 6 times, usually for 2 or 3 days, which is all I could afford. I started to be treated like one of the Villagers instead of an outsider. When this happened, I really started to experience the daily life of Van Mon. I woke up every morning at 3:00 AM. I got me gear together and would go to see the morning rituals of the residents. One of those mornings, I saw a man walking to church. This particular person grabbed my attention, not because he was going to church, but because he was going alone and he was blind. I went up to him and introduced myself. He seemed very nice and invited me to join him in the morning service. I watch him go pray in church. He sat by himself in the darkest part of the church and no one seemed to pay attention to him. At times during the service, I would catch him wiping away his tears.
I started talking to this man more and learned that his name is Bop. I spent many of my afternoons with him in his humble living quarters. He told me stories about how he survived an American bombing, how he came to Van Mon and what he thinks of his life now.
I was deeply touched by his stories. All of them seem to be full of hardships I could only imagine. Yet here is a man who still goes to church by himself, takes care of himself and even clean his own house, all while blind and disabled.
I told Bop I wanted to tell his story and he gave me permission to do so. As our relationship progressed, he would tell me about his childhood and how much he misses his family. He also told me, that even though he is religious, he feels like this life is just a test. There is no more happiness in this life. So he prays and looks forward to his next life where he hopes things will be different.
When I started to produce these pieces there was so much information. So many stories to focus on, but Bop’s story, was to me, the one that captured all the stories of all the people.
Documenting the life at Van Mon, was for me, emotional. After documenting such scenes like the washing of the patients or the local hospital I would be drained. I would finish shooting and walk away into the village banana field, the only place to be alone, feeling a mix of anger, sadness and helpless. When Bop told me about his family and started crying, I nearly cried with him. His pain was so deep. To see this grown man, older than my father, cry because his family, who is well off, did nothing to take care of him or show any love towards him.
I hope I have represented these people well with my work. I truly hope that more people will know about Van Mon and help them the best they can.
Hungry -Maisie Crow- Howard County Times
From Maisie Crow:
I first met Max when I was out on a daily assignment at Chimes School, a private institution for disabled students in Baltimore. After visiting a classroom where Max was working one on one with an instructor, I was intrigued by his behavior and curious as to why he was a student at the school. I connected with him immediately and my intuition told me to learn more about his situation. I asked the principal why he was at the school, but she could not give me too much information without his father’s consent so I left my business card with her in hopes she would keep her promise and pass my contact information along. In early December, I heard from Lon, Max’s father, who said he would be willing to talk with me further about Max and Prader-Willi Syndrome. He told me all about it the disorder and Max’s behavior issues. At the time, it was beyond my comprehension. How could someone always be hungry?
Prader-Willi Syndrome, PWS, is a rare-genetic disorder caused by variations in the fifteenth chromosome. Not only does PWS cause Max to have an insatiable appetite, it creates behavior disorders that can be hard to control. Lon understood from the beginning that I would have to document the behavior and the incessant eating.
One day, Max came home from school very upset that they had changed his school aide. Lon called me and suggested I come over, as he knew I needed the content to solidify the story. Filming video that day was difficult because I wanted to comfort Max. After spending so much time with Max and his father, I viewed them as friends as much as I did subjects. I felt helpless and wanted to do more than film what was happening but I also realized that my purpose as a journalist was to document their lives in order to share their story with others. I wanted the content to allow the viewer to feel the helplessness that I did at that moment.
I did not start any of the interviews until I was fairly close to being done shooting because I wanted to wait until Lon and Max were completely comfortable with me. Once they were able to trust me, they were more candid and open to sharing their emotions and feelings. Interviewing Lon was difficult at times because I wanted to put down the mic and just talk with him about what he was going through. At one point, I asked Lon if he had anything he wanted to add to the interview and he talked for nearly thirty minutes. He said, “In the past, it was always kids with Prader-Willi Syndrome are short, fat and retarded, and they’re not short and fat…and retarded.” It took Lon almost 10 seconds to say the last word of that sentence. His eyes started to water, and he almost couldn’t finish his thought. Those seconds of silence nearly broke my heart but they also created a pivotal point in the story. I used the silence in the multimedia piece with hopes that the viewer would pause, reflect and empathize with what Lon was trying to say. The audio allowed my subjects to have voices and narrate their own story. What they had to say was much more than my photos could ever give.
After observing Max and his father, I knew that the story wasn’t only about the disorder. It was about a relationship, and in order to show that I would have to spend a lot of time getting to know the two of them and letting them know me. Through watching Lon raise Max, I witnessed the lengths that a father’s love would go to care for his son.
I built a relationship with Max and his father. That is why I could enter their home, tell their story, share it with the community and hope that it provided an understanding of two special lives and a little known disorder.
A New Dawn -David Stephenson- Lexington Herald-Leader
From David Stephenson:
“A New Dawn” was by far the longest amount of time I have spent working on a story. Assignments come and go, the pictures are often forgotten by the next day. But this time was different.
I knew that following Dawn Nicole Smith through the Fayette County Drug Court program could take more than a year to complete – that’s how long it takes most drug court participants to finish, if they finish at all. Reporter Mary Meehan and I got to know Dawn for over three-and-a-half years.
Her story was far more complicated than I ever imagined. It tested me in ways I never predicted. There were occasional access issues. There were ethical dilemmas. There were scheduling problems (how do I do my job on a regular basis and still find the time to spend with Dawn? How many times do I have to apologize to my wife and family for being with Dawn on our anniversary or a birthday?)
And I’ll admit I had issues with motivation. I found it very difficult to make myself go back to see Dawn again and again and again, particularly when most of the time she was surrounded in chaos or crisis.
Finally, three and-a-half years after we met Dawn in the spring of 2004, we published her story on 23 pages in the newspaper and with a six-part multimedia presentation online.
When we began Dawn’s story, we weren’t doing a whole lot of multimedia. But using a minidisc recorder I had purchased in 2000, I recorded what I could knowing that by the time we finished we might know what to do with it.
I never listened to any of the audio until it came time to edit. As it turns out, the audio pretty much dictated the structure of the online piece. And fortunately, that five-chapter structure also closely followed the stories as they rolled out in print.
I chose to use Soundslides for the presentation for a number of reasons: It provided a large degree of user functionality – for such a heavy piece, I wanted viewers to have flexibility and options which you don’t really get with a video player. Soundslides also allowed me to have captions which I felt might be important to some viewers. Soundslides, being a Flash-based program, was light-weight and wouldn’t bog down a system like a 3 or 4 minute video could.
I did have to teach myself some Flash so I could build the chaptered interface, but I knew that would be a valuable skill to have for the future.
Almost a year later, I don’t think I would do anything differently with the online presentation. Of course, I do wish Dawn’s story would have turned out better. But sadly her story is a common one.
The Road to Stability -Krista Schinagl- Western Kentucky University
From Krista Schinagl:
The project was a semester long project that was supposed to combine all the skills we’ve learned while at Western. We had to write a proposal for it and it would be a combination of stills, ambient audio, graphics (if applicable) and video and it had to be presented in a web format.
After several weeks of not finding a project I decided I would do it on my sister. I knew she had a good story, I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I knew there was a good story there to tell.
I didn’t realize going into the project what kind of impact it would have on me. At this point I barely knew my sister. We barely ever talked and I only saw her once or twice a year. I had never really talked to her husband or met his family. In my mind she was going to be just like any other project. I would commit just as much time and work just as hard as any other project I had ever worked on. The only difference was that I knew I wouldn’t have to work to gain access. I would already have access because I was family and she already knew me.
One of the hardest things was to not get involved. Watching my sister break down because she was so over whelmed with bills was the hardest situation to stay an outsider or just an observer looking in. I honestly was standing behind that camera crying for her and feeling helpless and trying not to get involved. I felt kind of guilty or like I was doing something wrong filming her crying and I kept having to tell myself that this was very important for people to see and that she’s going to work through these problems on her own. I felt like it was my responsibility to remain a viewer and show the world what happens when you don’t manage your money and that someone would learn from watching my project.
It actually stressed me out a lot. I would be at school and she would call me up crying and I just didn’t know what to say to her.
Our relationship grew so close during this project that we began talking on the phone several times a day. I knew everything going on in her life and she told me more than she would have if wasn’t her sister.
It was also hard to edit the project because I grew close to my sister and became emotionally attached to her and her situation. It was hard to edit some things out even if I knew it made the project a lot stronger. I spent so much time editing that I became numb and couldn’t see the mistakes anymore or couldn’t see the spots that repeated themselves.
Other small struggles were that she lived two hours away. I would miss things like having to go to the doctor with no health insurance or when they went shopping for a new camper. And living in the camper with them was not always easy because it was so small and I slept on the table.
The best thing that came from the project is that I got to know my sister and her family. Now that a couple months have passed we still talk on the phone at least once a day. And if I hadn’t done the project on her I probably wouldn’t have gotten to know her in-laws.
Ethically I think it’s important people realize Carly is my sister. I have it written on the about page but I don’t know how many people actually read the about before watching the project. I have plans to include a video interview of myself talking about the effect this project has had on me which will make the project more ethical, but it’s hard now that I’m out of school and don’t have access to cameras and programs.
The Archive -Sean Dunne- Very Ape Productions
From Sean Dunne(Very Ape Productions):
I first became interested in Paul’s story back in February ‘08, when I heard about the highly publicized eBay sale of his collection. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of him or his collection until then. So I researched him a little more and found out that it was declining sales in his store and health issues that were causing him to sell it. Unfortunately the sale fell through. I contacted Paul in June and asked him if I could make a short documentary about him and he agreed. Surprisingly no one else had contacted him about doing a profile. As a side note, this taught me a lesson to never assume that someone else is already covering something, find out for yourself.
I thought the story would be important for a number of reasons. First, because it was timely. His lease was ending and the collection hadn’t sold, there was a sense of a ticking clock surrounding the whole thing. Second, because his story seemed to serve as kind of a microcosm of a failing record industry and economy. And lastly, to try and bring some much needed attention to the collection and try to help him get it sold.
I happened to be passing through the Pittsburgh area later that month on another shoot and I arranged to shoot a day with Paul. Due to a schedule conflict we only had around 7 hours to shoot both Paul and his collection. It was tight but we got our shots. The initial edit took close to a week with another week for revision, tweaks, color-correction and mix. We didn’t really have any plans for it after that. Maybe sell it to a network like Current TV or sell it as web content for another network. I posted it on Vimeo to kind of test the waters and get a sense of whether people liked it. From there it kind of took on a life of its own. The Internet has taken this thing to places that no other forum could have, not even TV. The whole experience has been fun. I like instantly hearing feedback on the piece. It’s been encouraging and makes me want to pursue some other story ideas I have.
