bob sacha » multimedia

Good Ethics vs. Good Storytelling & What We Crave

bob sacha — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 18:55:02 +0000

There’s a nice article in the New York Times magazine about my favorite radio show, RadioLab. And there is a fantastic interactive that the New York Times Magazine created isolating some of their storytelling sounds.

RadioLab is a brilliant show about science, told in an extremely clever non-traditional way. I’m always struggling with the line between good ethics and bad storytelling in new media. Many of the sounds on the show are created and the editing is extensive. But rather than being bad journalism, its brilliant storytelling and it just won a Peabody Award for…..
Immersive and boundlessly imaginative, the series uses pithy prose and state-of-the-art sound to illuminate complicated scientific and philosophical subjects.

Here’s a great quote from the NYTimes story written by Rob Walker:

“I asked Abumrad what a traditional radio producer would make of his meticulously constructed bruup bruup fhewm fhewm. “They would say it’s insane,” he said. Early on, he had to deal with “radio people” who thought he was wasting time on “artsy-fartsy namby-pampy” technical distractions. “But do you want to know why ‘Radiolab’ has worked beyond public radio?” he asked. “Because it sounds like life. You watch TV, and someone has labored over the feel. Look at ‘Mad Men’ or ‘The Sopranos’: the mood, the pacing, the richness of it, comes from those fine, quote-unquote technical choices.”

and even better, another quote on why it’s important to make things that last, not just things that are fast.

This approach — a smaller number of shows, painstakingly assembled and treated more like small movies than like regularly scheduled programs — addresses a different tension, around new habits of media consumption. That is the tension between relevance and disposability. Discussions of technology and media tend to focus on speed — what’s the fastest way to break the story, consume the story, influence the story? After all, media consumers today seem like info-rats chewing through heaps of micro-facts and instant-expiration data points.

But the other interesting thing about media these days is that it can stand perfectly still. In fact it loiters: shows don’t simply spill over the airwaves and evaporate; they linger on DVRs, DVDs, various online services. Newspaper articles pile up in Web “archives.” And clearly we still accept, still crave, some deeper media experience too. In experimenting with a show that produces (at most) 10 episodes a year, WNYC was specifically thinking of HBO’s success in building powerful cultural franchises that ignore the mores of traditional broadcasting.

Internet = empowerment? censorship?

bob sacha — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:56:19 +0000

Brilliant!! (animated) storytelling about web, censorship and democracy by web scholar

Evgeny Morozov tries to put all the pieces together, visually.

Or what else you can do instead of showing a boring talking head.

Click here to view the embedded video.

and here a video of Evgeny Morozo’s actual lecture so you can see the difference between a creative approach to visual storytelling and just capturing what was present in the lecture hall.

2012 workshops

bob sacha — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:28:59 +0000

“Bob Sacha taught me to think about storytelling in a completely different, and much more effective, way than I ever had before.” … Chris Linder, photographer, scientist and multimedia producer

“Bob Sacha changed the way I work. His workshop helped me learn how to tap into the emotion of storytelling and the importance of good audio.”… Lauren Hermele, photographer, Fulbright Grantee and translator

Here are the workshops I’m teaching this summer. Click the name of the workshop for more info. Hope to see you this summer.

In this master class, students learn to use all the tools of multimedia more fully. Video b-roll is discussed, more advanced interview techniques, rack focusing, time-lapse and sequence photography is explored along with workflow and story structure. This medium to advanced level class is the next step, a practical guide to using these techniques in the field. Here are three great projects from the 2010 class.

Three student pieces from the Maine Media Workshop’s Advanced Class

Do opposites attract?

Shot, recorded and produced by Tucker Walsh in a week in August 2010 as part of Bob Sacha’s Multimedia Master Class at the Maine Media Workshops.

A birthday brings Teisha Jones face to face with an important date in her family’s past.

Camera, Sound and Editing by Hannele Lahti in a week inAugust 2010 as part of Bob Sacha’s Multimedia Master Class at the Maine Media Workshops.

Tariq Zehawi has going to the grocery store to pick up some toothpaste when he found his character. And what a wonderful chance encounter it turned out to be. Camera, Sound and Editing by Tariq Zehawi in one week at Bob Sacha’s Multimedia Masterclass at the Maine Media Workshops

Teaching Multimedia, part 1

bob sacha — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:37:06 +0000

This was the first advanced multimedia class I’ve taught on my own and the 9 students at the Maine Media Workshops who stuck it out to the end of the week produced some great work. Everyone’s favorite was this piece by Tucker Walsh, a young and talented visual journalist who is going places.

If you’d like to see all of the class projects in a single movie, check out “Two Minute Wonders‘”

Do opposites attract?

Camera, Sound and Editing by Tucker Walsh in a week in August 2010 as part of Bob Sacha’s Multimedia Master Class at the Maine Media Workshops.

Camera, sound and editing by Tucker Walsh in a week in August 2010 as part of Bob Sacha’s Multimedia Master Class at the Maine Media Workshops.

Teaching Multimedia, part 2

bob sacha — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:08:32 +0000

Hannele Lahti is somehow able to get people to tell her the most amazing stories. She reported and shot this story as part of the week long MultiMedia Masterclass with me at the Maine Media Workshops in August 2010

A birthday brings Teisha Jones face to face with an important date in her family’s past.

Camera, Sound and editing by Hannele Lahti in a week in August 2010 as part of Bob Sacha’s Multimedia Master Class at the Maine Media Workshops.

Too long?

bob sacha — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:11:24 +0000

I’m a big fan of the Bombay Flying Club (“Online Journalism as it could be” is their motto) BFC produces stunning multimedia. I checked in to see their most recent piece, Streetlight Ethiopia, which was commissioned by the NGO “Hope for Children”

There are a some great things about this work: I like the the wonderful use of ambient sound (they have ambient sounds under everything and it gives it a wonderfully rich texture to the piece.) I love the full screen experience, full screen even BEFORE you click the full screen button in the upper left, and the use of subtitles on the entire piece. The B&W images are beautiful too.

But, I think the use of dissolves on every frame overly romanticizes the work, on a subject that, in truth, is really not very romantic. Cuts are harder but that’s the way we see the world.

One thing I find very disconcerting is that there’s no playbar. This piece is a little long and I really don’t like the fact they they’ve taken control out of my hands. I can’t skip ahead, and I can’t return and see the piece without starting at the beginning. I didn’t make it to the end the first time and when I returned, I was sentenced to start all over, like a punishment for abandoning it the first time.

So, how long is too long? This 11 minute piece has generated interesting talk on the blogs, summarized over at Tracey Boyer’s Innovative Interactivity. BFC even admits it’s too long in their blog, where they talk about how happy the client was and how they aim to please.

But why not make a shorter cut for the BFC site? You edit differently for a portfolio than you do for a client, right?

Repo Man

bob sacha — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:54:56 +0000

I’ve finally moved by old Phlog (short for PHoto bLOG) from WordPress. Now I can run hog wild on my own site…

If you’d like to see the millions of previous posts, check out my original wordpress site, sacha phlog.

On Thinner Ice

bob sacha — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:56:25 +0000

The news about what we’re doing to our planet keeps getting worse and worse.

My latest multimedia story was a collaboration from MediaStorm and the Asia Society, is On Thinner Ice“ a look at how we’re losing glaciers and what that means to the earth’s “bank account.”

This piece features some amazing photos by mountaineer and film maker David Breashears.

Artist in Residence

bob sacha — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 03:24:44 +0000

Just finished a three day artist-in-residence in the School of Design at Stevenson University, a small private university outside Baltimore. It was a lot of fun to be teaching students who were interested and motivated and willing to listen, pitch in with all their energy, and try new things.

The final stories are on the blog. I think they’re really good, especially for a group of undergrads who had never recorded any audio and never created a multimedia story before. Oh, and they produced them under deadline too.

Hats off to Stevenson University student Mike Jett for creating the awesome poster too!

Times of Crisis: a year in the life of the financial meltdown

bob sacha — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:03:48 +0000

I’ve been living the financial crisis for the past several months from the safety of my desk at MediaStorm. Working together with Reuters on a multimedia story bringing together the past year of their reporting in words, pictures and video, we tried to explain what went wrong.

The result is the introduction, which I edited and produced, plus a very cool timeline of the year of financial meltdown. See it at Reuters Times of Crisis.

Here’s the YouTube trailer.