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?
Grazia Neri Agency was the best European photo agency I worked with: they sold every story I sent them. So I was sad when they called it quits. But now there’s Luz, born from the ashes of Grazia Neri and with an eye toward new media also.
I’m also a big fan of it’s founders, especially Alberto Giuliani, an amazing young photographer. Great to be in such good company.
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.
NYTimes staffer Nicole Bengiveno headed down to Atlanta to do a story on the home foreclosure trauma,where home foreclosures are up 75% over the prevoius month. Her excellent work ended up as a picture page in today’s paper. She wrote the text too.
But if you head over to the NYTimes online, you can see the exact same story (with many more images) as a 4 minute slide show narrated by Nicole with the voices of the people who lost their homes. Tell me which one you think is more powerful. I don’t think there is any doubt.
Sunday’s New York Times hit my doorstep with a major package on China’s pollution crisis, headlined with a huge photo stretching across 4/5 of the top front page.
What caught my eye was a prominent notice under that Chang Lee photo that read: This series, with extensive multimedia features, can be found at nytimes.com.
Well, I finished my coffee, pushed aside the rest of the paper and rushed right over to my computer to find a juicy online package with a beautiful slideshow by NYT staffer Chang Lee, a small uncredited video complete with the excruciating Times reporter as badly lit talking head –god sakes, I want to see China, not some American talking to me with books behind him. I can get that in my own living room– and interactive graphic/map. You can even hear a summary of the story read to you in Mandarin.
At least check out the slideshow in full screen mode.
[I did a similar story for National Geographic Magazine in 2004, in the age before multimedia.]
August means another installment of the Leaping into Digital class at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine. Designed for people who want to jump from silver based film to digital media. The class worked hard and this week I’m slowly learning how to covert those files into a flash movie using FCP and a very cool free flash player from Jeroen Wijering.
One thing that’s cool about this player is that it scales the movie up to the size of the player. Here I scaled it 2x. I know this needs work but it’s fun to deliver it as such a big movie with a custom designed interface.
Curious to know what you think about the quality vs. size.
I’m still struggling with how to bring all the pieces of a story together powerfully in an interesting multimedia format online. Here’s a great story from the Toronto Star: great images, a tightly written story piece so beautifully voiced (by the writer!) that it made me swoon and great orginlal music.
This is something you can’t get on TV or in the newspaper. It has mood and feeling and texture and a story too.
I love talking with interesting people. Last week I had breakfast with George Jardine, a very cool guy from Adobe who helped design Lightroom. We met at one of my favorite restaurants in NYC and talked about a few things that we’re both extremely passionate about, with the big one being photography.
Two days later we got together again and this time he recorded our conversation for his great series of podcasts. We spoke about photography, new media, films, audio and where this might all be going. It was a fascinating and enlightening conversation for me plus I got to wear a very cool and amazingly efficient microphone on my ear, just like a popstar.
Have a listen.
Last month in Rome, I visited Paolo Pellegrin’s Broken Landscapes, an excellent exhibition at Museo di Roma in Trastevere.
It’s a retrospective of sorts, work from 1995-today by a still young photographer who seems to have won every major journalism award: a Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, eight World Press Photo awards, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and the Olivier Rebbot Award for Best Feature Photography and on and on .
After I looked at the work, I started to wonder why everyone–myself included–seems to be still shooting in a style developed in the 1960’s. Clothes have changed, music has changed, even car design has changed. And thank goodness people like Pellegrin have changed the way they see this world too.
How about the rest of us? When are we going to start taking pictures in a way that’s a little more contemporary? Yes, a good picture is a good picture but the way we deliver it can change. It’s no wonder that the NY Times Magazine is equally populated by photojournalists and art photographers. Maybe we’ve bored ourselves out of business? Maybe we’ll have a second chance with multimedia?
You can also see a video interview with Pellegrin, part of a project by Lelen Bourgoignie-Robert and other faculty in the Visual Journalism program at the University of Miami and part of the World Press photo website.
Broken Landscapes closes 09 September, 2007.
Everyone in New York is constantly looking, even the kitchen counter.
