When I first stumbled upon this multimedia story by Maisie Crow about the survivors of the Chernobyl disaster and the workers still dismantling the plant, I was quite sure from the start that I would be an interesting watch and a great piece of work on the craft of multimedia. Maisie Crow had been doing internships at Mediastorm, but more importantly had been doing some very nice multimedia pieces in the past. After watching the film, I must say, it reached all my expectations, why I now share it with you here.

When watching it, one of the first things you realize is that Maisie’s approach to the story comes from a photographic view on things. Her background in photojournalism is obvious. For me it felt as if the video sequences more focus on moments instead of moving situations that lead the viewer to something or bringing the story to a different point. Also when she introduces characters, she does that often with video, but in a fashion I’ve seen a couple of times now, with sort of a video portrait that uses an aesthetic of a still image.

When you watch the piece, one thing that you can find here executed very well, is the use of still and video. The stills are used extensively in moments where the story needs the viewer to slow down a bit and link the story to his own thoughts before approaching the next part of the story. While video is easier to consume, the stills let the viewer explore the picture more actively but also allows to slow down.

I’m a big fan of subtitles. There are always lots of problems coming along with it, but for me, hearing the voice of the persons in the story is always something that I think should have major importance. Even when you can’t understand the language, it gives you so much depth and feel for the person, something that I think should not be left out as a tool to tell the story. This is also what you find here. The problem of course is the distraction from the visuals, so it’s always a fine line.

Same counts for the use of music. Music is extremely powerful, what makes the use always critical. It has the ability to create atmospheres that otherwise would maybe not be there. In the film, music is only used in a very puristic way at important points of the story and helps to link different parts. But at the same time, most interview sequences come without any  music what allows us to feel an atmosphere that is created by what the people say instead of an atmosphere that was created by the music.

An interesting observation I made, was the extensive use of still images to the end. While at the beginning video is used way more than stills, the stills take over to the end. That could of course always have reasons coming from the production material, but it works well, because instead of speeding up and filling up the viewer with the story, the films slows down and gives more space to let the story sink.

But now enough of analyzing the structure and technical details of the film, the most important is the story and this is brilliant. Watch it!

It has been a long silence here in the blog. Beginning of June I stopped writing here in the moment, when we started what is maybe my most ambitious project to date – HUMANS. Now, after seven months, we are back in Denmark from our trip from toe to top of Africa, interviewing people about the basic questions of life. The result is a series of 60 multimedia shortfilms that will slowly be edited over the coming year. Each film will portrait one of the persons interviewed. So, a big project that needed my whole focus in the last months and will partly need it in the coming ones. You can see a bit of what we did with HUMANS so far and read some of the stories we worked on and about the people we met on the website.

Now it’s time to focus a bit on other projects again after the very intense and also sometimes exhausting work on HUMANS. And after the long time I’m looking forward to get back to this blog here and write about multimedia, transmedia, photography and share with you great work of others that inspire me. I’ll try to keep the blog updated at least once a week, but bare with me if I’m too busy sometimes.

For today I’ll just leave you with one picture. This is John from Malawi, the most energetic, positive man I’ve met for a long time. At the age of 93 (and yes, we did not believe it as well, but saw the birth certificate…) he is still going strong and looks sometimes scarily close to a twenty year old that is in the prime of his life. A true inspiration for life, love and happiness! More about him soon on the website of the HUMANS project.

]]> http://www.simonsticker.com/2012/01/16/we-are-back-after-seven-months-through-africa/feed/ 0 http://www.simonsticker.com/2011/06/10/this-blog-is-closed-humans-is-starting/ http://www.simonsticker.com/2011/06/10/this-blog-is-closed-humans-is-starting/#comments Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:37:35 +0000 Simon Sticker http://www.simonsticker.com/?p=3599

As most of you here know, we are about to start our latest project called HUMANS. In a few hours we are flying down to Capetown, South Africa and will travel from there for the next six months up to Cairo. Along the way we will do interviews with people we will meet about life, dreams, wishes, important moments and what else is important in the general questions of life. Each of those persons will get his/her own little shortfilm. We hope that this could create a little bit of an in our opinion often missed linked in our understanding of the continent and will show a lot of it’s diversity, differences and similarities, not only in Africa, but also in comparison to the western world.

The bad news is: This blog here will be closed for the time of the journey.

The good news: There will be a lot happening at the project’s website with the produced films, posts from our experiences “behind the scenes” during the journey, more stories and a lot of pictures. So make sure to head over, subscribe to the RSS feed and if this is still not enough, follow us on Twitter & Facebook to get the full package.

I hope this will become a great project to follow for all of you! Thanks!

Maybe Empathy is one of the most important talents or skills a documentary photographer or photojournalist needs for doing his work. We want to make our audience understand how it is like to live under the often very different circumstances the people we visit and photograph are living in. It all comes down to empathy, when we want to transfer the emotions of the subject to the people who see the pictures, make them feel close to the people and their stories.

Sam Richards is showing us in this TED talk a great lesson about empathy and how easy it sometimes is to think only in our own little box, from our own point of view, making own our own up about other people. And for me personally a great reminder to keep the empathy as high as possible in the next months in Africa with HUMANS.

When we started working on the concept for HUMANS, one of the driving forces behind the idea for me always was and is the very limited picture we get about Africa, it’s countries, the lifes of the people, the cultures and so on. The reporting between Safari and fancy holiday resorts and the catastrophies of war, Aids, famines, corruption and so on, was not at all fitting into what I experienced and what people told me. Obviously this parts are a part of the lifes of many and especially the stories about the things that go wrong are very important stories to be told, but I believe that for the understanding we need more – a fuller, richer picture that covers not only this stories but also the normal life, the good stories, the stories of innovation, success and the things people in the western world could learn from a lot. Maybe this richer picture will also lead to a new perception for this continent and with that also a higher awareness for it’s problems. First, because it is easier to relate to when your picture is not only about something far away from your own reality, but second also we get a deeper understanding what allows to put things better into perspective.

The writer/photographer duo Brandan Bannon and Mike Pflanz tried exactly that with their project about Nairobi. They devoted the whole month of April to tell different stories from there. Every day they posted a new story on their blog, both with pictures and text, covering stories from food costs, streetkids to mobile phone use and car ownership. They wanted to capture a glimpse into the variety of this megapolis on the rise. In their own words:

Daily Dispatches: Nairobi is an innovative exploration through photojournalism of a fast-evolving 21st-century African city, unfolding day by day in real time. We will spend each day of April searching out stories from all corners of Kenya’s capital, stories which will paint a compelling, informative and surprising portrait of the city, and the lives lived by those who call it home. Each day, we will send our images and reports back to a series of US universities and colleges we’re working with, who will in turn print them and mount them in an exhibition which grows day by day.

Make sure to take a few minutes and check out the stories they covered in their project and get a deeper insight into the life in todays Nairobi.

It is obvious that news don’t have the capacity to cover this broad spectrum of stories and when we look in other parts of the world, exactly the same happens. A friend came back from Japan recently and what he told was quite different to the picture we get in the news right now. It is a problem and an advantage of news to cover the stories when they unfold, but when this is the only picture we get it creates misunderstandings and misperceptions of the countries, the lifes of the people and at the end also the reality. What projects like Daily Dispatches or also our project HUMANS can do is not to replace classic coverage and storytelling, but to add some layers that are hard to add in normal coverage and through that help to create less narrow-sighted pictures of the places we hear about.

While back home in Copenhagen for once I came together with the guys of Von Dü to record some video for their latest release, their new single ‘Sommer I Denmark’. The release party is next saturday at Amager Bio in Copenhagen with a nice pre-release party for what the guys already bought a couple of thousand beers. So if you are in town, make sure to pass by as it will be a lot of fun.

Working with Von Dü is a nice change from most of my normal work and is a great playground to try out ideas and also learn a lot as it gives me a different angle to approach my video and photography work. For instance thinking of the difficult light situations at concerts needed for sure a bit of a learning curve at the start, but made me on the long run way more confident with that also in other situations for instance a small dark hut somewhere. The nice thing is that what ever you do, if you stay open for what it teaches you, it will bring you further also in other parts of your work.

As a side note for everyone who is following HUMANS: The flights to Capetown are booked for the 10th of June and from there we will travel up the eastcoast till we will hopefully reach Cairo at some point in December. So it’s a big tour and I’m quite excited to see Humans come alive and hear all those stories and share it with you. We are also planning right now to do some kind of streetart projections and lectures along the way to bring the stories back to the people, something I’m quite excited about too. So if the blog here get’s calm from beginning of June, don’t be surprised, we will update the Humans blog in return quite regularly with stories, pictures, videos and so on to give you a good behind the scenes look into the project in the making and our trip plus of course the shortfilms we will produce about the people we’ll meet. If you are not familiar with the project yet: You can learn more here.

I wanted to write about Jonathan Harris for quite some time. I love his work and what he tries to find or tell with it. He has done some amazing data-visualisation projects like We feel fine, I want you to want me or Sputnik, but what I think is his most interesting work are projects with a clear storytelling approach and giving the user some chance to find their own way through the story. The Whale Hunt is such a project. Harris was taking a photograph every five minutes on a journey to a Eskimo family in Alaska and joined them on their Whale Hunt. Like a heartbeat he was rising the number of photographs in moments of excitement. The user can now choose characters, topics and heartbeat to create an individual story.

Another project, what apparently never got published, is called Balloons of Bhutan. The project collected interviews with 117 people in Bhutan about happiness. Harris was talking about that in a TED talk (below). Many of it reminds me of the ideas we had when we developed our project HUMANS.

His latest project is called Today and is something what became somehow a fashion in the last year. A daily photo project that he started when he turned 30 to remember and collect his own stories in life. Some great pictures and a interesting narrative in the video.

“I wanted to find a way to be more in the moment, to be more in every day; to understand time more and to understand my life more, to have more memories — all of these things. Basically, to live more richly, as a human life, not just as a work life.”       ~ Jonathan Harris

“No matter what you do in your life, what you create, what career you have, whether you have a family or kids, or make a lot of money… your greatest creation is always going to be your life’s story. Because it’s like this container that holds all of those other things. That was something I was really interested in with this project, thinking about life itself as a creation, as a story that you’re writing.”

~ Jonathan Harris

Yesterday the world lost one of the great storytellers and fighters for human rights of our time, Tim Hetherington. He was killed in the Libyan city Misarata while covering the frontlines together with three other photographers, one of them, Chris Hondros died later due to his fatal injuries.

Hetherington got widely known for his Oscar-nominated film Restrepo and was not only an acclaimed photographer, but also someone who pushed the border of how we communicate our stories. Last year in an interview with the New York Times he declared photography as a medium for mass-communication as a medium of the past. Working on different film projects over the last years, he was a cameraman for Liberia: An Uncivil War (2004) and The devil came on the horseback (2007). He was working as an investigator for the UN as well. Maybe Tim was also so important for the community because he was seeing the camera first of all as a tool to communicate and tell stories, ready to move on to something else when that fitted better to reach people with his stories as he did with his films in recent years.

I would like to leave you with his last shortfilm Diary:

“‘Diary’ is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.”

RIP Tim