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/2011/05/30/an-interview-with-poul-madsen-bombay-flying-club/ http://www.simonsticker.com/2011/05/30/an-interview-with-poul-madsen-bombay-flying-club/#comments Mon, 30 May 2011 06:54:23 +0000 Simon Sticker http://www.simonsticker.com/?p=3548

Human Rights Watch is since some years now coming up with some great multimedia projects to tell the important stories they are researching and trying to create awareness and change for. This piece about the situation of gold mining in Papua New Guinea and the human rights abuses for the people living there is divided into four major topics and could be viewed as a whole ten minute piece of in chapters that cover rape, illegal miners, mercury poisoning and red water. They teamed up with photographer Brent Stirton to cover the visual part of the story.

I don’t want to give you a review on the piece, because I think it is doing very well in telling the story and keeping the attention throughout the piece. More interesting is the way that HRW delivers the information. Beside the core multimedia story they don’t leave you afterwards with a “and now?” but they give you links to more detailed reports, research, additional photographs, a summary and the possibility to embed a html code with a link to the feature plus the obligatory social media sharing options. In the past HRW even allowed people to embed whole features on blogs and so on, what was pretty straight forward I think, but of course they also have an interest to drive people to their website. What I like about most of their features (and this one here as well) is the clean and simple presentation that really puts the story in the foreground and it not overwhelming you with a big pile of information, but allow you an easy access point from where you can dig deeper into the story.

That all said, you can check the feature now by clicking on the picture below. Interesting presentation and even more important story.

Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit fame came up to Copenhagen recently for a visit and to work on a project in Malmö, Sweden. Unfortunately we did not find the time for a little interview chat during that time, but set down a week later for a chat on Skype about multimedia, the future of photojournalism and the picture of developing countries in the Western world. So get yourself a coffee and listen to some interesting thoughts and critique about the mentioned topics. I know it’s sometimes controversial to say the least, so I’m happy when you take part in the discussion here in the comments or over at the duckrabbit blog that is bringing up discussions about this topics regularly. Also make sure you check adevelopingstory.org for discussions about the picture of the developing world. And last but not least check some of Benjamin’s great work here.

I mentioned it in my last post, but now it is about to start after we were working on the preparations in the last two days. Pecs2010chairs is a project in Pecs, Hungary, a temporary invasion into public spaces. For the next days 2010 chairs will invade into public spaces and will create new points of view and possibilities to see and use your public spaces. The project will move through different squares in the city and invade into the normal spaces, creating border, possibilities and new ideas. Thousands of single pieces moved around by everyone who would like to. How will people react and act?

This is what the project designers wrote:

Take a seat, be a part.

What looks like a furniture, can have a powerful impact on a city when they appear in masses:  An Invasion of 2010 Chairs. Temporarily, six public spaces will be invaded by chairs one after another along the new cultural path. The movement of chairs creates a symbolic bridge between the Main Square and the revitalized Zsolnay Cultural Quarter – the yet unexplored space of Pécs. Bizarre impressions shall express the potential of public spaces for inhabitants of Pécs – not only for the duration of 1 week, but beyond. You are invited to participate in this social experiment with artistic   and musical performances.

My assignment here is to document the project. But after the classic negotiations (‘We need a short video clip and some pictures for press.’) we developed the idea to try out an internet experiment in the soul of the project, an interactive website that will be developed over the process of the week. With the project moving every day the website will bring up new features, short films, interviews, pictures… The trick is that the project is developing in a linear way, so with a classic storyline, from square to square. There are events planned, but the rest is up to the people who interact with the 2010 chairs. They could do everything with it. And from this idea we will also allow the user to choose the parts of the story that are interesting to him – for every square but also for the whole website at the end. During the process we will add an extra navigation that will allow the user to break out of the linear line from square to square and search for the parts he/she is interested in.

I’m very excited about it as it combines a lot of different things that are pretty straight forward. I’m getting up in the morning right now, start shooting, get back to the Hotel and start converting, checking pictures followed by the editing of the videos and then it’s up to program the site for the day. It is also the attempt to show that interactive features don’t have to be big flash productions, but are also possible with basic html and a clear concept – to be executed in a short amount of time and with small budgets. It’s an exciting journey and I’m more than happy to see where it goes.

Follow us on our journey and get to know Pecs a bit, day by day… Check it out here.

I don’t wanna lose to many words, but leave you with this powerful story that was done by trainees of a Mediastorm workshop, inspired by a story about Diana in the New York Times. Give yourself nine minutes, take a deep breath and watch it.

The first time I saw this interview with Stephen Mayes, director of the VII agency, he hit quite some spots inside of me where i have been thinking about for a while. It is more or less an interview about the future of photojournalism and the ways how VII is approaching it and how the whole economy changed.

The very first thing he says is that one of the biggest traps of photojournalism is to think about it as a format. By doing so, we limit ourselves, how far we push it, i guess, so it is good to think outside the box. One of the reasons i define myself very seldom by the media format i use to tell the stories.

VII started an online magazine a while ago and one for me very interesting aspect of it is that it is not selling something directly, but that he says, it is creating value in the way that it is allowing the photographers to tell their stories more deeply and in that way showing the photographers voice. In the same way Panos agency for instance is using multimedia to promote the work of the photographers on their site.

He is also talking about the magazines and one of the important sentences for me is that they are not important as clients anymore, but still important as a distribution partner. A major shift that also shows that there are thousands of different formats today as well to distribute and also make money out of it. Thinking of transmedia, where he is also talking about in the interview.

He also sees a role change for the photographers from suppliers to publishers, what is also really important to think about. How can we reach a dedicated audience with the stories? How can we develop new models out of that. A classic example where this role changed is music industry or also DVDs where the digital downloads are taking away the middle part, the shop, but instead have a direct communication/ selling from producer to user at least as a possibility.

At the end he is talking about what he thinks is needed nowadays to work as a photographer and interesting enough he is not talking about taking good pictures (what is still an important part, i guess…), but about how important it is to have something to say, having a brand and good imagination how to tell it. He believes that taking pictures to make money as your first goal is nothing what will bring you success. Earlier he defines the product he sells with VII also not as the photographs, but the credibility of the photographers.

At the end, we all want to tell stories i guess and we want to do that in the best way, so i wonder why do we limit our selves to one form of media and not explore what is possible?

Anyway, make sure to listen to this interview below (what is part of a great series you can find here).

I’m on a early flight this morning what made me skip to publish another series of pictures from Iceland but instead use the time and share with you some thoughts on the concept of transmedia I got pretty obsessed about recently after hearing about it. The concept is simple, actually that simple that it barely feels as new information. But I think it is something what we often forget about. And it is also a bit scary when you think of labels like photojournalist.

One of the basic concepts always has been cross-media, what more or less means to take your produced material, let’s say pictures and publish it in as many channels as possible, for instance a book, magazine, newspaper, web, you name it.
Multimedia is now another way of expressing the story. It is web-based what also means it has a lot of limitations in further distributing into other channels. 20 years ago everyone was thinking that pictures for newspapers, that is the deal. Now that changes, but what is in 10 years? But there is also a big chance in multimedia. We might not be able to bring the multimedia stories out of the online world, but we have a whole bunch of material. A audioslideshow without audio is still a great series of pictures, the audiofile maybe still tells the story. Only thing is, each form of media has to be really good in itself to also work in other channels or in other combinations.

The concept of transmedia is exactly about that. Last week i was talking about the chance of multimedia to combine the advantages of each form of media to tell a stronger story. This of course is for stories in the web. For a book words and strong pictures might be the best combination. For radio the audiofile with a good mix of interviews, atmo sounds might do the trick. Transmedia is about different forms of media and but rather than making the format define how we work, for instance taking pictures, we choose the best forms of media to capture and tell the story. At the end this also defines in which channels we are able to tell the story. There might be stories that are to big or deep to get into it that they never find the space in a feature article or a three minute multimedia piece, but they could work in a book for instance. So we adapt how we communicate the story to the structure of the story and then choose the best media, rather than choosing the form of media and adapting the story to it. This is a big and major difference to think about. It is all about looking for the best way to tell the story.

When we do multimedia this is inside of the concept where we decide how to tell the story. Is video for this part of the story best or can the picture tell us more? Does the audio maybe brings the story further the most? We think of the same things. How can we tell the story in the best way, just for the online distribution. Transmedia is taking the needed step further and thinks of what channels are good to tell the story and what tools do I need to do so.

I personally think that times couldn’t be more exciting right now when it comes to things like that. It is for sure hard when you focus on one tool as your storytelling tool, but with the willingness to learn also other tools and their advantages there are many opportunities i think. Even when capturing a story might be more challenging then before as you have to be able to switch between the forms of media constantly. But who said it’s gonna be easy?

In the last two weeks in Iceland i had time to think about multimedia and how it is used. One of the thoughts that came to my mind was that the time for multimedia how many photographers see it, will maybe soon be over as long as it is something only web-based. Or maybe over is the wrong word, more that it will need a lot of development to become something what is strong enough to become equally important for reporting than video for instance. Ben at duckrabbit called the audioslideshows, we so much like to call multimedia, recently photofilm, a term that makes it even closer to video, that makes them even more direct competitors of video. But first maybe some words on what i mean when i talk about multimedia as this term is so much fashion and used for more or less everything nowadays. In my point of view (and i guess in the understanding of many photographers) multimedia is the combination of different forms of media in one piece. That could be text, video, photography, audio, graphics, you name it. Each one of those forms of media has advantages and disadvantages so combining this different forms gives us the ability to use the advantages and skip the disadvantages (at least in theory). In a photo-audio-slideshow this concept is not working as it only adds a new form of media, but still has to fight with disadvantages the picture might have in communicating the story. There might be stories where it works (and some of my stories are exactly told like that), but it is not always the best way. Just to keep that in mind. Now, it is for sure difficult to learn all that different forms of media when the only thing you have done before is photography or audio for instance. One important thing for me was to understand that multimedia needs or allows new ways of telling stories, but it needs an deep understanding of each form of media and what is the best way to use it for telling the story. Not easy to say the least as many of us also need the ability to capture the story with this different forms in a compelling way with great pictures, video, audio and so on. So we need this knowledge in the capturing and in the editing of the story.

Why am i now even go further with the headline and state the question: Is multimedia already old? As i said, for most multimedia is a combination of different forms of media at the end combined in a video by using the advantages of the different forms to tell the story in the best way. And here we have an important point: We want to tell a story. And multimedia is right now a web-based way to tell stories. And if done right, it is very powerful, brings us stories closer and more direct. So why do i think it is already old? The web developed a lot in how we use it through social media, web 2.0, however you want to call it. The one-way communication we were used to in the past is here at least getting less and less powerful. When we had before a world of only consuming information/content, we now interact with the content. The easiest expression of that might be comments where ever we look at or the possibility to share more or less everything with other people through Twitter, Facebook & co. But what does that mean for multimedia? Multimedia (always to be seen in the understanding described above) is first of all a linear way of telling stories. Maybe not the story in itself, inside the film, but how it is communicated. It tells the story how the journalist, editor, whoever thought it would be best. He decides where the story starts and ends. But one of the big advantages of the internet is in my opinion that we have so many possibilities to connect content with each other, make people interact with it, share their thoughts, and therefore decide how they approach the stories. As we no longer just watch TV or listen to radio or read newspapers without direct connection (maybe beside reader letters, most of the time without replies) the possibilities of the internet in communicating are massive. My goal for all the stories that I do has always been to tell them in a way that engages the people who see it, makes them understand and connect with the people who’s stories I tell. And with the combination of the different forms of media, it is a first step. Interactivity, in my opinion, will be the next step.

Interactivity truly brings the one who watches out of the passive consuming role into a active role and when it is only about where to start the story, what approach to choose. When that leaves to making comments or sharing it, that is great. Most of the time comments are maybe not important for the content, but they are the result of a thinking process and the creation of a vision. In this case the quality of the comments could also be seen as an indicator how good the project was able to engage and connect people with the story. Interactivity offers us many opportunities. When the journalist was the one who was doing the combination of content and the guiding through the story, maybe now this is something the user is able to do by themselves.

Now, it is nothing new. There are many powerful interactive projects out there and blogs like Innovative Interactivity write about it on and on. But most of this projects are big, long-term projects, flash-based and need a big amount of programing. Nothing what you consum when you are not 100% into the story. Only speaking of myself, i barely made it all the way through one of the features. Even the great ‘Prison Valley’ has a long start film giving you a multiple minute introduction without being visually compelling that makes me want click away after a short time. I think one of the biggest steps sometimes in interactivity is that we have to learn to trust the ones who are interested in the story that they will search for the information themselves as long as you make it easily accessible. And that we have to get away to see interactivity as something what needs this big projects. I think the future will be made with interactive multimedia, done with easy programming, links, lightboxes and so on. It might not look that fancy as this big projects, but it could do the trick and tell exactly the same. Only that it could be done in a short amount of time.

Do i still think multimedia is already old? Maybe not. But there are still a lot of possibilities that will be more and more developed in the future, i guess. Interactivity is just the next step. Something else what we have to learn how it works. What i truly think is that future storytellers will either work in small teams or will be masters of different forms of media. I think we will come away from labels like photojournalist, that is for sure, to something broader. As a little story on that to the end: I was recently asked in a pre-talk for an assignment how i would describe what i do. I thought for some time and said: ‘I tell stories.’ Even when that might not be all, but the rest are mainly tools to do so for me. I got the job right after.

Do you have other opinions or thoughts on the topic? Let me know.