Posts tagged multimedia
HTML5, Parallax and Storytelling
Yes, you should stop what you’re doing and explore how the New York Times put together this story on avalanches and skiing in Washington State.
For Students: a New Multimedia Storytelling Competition
From the multimedia magazine the Atavist. Beginning January 1, 2013, students are invited to participate in the above competition by submitting a long-form, nonfiction story that isn’t just writing — the judges want to see photography, video, narration and illustrations. Whatever’s appropriate and fits into the Atavist’s editorial platform.
There are openings for high school, college and grad students. Enter here, and good luck.
The Election as Graphic Novel
Just look at it.
I can answer but my biases proceed me since a) I’m on a Mac and b) we have partners who help us out. If I mention them I’ll acknowledge them below.
- In General
Adobe CS Something. We’re currently working with CS5, but CS6 is described as great. Mind you, this is a suite of tools that ranges from design and photography stalwart Photoshop to the video production capabilities of Premiere. In other words, Adobe is creating an all encompassing product line for our multimedia needs.
- Video
Final Cut Pro. We’re on FCP X but have been frustrated by features we’ve lost since Final Cut 7 (long story). Fortunately, FCP X is adding these features with each new release.
Something to look into: Adobe’s Premiere. When Apple reinvented Final Cut with its X series, many video producers were underwhelmed and fled to Adobe and have great things to say about it. If you get Adobe’s CS 5/6 you’ll have Premiere and can take it through its paces.
- Audio
This comes in two flavors: when we create jingles, soundtracks and general audio design we use Propellerhead’s Reason and Ableton Live. We then mix these with Apple’s Logic Pro.
Pro Tools is an obvious standard that’s used throughout the radio world but we’ve gone with Logic Pro because it fits easily within our overall workflow.
- Screenshots and Screencasts:
We go with two flavors here. For screenshots, Ambrosia Software’s SnapZPro. This let’s us take screenshots with dropshadows and other effects. It also lets us do basic screencasts.
But if we’re doing longform, voiceover screencasts we opt for Telestream’s Screenflow which has a built in video editor and is specifically created for doing screencast tutorials. For example, it has callouts for where your cursor is, can zoom in, zoom out on screen details, etc. (Disclosure: Telestream is a FJP partner.)
- Text Editors
These are underestimated until you actually code. We use Panic’s Coda but the more popular choice (for the Mac) is Macromates’ Textmate.
- File Transfer
Coda handles general file updates to our servers but we also use Panic’s Transmit for uploading/working within both our CDNs, Amazon and Highwinds (Disclosure: Highwinds is an FJP partner).
How to learn them all?
Start with each publisher’s site and then with general online searches. These will usually lead you back to communities on YouTube that provide tutorials.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for take out a subscription at Lynda.com. Lynda’s a learning community that provides screencast tutorials on both multimedia production and code development.
Better, the monthly subscription is inexpensive and your can cancel as soon as you’ve finished what you want to learn. For example, sign up for a month, learn a piece of software and then cancel until you need to learn something new again.
Anyway, that’s the biggie picture. Hope it helps. — Michael
Cuban Missile Crisis turns 50, becomes Interactive Documentary
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis this week with an interactive documentary containing – besides a two-hour film – photos, letters, newspaper clippings, and speeches.
Called Clouds over Cuba, the film is divided into five sections with a corner icon containing all supplemental material. That icon, your ‘dossier’, slowly fills up with 187 items – memos to the president, speeches, pictures from the USSR, etc. – as they’re mentioned in the film.
The best feature: you can sync the documentary with iCal or Google Calendars and find much of that content spread out before you, according to the day and time of their importance. This can be very useful, as toggling between a movie and each dossier item as it unlocks becomes tiresome after a few minutes.
Gabriel Sama on Infinite Online Space
We sat down with Rest of the World Media founder and Stanford regular Gabriel Sama to talk about newsrooms, and how they should organize themselves and their content. Newspapers have only so much space, Sama told us, and you can only fill so much of it with news. But when newsrooms publish online, they face something very different — they’re dealing with infinity.
That’s not to say they should try to fill infinite space, Sama says. Journalists should focus on what’s important today — whether it’s an oil spill or an attack in Gaza, a journalist’s work shouldn’t necessarily be confined to their beat. He emphasizes the strength of teaming up with other journalists and bringing multimedia into the picture at the planning stage as a way to utilize the infinite space we’re given online to publish timely, meaningful content.
FJP: Gabriel’s not the only one thinking about cross-beat reporting.
Launching a Global Multimedia Platform
The Tiziano Project, an organization that provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with media training to tell stories about their lives, has launched StoriesFrom. The platform is a gathering of international multimedia storytelling.
The platform allows individuals and organizations to easily create immersive documentary projects that combine the work of both community members and professional journalists and filmmakers. The resulting showcases display completed projects in beautiful and engaging online packages…
…StoriesFrom launched with projects from Iraq, Afghanistan, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Latvia, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.
It is currently accepting project ideas to be used for beta testing of the platform. If you would like to participate, please email: create@storiesfrom.
StoriesFrom was funded by a 2011 Knight Challenge Grant.
Image: Partial screenshot of StoriesFrom.
Select to embiggen.
Your Local Paper, In More Ways Than Ever
via Editor & Publisher:
A new marketing campaign from Pioneer Newspapers, Inc. is on a mission to send one very important message: Newspapers are alive and well. But you won’t find the message just in print. It’s being broadcast in television commercials, radio advertisements, and on billboards.
“We’re trying to reach people who don’t read the paper,” said president and chief executive officer Mike Gugliotto.
The Seattle-based family media business owns newspapers primarily in the Northwest…Their goal? To take a more proactive stand to dispel myths that the newspaper industry is dying.
Nine Pioneer newspapers are participating in the campaign, which will continue for one year and incorporate several themes.
The current theme focuses on the changing landscape of news delivery. One of the commercials shows a newsboy riding his bike through a neighborhood delivering the news, but it’s a laptop landing in homes. Another shows the family dog fetching the newspaper, only to come back with an iPad in his mouth.
And of course, multimedia is a big part of the campaign.
In addition, Pioneer has invested in new formats to deliver the news. The Chronicle equips reporters with “MoJo” kits that allow them to carry a laptop, digital camera, video, and audio recorders so they can bring readers breaking news and live blogs. The Tribune launched HTML5 websites for readers who prefer a tablet-based experience. Advertising representatives are also given tablets to take to meetings with clients to showcase online and mobile offerings.
FJP: A nice rebuttal to the all the talk on dying newspapers.
Image: Cupcakes announce the slogan, “Your Local Paper in More Ways Than Ever.”
Afrikaner Blood
Afrikaner Blood from Holland’s Elles van Gelderen and Ilvy Njiokiktjien has won the second annual World Press Photo Multimedia contest.
The documentary follows Afrikaner teenagers in South Africa as they attend a self-defense camp to learn how to defend themselves against the “black enemy.”
Via the British Journal of Photography:
Speaking to BJP ahead of the announcement, jury chair Vincent Laforet explains that the judges felt the winning work had “a squirm factor,” he says. “We were uncomfortable with the subject and what was being said. I, initially, had a negative reaction to it because I was so taken aback by, in effect, the power of the piece. But, when I saw it for the second time I realised that not only was it a very important piece, but also it was by far the single best produced piece in terms of nuance and restraint - they could absolutely have gone over the top, exaggerated things or make points a little bit more bluntly. Instead, there was a lot of subtlety. The piece was very well edited. It had a series of interviews prior to the indoctrination, and interviews after it.”
Run Time - 8:27
Four for OnePublished on bob sacha ’s blogText? Sound? Multimedia? Broadcast TV? Which is the best medium to tell a story? In the last days two major US media outlets chose to feature a story about an obscure 82 year old jazz pianists from Buffalo, NY. Not exactly the usual subject for a national media feeding frenzy but interesting to compare the stories. Which worked well? What did each version leave out? How did each version start and finish?
Here’s the line up:
The story in print from the NYTimes
The story in multimedia, also from the NYTimes
The story on the radio from National Public Radio’s Weekend Editionand finally, the same story on local Buffalo TV News.
I was lucky enough to have Bob Sacha as a substitute professor once (he brought us candy and opened our eyes to multimedia storytelling) Please check out his blog. It’s a constant source of inspiration for me. P.S. I grew up in Buffalo, NY after I moved from Beijing. This story was kind of a big deal. -Chao @cli6cli6
Top 50 multimedia packages of 2011
This is a great list of amazing multimedia storytelling projects in 2011. Check it out for inspiration. Congrats to my former professor Zach Wise for his part in Soul of Athens.
Journalistic Multimedia:
- Portraits of grief — NYTimes.com
- How does your income compare? — WashingtonPost.com
- The debt crisis: What should Congress do? — NYTimes.com
- A week on Foursquare — WSJ.com
- The death of a terrorist: A turning point? — NYTimes.com
- Arab spring: an interactive timeline of Middle East protests — Guardian.co.uk
- Empty cradles — JSOnline.com
- Victims of gang violence — LA Times
- Japan earthquake — AP
- Battles and casualties of the Civil War — WashingtonPost.com
Learn what redistricting is all about through this ‘school house rock’ style music video made by Andrew Bean and Dave Holmes in partnership with ProPublica.
Multimedia in Journalism: An Interview with theTimes’ Amy Harmon
Amy Harmon recently published a piece where she followed a young man with autism for a year. The Times then helped add other multimedia elements to this story. You can find the link here. The following is an interview with Harmon about the process.
MZ: How did the idea of integrating all that multimedia into a narrative piece come to be? Was this the first time the Times tried anything like it?
AH: The Times uses multimedia to tell stories all the time, we even won an Emmy for one cool approach to this recently. But what I think is so innovative about the “quick links” that my colleagueJosh Williams invented for the autism story is precisely the integration that you are asking about. In an immersion-narrative like this one, the whole point for me, as the writer, is to get readers hooked enough to keep reading to the end. I struggled for weeks, over many drafts, to do that with this one. I hoped they would want to know: will Justin manage to secure a place for himself in the world beyond high school? Will he find a job that uses his artistic talent? Will he remain friendless? The last thing I wanted was to add multimedia distractions, no matter how whizzy. So to me, the beauty of the quick links is that they don’t take you away from the story. They don’t open a new tab from which you may never return, they don’t introduce a dimension of plot or character that is tangential to my compulsively-labored-over text. But they DO bring the story to life in a visceral way that my words do not, and perhaps never could, even if I had longer to perfect them, or was a more gifted writer.
As to how the idea came about: it grew out of the editing process, pretty late in the game. This was not a case where we sat down ahead of time and tried to conceive of a new way to convey information. But one thing we had done, which is pretty standard now, is produce a short video that would accompany the story on our Web site. And it was when Glenn Kramon, the paper’s enterprise editor, saw the video that he asked whether it would be possible for readers to see and hear Justin as they read the article online. The video itself was great, we all loved how the producers had told Justin’s story. But it was also obvious that seeing and hearing Justin, even in just the raw footage, Glenn was able to grasp the nature of his autism with a clarity that he had never had in reading my written descriptions. And he didn’t want readers to have to watch the stand-alone, seven-minute video to have that experience. He wanted it sprinkled into the story. It seemed obvious once he said it, but since none of us had ever seen anything like that, I was sort of doubtful that it could be done, at least in time for my story to run.
At our next meeting, though, Andrew DeVigal, who heads the multimedia team, came with Josh Williams, a member of his staff. Josh instantly grasped what we wanted, and it was only a couple of days later that he showed us the first iteration of the links. Josh had been involved in developing much fancier stuff, and he didn’t think this was such a big deal. But I did. Maybe because it is still essentially a familiar format, rather than a completely new one, I felt like I could work within it, and it gave me this totally new way to make the story better.
(I ask because I want to be a photojournalist, but I'm worried. Worried that I'll put time and effort and money into trying to be one, and then "something" happens and people start buying a significantly fewer amount of pictures than they do now, or photojournalist jobs start disappearing, or something else that scares me.) — Asked by roavl
Hi Jesse,
Thanks for asking this question and let’s start with a giant caveat:
While I’ve published photos, I am not and have never been a photojournalist. Instead, my photos were “good enough” to accompany whatever story I reported at the time.
What I will say though is that I have a number of friends who are photographers and I want to tell you their stories.
Before I do though, let’s get a harsh reality out of the way, and that reality runs like this: as much as traditional writers bitch and moan about a digital world passing them by, photojournalists currently hold the the shortest end of the editorial stick. The market for dedicated photographers on particular stories has, unfortunately, contracted.
Instead, many news organizations demand that a single reporter heads out with an arsenal of devices when covering a story. This can mean pen and paper, camera, video camera and audio recorder. And many — but certainly not necessarily all — can produce “good enough” content that the newsroom can run.
Add to this images that come through via Creative Commons and citizen journalism reports from hot spots around the world and newsrooms are, and have been, sourcing their visual needs to those outlets rather than sending traditional photojournalists.
All of which is to say that the outlook for a traditional photojournalism career looks grim in an age where “good enough” images are created via smart phones and used with regularity.
That, Jesse, is the negativity that I’d like to drop on you today.
But I’d like to counter that with some positivity and perhaps some strategy as well.
First, let’s look at who we are and who we are is a story-telling species that’s also very much a visual species. Yes we want to know the facts of the day. We also want them wrapped up in images and understandable graphics that translate the news to us just so.
So there’s this tension going on in the newsroom right now. This tension is between using the “good enough” photo, using this image posted to the social network from the event that wants to be covered, and sending someone like you in.
You’re a control group though. And if you can get the gig and we send you in, we know what we’re going to get in return. We know we’re going to get kick ass images that we’re going to run and be proud of and our audience will pass them around and say Jesse’s a kick ass photographer who helped us understand the here and now so much better than we otherwise would have understood it.
And you will be thanked and praised as well you should be.
I don’t want to undersell the disruption going on in photography though so let’s talk strategy. Getting thanks and praises does, after all, require getting the gig in the first place.
I’ve mentioned that I have a number of photographer friends. Here’s by and large what they did in the early parts of their careers: they shot both advertorial and editorial. They assisted established photographers who’d gotten the big accounts with the big agencies and they made their money and saved their money so they could take lesser paying editorial jobs.
You know what else they did? They learned every camera and every lens they might ever come across on every shoot they were a part of. They also took time after long 12 hour days to go out and shoot images of their own. Some of them were then able to sell those images to stock house in order to get some recurring revenue during the weeks and months when they weren’t on commercial jobs.
They also learned audio and video and how to edit that audio and video.
And then they used those skills and that knowledge and applied it to newspaper and magazine work that they also really wanted to do.
In a sense, and out of necessity, they became multimedia journalists and entrepreneurial journalists. And while photography is your foremost passion, take the time to learn these other skills. Take the time be a “good enough” videographer and writer and audio producer. And if you have some time and patience, throw in some code and graphics work as well.
We can’t excel at all things, and I’m not advocating a mediocre generalism, but we have the capacity to be excellent at more things than we generally give ourselves credit for. Sure, you’ll suck at each new thing you try. But we all suck at each new thing we try.
We just need the courage to keep on trying until we suck less and actually become competent and then good.
Jesse, the world of photography is going through radical upheaval. But within that upheaval is opportunity as well. A photojournalist’s career is going to be totally unlike what it was a generation ago but the world needs its images.
And when you get your foot into an editorial door. And you bring this diverse skill-set with you, your photography will begin to shine. And as it shines, your editors will start leaning on you more and more to go out and shoot more images.
You’ll still do many tasks across many disciplines but slowly you’ll angle towards that which you love.
You ask whether it’s foolish for someone to try to make a career in photojournalism right now.
Flip that on it’s head and ask instead, what career can I make as a photographer and a journalist, and how do I get there? — Michael
PS., If you don’t know their work, I highly recommend looking at the portfolio of MediaStorm which has been doing groundbreaking photojournalism multimedia reporting for a number of years now.
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