Back to Beijing

I’ve been to China on assignment for National Geographic Magazine four times in the last decade so it was interesting to dig into that story again, this time for MediaStorm on behalf of the Asia Society. The website and Longing for Blue Skies, the short film I produced and edited, just launched last week on their website.

It was fun to look through all the wonderful photographic coverage on China. One of the things I’m learning is to craft sequences using a single photographer’s work as a way to give more structure to the narrative.

The other fun part of this project was the chance to sit down with Orville Schell, a writer, former journalism school dean and now the Arthur Ross Director, Asia Society Center on US-China Relations

It was my first major on-camera interview (which I directed and lit ) and Orville was a joy. You could hear the sound bites tumbling out of his mouth and the hardest part of the job was getting the two hour interview down to my first cut of 9 minutes, then again down to the current 6 minute piece.

While you’re on the site, check out the Room with a View feature. A nifty piece of citizen journalism that involved a simple look out the window.

Please pass this along to anyone who might be intersted.

And let me know what you think!

deep water

I love teaching and I love learning too. So I was in good company as a coach at the NPPA MultiMedia Immersion session in Louisville, KY. The students were photographers (one a Pulitzer Prize winner) picture editors, newspaper directors of photography and even other teachers; photojournalism professors from the top three PJ universities in America. It was great because I learned a ton. You can see all the student stories online.

whoo hoo, a winner

My work as multimedia producer and editor on Bearing Witness was awarded the top prize in the Multimedia- Photo/Video at the new New York Photo Awards. It’s a huge thrill for me as Bearing Witness was my first MediaStorm project.

soldier online at msnbc

Everyone is always asking how to make money in multimedia .

In time for the 5th anniversary of the conflict, a multimedia story I produced with photographer Brian Sokol, about a family who lost their son in the Iraq War, is now online at msnbc.

it’s a start

Well, my first piece as a producer for MediaStorm launched today: Reuters Bearing Witness, Five Years of the Iraq War.

My part in the project took more than eleven weeks of production, combing through more than 20 hours of videotapes of interviews with Reuters journalists, photographers, editors, producers and staff plus video footage captured from Reuters TV cameramen in Iraq. There were also 3,600 still images, the best of the best that Reuters photographers captured during the 5 year Iraq War, selected in a wide edit by Reuters’ talented executive team of Ayperi Ecer and Jassim Ahmad.

The maps and the revolutionary timeline, design and dev were handled by MediaStorm designer Tim Klimowitz, who is also an awesome Guitar Hero playa.

I only wish it was a project about a happier occasion.

I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

You’ll need a fast connection.

three, two, one: POYi winner!

Yes we have a winner….no three winners. I was lucky enough to have been a multimedia producer on all three top prize winners in the Best Use Multimedia category in this year’s Pictures of the Year International (a.k.a.POYi!) contest. OK, it’s cheating a little because I didn’t join MediaStorm until January. And for Soul of Athens, I also created a short film.

In order: MediaStorm, Soul of Athens and the Mountain Workshops.

boom!

The popular online show Rocketboom came to MediaStorm last week and the episode ran today. So if you want to see our very cool office and a bit about what we all do, check it out.

(and here’s the extended conversation with Brian Storm and more inside stuff. Yup, that’s one of the beauties of the web: you can see the entire interview, not just a small edit.)

shooting the shootouts

The Guardian has more and more multimedia online, including this short film about Silva Severino, a photographer who risks his life covering the favelas near Rio.

same assets, different views

Since I’ve been at MediaStorm, my colleague Eric Maierson has been working away on this multimedia story on the Congo with Marcus Bleasdale. It launched yesterday.

MSNBC also launched a different Congo multimedia feature based on the MediaSTorm interviews and Marcus images.

As they say in high school: “compare and contrast.”

air sick

Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk is responsible for perhaps my favorite multimedia piece thus far …and now he’s done it again with a video about global warming created from twenty thousand still images.

If I ever considered working for a newspaper again, this is where I’d love to try it out.

the cartoon life of print

Print journalism just can’t get a break. Even the Simpson’s are piling on.

newspapers of the future, part one

My friend and former teacher Zach Wise has been working on the redesign–more re-imagining– of the Las Vegas Sun’s website. It finally launched today with lots of big photos and bigger multimedia pieces.

Read the backstory.

power of time

My friend and OU grad school classmate Tim Gruber has an interesting and opinionated blog.

As part of an exercise in our video class, we had to post our favorite movie. He chose this film from YouTube, which asks: If you had the power to turn back time, would it be a good thing?

See ya all in the New Year!!!

one square at a time

I wandered into the Peer Gallery to see Christopher Rauschenberg’s show called “Daily Life” and liked it a lot.

I also jotted down Portland Grid Project on the exhibition card to check out later.

For that project, photographers have spent more than nine years (1996-2005) systematically documenting Portland, Oregon. Now, with some new faces and perspectives, they continue in Round Two.

Using a map of Portland divided into grid squares a mile and a half on a side, each month they photograph the same randomly picked square, using a variety of films and formats. At the end of the month, they meet to look at everyones photos. They’ve created a complex, detailed urban portrait, consisting of about 20,000 images of Portland, its land forms, architecture, people, residential neighborhoods, industrial sites, waterways, parks, and sometimes just a shadow or the look of fallen leaves on a newly mowed lawn.

on the right track

David Kessler has been making short (2-3 minutes) video stories about the characters he’s found underneath the Philadelphia EL (that’s the ELevated subway tracks in Philadelphia, PA.) This year-long documentary project, Shadow World, which started as a video blog, has hit 25 epidsodes and has grown into an exhibit and installation in a Philadelphia gallery.

He started it all by just paying attention to the people he saw on his daily walks in the neighborhood. You can read the details in this cover story in the Philadelphia Weekly.

my new life

I’ve joined the Emmy and Webby award winning multimedia production studio MediaStorm as a multimedia producer.

And I am psyched!

the boy in the moon

Another amazing multimedia presentation from the Toronto Globe and Mail, The Boy in the Moon is a brutally honest long form attempt by writer Ian Brown to understand his profoundly handicapped 11 year-old son, Walker.

My hat is off to the Toronto Globe and Mail for funding these long term, long form documentary projects. When will more newspapers start doing the same?

one hundred young americans

This year-long project represents photographer Michael Franzini’s 30,000-mile journey in search of what it truly means to be a teenager in this hyper-connected, media-driven society. It’s a book, a blog, a website and a series of stills and video portraits.

gorilla massacre story: briefly in print, wonderfully longer online

Strangely enough, in the current edition of National Geographic there was only a single 2 page Brent Stirton image on this story about the recent gorilla massacres in Congo. But there’s a great video treatment of it online at NGM.com, produced by the gang at MediaStorm.

10×10, no human input needed

It’s not new but it’s always fun: 10×10 is a widget written by Jonathan Harris that scans the wires every hour to look for the 100 top words in news stories, then chooses 100 corresponding imagesThe site explains: “At the end of each day, month, and year, 10×10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.”

However, if you look at the picture choices, they’re often repetitive, boring or missing. For instance, the Prime Mnister of Australia just conceded the election but they couldn’t find a picture of him? I mean, the guy has only been in politics for 33 years. But hey, who needs human input?

If you liked 10×10, check out WordCount, the 88,000 most frequently used English words arranged as one very long sentence.