Multimedia Project

Our class has started a multimedia project and my group will be focusing on the video aspect of multimedia.

The story we will be covering is about professors and their first jobs. What their first jobs ever were and what their first jobs out of college were. We will be interviewing professors on campus and asking about their first jobs and the effect that their first jobs has had on their lives.

I have set up an interview for Friday with one professor.

Challenges: With all the stress of class registration it is hard at this time to find professors with enough time to be willing to be interviewed and our group discussed interviewing in pairs so it is also hard to coordinate schedules.

Controversy of The Falling Man Photo

Seeing the picture of the Falling Man for the first time is awe striking. It shows a man in mid air falling after jumping out of one of the twin towers on 9/11. I find it somewhat ironic that the man looks so relaxed as he is plummeting with the force of gravity.

One of the controversies of the photo is that it exploited a man's death, invaded his privacy, and stripped him of his dignity. I don't know that I agree with that. I think the picture shows a man trying to save his life in the only way he knew how at that point in time, given the situation he was in. It is representative of what a lot people forced themselves to do that day.

I think that, while the photo does not encapsulate the whole event including the people on the ground and the smoke rising out of the building, the photo captures the man trying to save his life and getting those last few breaths of fresh air. It is part of journalism to report the truth and that was a big part of what happened that day. Although the resistance to the image makes sense. It is psychologically scarring to see something like that-especially for a child. It is upsetting and serves as a constant reminder of the heartache and pain of that day. And I agree when the article says that the images are disrespectful to the victim's families, it just makes it more painful.

Captions can be very helpful

I went on to socialdocumentary.com and watched the Street At Night photo essay. While I think the pictures were very good and that each one tells its own story, I found myself asking for more information.

I know the photo essay is called "Street At Night" and the pictures were taken in Austria. But I would like to know exactly where in Austria and if it was just one street that the photographer is shooting. I think it would have been interesting if the photojournalist had taken the pictures of the same spot for about an hour and took pictures of the different people walking by or possible events that may occur on that part of the street.

The captions could be a little more informative, maybe saying if the picture is taken in a bar or place located on the street. However, as a whole I don't know if there is enough information for the continuous slide show to make sense, but each picture tells its own individual story which I found to be interesting.

Sometimes a picture says more than words

I found the stylistic elements in the Intended Consequences story (about the raping of the tutsi women during the 1994 genocide) to be very interesting.

The main focus was on showing still photographs of the women and their children but I like how there were a couple times when you couldn't tell if there was a couple seconds during the slideshow when it looked like the woman's eyes were moving. I couldn't tell if the photos were taken so that that would be the case or if there were a couple seconds of video edited in. But I like the focus on the eyes. It helped the audience to see that these women are suffering physically and emotionally. You can see the pain in their eyes and on their faces.

Another element that provided emotional impact on the audience was the use of audio with a black screen or no audio. When there was a black screen I really paid attention not only to what the women were saying, but how they were saying it. At one point, there is no audio and the words that the woman is speaking are shown being written out on the screen with no voiceover. It helps to show the significance of the event and signifies the horrors that the women had to go through.

The focus on the women's faces helps to convey how much they are suffering. Non of the women look happy or as if they have gotten over what has happened to them. Most of them hate their children that are a product of rape. There are tears in most of their eyes and just their facial expressions say more than words ever could.

"Intended Consequences" did a great job combining the use of video, audio, and pictures to portray the suffering of an often untold story.

See the World

I enjoyed the "Best Places to Go in 2010" interactive graph on the NYT multimedia page.

While there are no video or audio clips, the adventurer in me found the map to be very interesting. I would like to travel and it is helpful to see popular places that people have been to and would want to go to.

People who have already been to a specific country or city give recommendations as to what to do and see while you are there and also give recommendations as to where to stay and where to go. When you click on a city the map focuses in on that specific area and then fades into all the recommendations. It is like having a mini-travel agent.

I found the interactive graph to be very interesting, informative, and fun.

A Student Did That?

I was very impressed with the "Distracted Delegates" video, a multimedia story done by a student journalist.

She took a video of the delegates while they were in a meeting a reported the ones who were surfing the web or chatting online. Doing something other than what they were supposed to do.

She started off with an interesting theory, wondering if, like so many college students, do delegates also get distracted by social media during important meetings?

She went out and found the answer. Turns out, even professionals lose their focus sometimes. There were a surprising amount of delegates surfing the web during the meeting.

I also would like to know if they knew she was going to do this story. I think if the delegates had known, it would have affected the what they did during the meeting, but on the other hand, is it ethical to write a story that the subjects do not know they are taking part in?

Multimedia is hard work

After reading the article Multimedia Storytelling, I now know just how much work goes into telling a story through the use of multimedia.

In this article, Jane Stevens goes over how she went about creating a multimedia story about Dancing Rocks.

There is a long list that a reporter must keep track of and many different elements to go with one story. The reporter must break down the story into many different elements and see what aspects of the story will be best told through text, audio, video, pictures, and graphics. The reporter then has to make a storyboard, do the field work, and then edit and assemble the story. While the finished element is awesome, it is a lot of work for the reporter to go through. The professionals make it look easy. Until I read this article, I did not realize just how much effort goes in to producing a multimedia story.