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I have finally succumbed to the lure of After Effects, Final Cut and Flash for my visual storytelling needs of late. Not that I’ve turned my back on my drawing board (or the more accommodating sketchbook – additions to which are up on flickr). More like I’m finally able to start experimenting with different ways of presenting the visual stories that up until now have been pencilled, inked, scanned and printed (or published online). Turns out After Effects is more intuitive than I thought, though the avalanche of sub-field arrows reminds me of the first time I got plonked in front of Photoshop CS2 at Penguin many moons ago. So I’m finally on track to combining video, audio slideshows and interactive comics from one story into an online rich-media maelstrom. The question is, what is the best way to hack them altogether? Is it Flash, or will that be the online publishing equivalent of Quark in a few year’s time? By now, loyal reader, you’ll have no doubt closely watched the Pulse and Seda videos that I’ve posted (scroll down in the News section below if not), and will be anxiously awaiting the latest offering, which should be wrapped up by Weds. It centres on two Bhutanese refugees who have been resettled in Oakland, and their contrasting experiences at different ends of the age spectrum.
With the help of the indomitable Christopher Lin, I’ve also managed to put out a new version of my interactive comics reader prototype, now featuring a vertical as well as horizontal scroll, and pop-up windows from linked panels. It went down very well at our Knightly outing to Google last week, where I presented it to teams from Google News and Youtube. Fellow fellows Hugo Soskin and Di Pinheiro are putting together a video of the talks (also given by Cafe Babel founder-now OWNI partner Adriano Farano and Investigative Journalist Evelyn Larrubia), so I’ll post a link when it’s up. The excellent comics journalism resource Cartoon Movement have also expressed an interest in an interactive narrative visualization (like a data viz, but with visual stories as opposed to infographics, though I suppose the panels technically constitute information graphics) I’m putting together of the Nisour Square shooting of 2007, so expect that down the pipeline soon. To keep you sated until then, check out this video from a talk I gave to the MA journalism students at Stanford last month on comics journalism, my path into it, process, and all that good stuff.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking. It’s been too long. Well, plenty of reasons for that. First and foremost is the fact that I’ve been wading through the list of Knight Fellowship projects instead of blogging about them. Good news is I can share some of the progress – as ever, I’m always interested in what you, dear readers, think about it.
Multimedia has been the main focus this semester, fuelled by my focus on the excellent Multimedia Production class I’m taking at the Comms dept. Our small production team (comprised of 4 Knights) has now 3 films under its belt, the first of which was an interview with another Fellow, Seda Muradyan. Hugo has since posted his solo-produced piece on another fellow Fellow, Jenka Soderberg, but fear not! Our latest oeuvre isn’t fellow-related, it’s with the creators of the Pulse news app – 2 Stanford alums who created a best-selling RSS feed reader for mobile devices that even got a shout out from the grand poobah of all things tech, Steve Jobs. You can view all of our multimedia efforts at the Knight Garage blog here.
Wow, where did January go? I was sure it was here a second ago. It feels like the second semester only just started, and yet here’s Feb knocking on the door and I’m wondering where all my carefully chronicled Knight exploits have gone. So here’s my attempt to sum up what’s happened over the last few weeks at Stanford:
Hmm I’m sure I’ve missed a few things off the list, but that’ll do for now. Oh, and the small matter of figuring out my life post-Knight…
UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has reached a preliminary decision about the proposed Newcorp buyout of BSkyB I mentioned a few weeks ago. Click here for the full skinny. His verdict? He’s going to refer to it Ofcom, the British regulator (huzzah!). Oh, but wait. He would, if he wasn’t going to take the middle ground and give Newscorp time to make amends first. We’ll see. Click here for the Beeb’s coverage, and here for the full government statement. A brief synopsis of the media consolidation pros and cons here.
Former British PM Tony Blair took the stand yesterday to offer an addendum to the comments from his previous appearance at the Iraq inquiry, explaining that:
“At the conclusion of the last hearing, you asked me whether I had any regrets. I took that as a question about the decision to go to war, and I answered that I took responsibility. That was taken as my meaning that I had no regrets about the loss of life and that was never my meaning or my intention. I wanted to make it clear that, of course, I regret deeply and profoundly the loss of life, whether from our own Armed Forces, those of other nations, the civilians who helped people in Iraq or the Iraqis themselves.”
Yet another signup to the “let history be the judge” camp it seems – not least the part of history that saw him planning regime change with Dubya back in 2001 (see 1:13 in the video). But it wasn’t the heckling that best summed up the public’s reaction to Tone, fresh from his book tour – it was the fact that he arrived at the inquiry 2 hours early to avoid the crowds of protestors who set up outside the premises. Watch Sky’s coverage of his testimony here.
Sketchbook page from last night's Zittrain lecture
In the first of many blogging experiments, and to minimize the amount of time I spend at my computer this semester – not to mention to hone my cartooning skills – I’m going to post pages from my sketchbook from some of the lectures I attend this semester. Last night’s was part of the Liberation Technology series and featured Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain discussing the ethical pitfalls and perils of crowdsourced jobs – especially ones that seem innocuous at first but actually have nefarious goals. Such as what if the Iranian government (whose involvement would obviously be kept hidden) attempted to identify protestors at a rally by building an entertaining face-matching game, or companies luring “turkers” (from Amazon’s now notorious “mechanical turk” site) to provide bogus product reviews for points or minimal (3-5 cents) return.
We are all complicit when the promise of fake online points prompts gamers to overlook their ethical responsibility to society – check out this so-sinister-it’s-laughable true story of an anti-Health Reform Organization bribing facebook game players with points to send an email to their member of congress decrying the evils of Health Care reform. In a beautiful instance of technology spawning some great metaphorical neologisms, this process is called astroturfing – because it’s fake grass roots campaigning.
Find out more about Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it, here.
Sketches of Condi during our Q&A
The Winter term kicked off this week, and already it feels like I’ve been back ages. In true Stanfordian fashion, yesterday’s highlights included: an introduction to multimedia reporting (hello Final Cut Express), catching up with the globe-trotting antics of the rest of the Knights, planning a group ski trip to Tahoe, reading Jeremy Scahill‘s scathing expose of Blackwater and the role of private security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then sitting down with ex-National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss her take on them. While thinking about how all this fits into my project, and working out which courses to shop. Just your average day back at school really.
Geri Migielicz’s class on Multimedia Storytelling is the definite course highlight of my year, as I’ve been wanting to tinker with video, audio and animation to complement my comics work for a while now. Naturally, a lot of the same compositional/framing devices for comics apply to (and are directly borrowed from) film, so that helps. I’ve been addicted to storytelling shows like this American Life and The Moth podcasts for years (ever since depending on them at White River for accompaniment during the hours spent inking at my drawing board in fact), so it was great to see Jessica Abel and Ira Glass’s Radio: An Illustrated Guide in the syllabus. In fact, just this afternoon a bunch of us are getting together to learn how to make a podcast, courtesy of KBOO Portland Radio Director Jenka Sondenberg – so be sure to come back next week to listen to that. Some of the examples we checked out were the NYTimes Year in Pictures and the media-rich 5 Years Later from USA Today, focusing on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I snapped up my copy of Final Cut Express from the bookstore that afternoon, and have just installed it, though I hear it’s a beast on a par with Photoshop in the menubar/features stakes. We’ll see.
The chat with Condi Rice was another year-long highlight, though the mood in the lounge was a lot lighter than expected when I walked in – probably a strategic decision on Jim and Dawn’s part to mix up the holiday catch-up festivities with an indisputably controversial speaker. Predictably, Condi came across as furiously intelligent, quoting in-depth resolution numbers and bilateral treaties in many of her answers (though arguably few of us could confirm or deny their veracity), and the possessor of a honed rhetoric that was nimbler and more acrobatic than the psuedo-kung-fu hand gestures that accompanied them.
The crowds line up for a copy of Pika-Don
The literary maelstrom that was the Miami Book Fair is now over, and both the Stanford Graphic Novel panel and my comic journalism panel with David Axe went very well. The SGNP on Thurs saw Adam Johnson, English Professor at Stanford and the creator of the SGNP, talk about the origins of the program, how he conceived of it, how the process varied across our three books (Shake Girl, Virunga and Pika-Don) and what advice educators need to follow to start a similar course of their own. The response was overwhelmingly positive so here’s to offshoots popping up all over the country. Below is one of the many watercolour sketches I’ve been banging out during the lectures – apologies for the low quality, it’s from a blurry iphone photo. Anyone out there recommend a decent portable scanner?
On the tail of that positivity, check out this article from the Miami NewTimes on my work. I’ll post a longer update on my talk (it was recorded, so perhaps even the video of it too) tomorrow, as well as some more sketches, and the lowdown on Joe Sacco’s talk.
Last but not least, some fantastic news from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), who reached a historic agreement last week with the Florida Tomato Grower’s Exchange. See above for a few sample panels from my first comic, What a Whopper, featuring none other than Reggie Brown from the said exchange, who seems to be eating his words from 2007. Click here to read the Whopper comic online, which is about Burger King’s then exploitation of migrant labour from Central America.
Mark and his Sarah Palin animated nemesis in action
Last Wednesday I was delighted to see that my suggestion of Mark Fiore as a visiting lecturer to our weekly Knight Fellowship seminars became a reality. In case you didn’t know, Mark recently won a Pulitzer prize for non-print based journalism (the category’s only a few years old) – he specializes in animated editorial cartoons, which he puts together in Flash.
Not only was it heartening to see the love and respect he had for the masters of animation (Hanna Barbera, Mel Blanc), but also really impressive to see how he pulls together an entire 2-3 minute animated short every week. Just when I thought making comics was labour intensive, he’s working with voice actors, doing lip synching (keyframe by keyframe – no flash tweening here thankyouverymuch), the lot. Even better was the chance to check out, and see how he builds it up, layer by layer. Here’s one of the many clips he showed us:
Who knows, I might even give a short animation a try – watch this space. That is, if I get a chance in between thumbnailing my latest version of the prototype, which I’ve been working on with fellow fellow Sahar Ghazi. Speaking of Flash, I’ve also stumbled across the perfect prototyping tool for future iterations, involving everyone’s favourite frame-by-frame interface. So long as there’s no code involved, I think I’ll be fine…
I also had a great chat with Dominic Price (one of the developers of the Cloudpad web app from Nottingham University) this morning, who talked me through downloading the code for the latest iteration and the steps I need to get it up and running so I can start bending the code to suit my project’s nefarious needs. To do that, I have to figure out what type of server the Stanford webspace runs on, and some other essential info I’m at a current loss to mention.
A brazilian comicsphile feels the inky pull towards a page of Archcomix
Congrats to Augusto Paim for organizing the Comics journalism conference in Brazil at the Porto Alegre Goethe Institute. I wasn’t there in person sadly, but some of my artwork made it through the ether- check out this photo from my comic on Chagos, a panel of which is above, back in the days when I used to watercolour. To read the whole comic, click here.
More details are now out about my upcoming talk on comics journalism at the Miami Book Fair, so those of you on the east coast looking for some thanksgiving sun prime your diaries for 4pm this Sunday. Get the full skinny here. I’m sharing the panel with war correspondent David Axe, writer of War is Boring, which was then turned into a comic by Matt Bors. (Wars might be, but coups definitely aren’t).
For an update on my Knight fellowship project at Stanford, click here.
