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Above is some of the original concept art for one of my latest projects that will feature comic art, animation, after effects and live action documentary footage, all blended together. It’s a unique opportunity to get out from behind my drawing board and work as part of a team, which I’m really enjoying, though I can’t share too many more details with you until we’re into the next stage of the project. Early days yet. There’ll be a trailer for you in early May, so be sure to check back in then. I finally bit the bullet and got a copy of toonboom after what felt like a lifetime of wrestling with flash, and so far, so good. Aside from some jaw-droppingly bizarre keyboard controls (alt + a = brush tool, anyone?). I was actually prompted to get TB over anything else after seeing the trailer for the oscar-nominated Chico and Rita.
Speaking of nominations, the Yiddish-themed anthology I collaborated with Harvey Pekar on, Yiddishkeit, has been nominated for an Eisner award for Best Anthology! Kudos to comics stalwart Paul Buhle for getting us there. Clearly this post, there’s no I in team. There is one in Eisner though.
First, a test video for your viewing delectation and feedback: is the speed too fast? Is the text legible enough? Talk about your low-fi setups…
Below is a transcript of a recent email conversation I had with a fellow multimedia storyteller, Bo Soremsky, who put together this awesome interactive piece about a trial in his native Germany. Bo’s Qs are in bold.
People often ask me why i’m drawing pictures instead of taking photos. I’m sure you are familiar with that question. What’s your take on this?
People often forget that photos can be editorialized just as much as drawn images. Personally, I think a drawing is all the more sincere in explicitly revealing that the object depicted has been run through a subjective filter. All too often do readers forget that even a photographer has to crop in/out the elements they don’t want in a frame, and that’s before the editor has their say. Not to mention the possibility of it being tampered with in photoshop. To me, drawn images are the most accurate way of translating what’s in our heads onto paper – crystallizing our subjective experience. Provided a journalist is up front about that, I don’t see what the problem is, beyond the traditional aversion to what’s innovative versus something that’s been traditionally accepted. [Perfect example: Newsweek’s cropping of a Dick Cheney photo in 2009, prompting the longest comment thread ever on the NYTimes Lens blog – http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/essay-9/]
Without doubt drawings provide a very subjective view of the subject. So, how do you create authenticity? One answer to that question can be found in your hypercomic: By clicking on a panel the reader gets access to supporting documents. Thats a great way to prove your assertions. But are there other possibilities to convince the reader that you are telling the truth?
Sources are always going to be the key to authenticity, and linking is certainly one of the best ways around that. Incorporating more multimedia, housing multiple, corroborative views together could be another. I don’t think one single “truth” exists – even if you and I experienced the same event next to each other, we’d record and report it differently.
What do you think are the advantages of a digital reportage over a printed one? Does interactivity really help to tell good and authentic stories? Couldn’t it be to complicated and confusing?
I think interactivity is one of the few ways of demanding a reader’s engagement and involvement – readers/viewers get let off too easily these days in the era of clicking off youtube videos or channel surfing. Only by forcing the reader to drive the story can we be sure they are fully committed to the narrative – much like the way agency works in between comics panels to make sequential images seem like they’re part of the same story. It could well be complicated – the key is marrying a compelling story with an intuitive interface – no mean feat! (Not to mention being paid well enough to make it in the first place).
As part of the multimedia jamboree that has come to characterize my project, I’ve been researching the latest techniques that news organizations are using to convey their complex story subject matters to an increasingly time-starved, quick-fix-hungry readership. The key as I see it is to balance an accessible means of delivery (something that doesn’t fall at the first hurdle of being visually horrifying or clunkier than a second-hand skoda) with a message that will stay with the reader for longer than it takes them to drain their latte.
This means content providers being a little more accountable for how the information they’re relaying is being used – after all, a school’s not worth much if its pupils can’t retain the teaching long enough to pass their end of year exams. Yes, you could argue this is less relevant in the second-by-second news cycle, but as we’ve heard time and time again, the up-to-the-milisecond-coverage means little without a healthy working knowledge of the context that it fits into.
Discussing this recently with Josh Kalven, founder of Newsbound, we agreed that game theory could play a crucial part here, inconspicuously cajoling browsers into testing their post-article muscles to see just how many of the key points have stayed with them. Josh has joined the ranks of the visual explainers, creating a company that is “exploring how best to contain and explain complex news narratives“. See below for his first offering, on filibusters:
Of course, we’re not the only ones who have awoken to this new breed of explanatory journalism – indeed Fellow Knight and NPR Marketplace stalwart Paddy Hirsch has made it to the focus of his project, as an offshoot of his highly successful marketplace series of explainers: here’s one on the Double-dip recession from Marketplace:
As I’ve mentioned before, Paddy and I are also working on our own financial crisis explainer, which will be premiering early next month and will be akin to the mongrel offspring of New York Times’ Zach Wise’s after effects animations and Mark Fiore’s more cartoony satire.
Much praise was heaped on John Jarvis (and rightly so) for his uber-slick explainer, “The Crisis of Credit Visualized”, which was his thesis project at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. For a behind the scenes look at how the project came together, check out Jarvis’ post here. Jarvis is now part of a group known as The New Mediators who are using graphic design solutions and interactive, rich-media diagrams to bring clarity to complex processes. Next post, coming soon: riding the visual rollercoaster of slickness – and no, that’s not a veiled reference to this very slick interactive timeline of the Middle Eastern Protests from the Guardian. (Although it will feature).
There’s nothing quite like the race to the end of term to catalyse a depth-charge of creativity. The past few weeks have been busier than normal as I’ve spent hours hunched over final cut and flash (as opposed to the drawing board and scanner), busily hashing out my first mini-interactive documentary site (produced with fellow Knight Madhu Acharya), on Bhutanese refugees and their integration into the Oakland community. The screenshot above gives you an idea of the homepage layout, which in the final published version allows you to choose different chapters of the story to explore. I’m currently tying up loading/streaming issues with the FLV files, but aside from that I think it’s good to go.
Now that I’ve got to grips with Final Cut and Flash, I can move to phase 2 of my project, namely combining video and audio within comics pages to give online readers an interactive multimedia comics experience as they explore news events. Looking back at the “to do” list I put up at the end of January, I’m pleased to say that I’ve hit all the goals:
I’ll next week with news of some future projects, as well as some previews of the above – including my first experiment with text animation in After Effects.
This is MTV EXIT’s first forray into animation: a stunning piece of socially-minded animation from JM Animation Studio, telling the story of one girl’s descent into human trafficking and the overlap with the various people involved in the ring. There are 3 parts, with a total run time of 25 mins – well worth your time (not to mention the fact that the soundtrack’s provided by Radiohead). Share and comment on how effective a means of raising awareness/storytelling you think it is.
[Reminder: check out the Knight Project page for the first report on my latest animation project.]
EA games made the headlines last week with the announcement that the latest version of its Medal of Honor series would allow gamers to play as the Taliban and, of course, kill American soldiers. Click here to watch the Linkin Park-backed trailer in all of its bodycounting glory.
This comes fresh on the back of the announcement that Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 is officially the best-selling game of all time in the UK. Fox News jumped feet first into the melee, bringing a grieving Gold Star Mother into the studio to comment (watch the video here), but enough people have commented on the polemic for me not to go into a equally predictable defense of art imitating life. Instead, what I want to focus on here is the rise of the videogame as an increasingly sophisticated (not to mention supremely lucrative) art form. And most importantly, ask why we aren’t waking up to the potential that video games like Modern Warfare or Medal of Honor represent for news reporting? Scrolling through the comment thread at Gamrfeed’s original article on the issue, Puffy’s comment says it all:
I really don’t understand the argument here.. I mean this is a purely fictional piece of entertainment that is based on real events. Do these media types this that when people play these games in multiplyer [sic] they think, oh good, I wanna be the Taliban and kill some Americans? It’s just a name and outfit to distinguish your teammates from the enemy team, gamers don’t give a shit who they’re playing as in these titles.
What we need to do is redress the balance of this sort of technology being used for pure entertainment purposes and think about how an interactive, immersive digital environment would be the ideal way to introduce students/viewers to the reality of what life is like on the ground in Afghanistan/Iraq/ war zones. Patrick Farley’s doing a similar, albeit deliberately hyper-fictionalised and stylised version of Afghanistan (using 3D rendering tools) over at electricsheepcomix, which I highly recommend. Gamrfeed later ran an excellent piece featuring interviews with US military personnel on the issue, which you can read here. Just as we’ve seen with comics, too many of the supposed gatekeepers of culture see videogames as just another form of lowbrow entertainment and not a state of the art opportunity to engage with an audience on a totally new level. To that end, what do you think is the average age of a videogamer? Answers in the comments section…
I’ve finally come good on my promise to translate the rest of the Honduran coup comic into spanish, which the polyglots amongst you can read here. Feel free to send me any corrections, suggestions or translation errors that may have slipped past my iron-clad grammatical grasp. I’ve also added a Honduran comic thread to the discussion forum on the Archcomix page, so click here and get posting on it. The other big news is that Ryuhei Okada of the Caracas Cafe blog has offered to translate the Honduran coup comic and Right to Return into japanese, so big thanks to him.
Lately I’ve been looking into how animators around the world have been combining narratives with a journalistic message to give a different perspective on news issues and show us what life is like in typically inaccessible parts of the world. One striking example is Fatenah (left) from Palestine, telling the story of a young girl of the same name who’s grown up in the Gaza strip.
Speaking of bringing stories to life, I also recently came across Google’s living stories, part of an online experiment that houses all the contextual information to a specific news story in the same template, similar to a google wave document in a lot of ways. Granted, it still suffers from the same scroll down beyond the break ad infinitum of standard online news sources, but it’s certainly a start. Let me know what you think in the comments section. More cartoons and sequential journalism later on tomorrow.
