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That’s right, now is one of the few times you can honestly help me improve my mojo. (Mo)zilla + (Jo)urnalism that is, you dirty-minded lot. Simply go here, read my awesome proposal and click ‘vote’ in the top right hand corner. Essentially, it’s what you’ve come to expect around here, discerning fan of comics journalism that you are – combining the visual storytelling devices of comics with the souped-up power of web 2.0 (or is that passe already?) to incorporate video, animation and audio within comics panels. Voting closes today, so make it count! Winners go through to the next round, earning themselves some top-notch coding training in the process. Believe me, after wrestling with my interactive Blackwater piece (now pushed back til Monday on Cartoonmovement, sorry folks), I could use it.
Here’s the blurb from the Mozilla:
Video is a central part of many people’s daily news experience. But most online video is still stuck in a boring embedded box, like “TV on a web page,” separated from the rest of the page content. This offers little in the way of context or opportunities for viewers to engage more deeply.
New open video tools make it possible to pull data from across the web right into the story. Information related to the video can literally “pop” into the page. And videos themselves can change, dynamically adapting as stories evolve. The challenge is to use these tools in ways that serve the story. How can we enrich news video through things like added context, deeper viewer engagement, and the real time web? What are the untapped possibilities inherent in many-to-many, web video?
Wow. I know lately I’ve been prone to postponing my once-daily digital diatribes, but the sheer amount of work I’ve been getting through of late has tipped we way over the line. The main reason for that was the big push to the end of my Knight Fellowship at Stanford, which I’ll write more about in detail on my Knight project page. In the meantime, visit this link to watch my 3 min hyper-summary of comics journalism and what I’ve been working on at Stanford. Or click here to see how the rest of my incredibly talented cohort spent their year via the re-engineering journalism Knight Fellowship Garage.
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.
Above is a graphic I put together for a project started by Fellow Knight Jigar Mehta on the Egyptian protests, #18daysinegypt, so-called because it’s all about encouraging citizen journalists to come forward with their footage of the recent developments in Cairo. The key lies in the footage being geo-tagged to create an explorable archive for viewers to find their own way through the dates and places that led to Mubarak’s resignation. More news and updates below.
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.
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.
a whiteboarded rainbow of inspiration
For an update on my ever-evolving Knight Project on an online multimedia comics interface, you’ll be wanting the Knight Project page.
Today was the first half of the Knight’s crash-course at the Stanford D.School in design thinking, half of which took place on the Cal Train and involved tackling the challenge of commuting: how to improve the overall experience, how that varied for the different types of commuter, the emotional influencers that dictate commuters’ behaviours etc. Once we’d acosted various travellers on the Bayshore-Palo Alto slow train and dodged the wrath of the design-challenged ticket inspector, we headed back to campus to thrash out our findings with post-its and whiteboards, dividing the feedback we’d received from interviews into 4 areas: things the passengers said, things they wish Cal train would do, things they felt towards their commuting experience, and things they thought. It was all about fast iterations, prototyping and not being hung up on getting a perfect result the first time round. In fact, being too eager to find an early solution stifles the creative process and will only limit your findings. Counter-intuitive, but very rewarding and looking forward to the follow-up session when we’ll dive deeper into designing a solution for our commuters tomorrow.
If you have any suggestions or feedback on ways to improve your commute, post a comment!
