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Here’s a link to another of my forrays into interactive flash design, featuring background info and interviews with Bhutanese refugees in Oakland. Madhu Acharya and I put the series of videos and audio together towards the tail end of the Knight fellowship, and the story went live this week on the Penipress website, which also feeds SFGate and the Bay Citizen. The above sketches were done in situ as I was wrestling with the idea of combining direct reporting with post-production work, sort of like the Bo Seremsky piece I posted a few weeks back.
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).
I’m pleased to announce that one of the interactive multimedia comics that I worked on during my Knight fellowship is now live over at Cartoon Movement. To read the piece, click here. (Above is a sample tier). The piece tells the story of the Nisoor square shootings that took place in Sept 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq involving US contractor Blackwater (now renamed “Xe Services”). The tragic event saw 17 Iraqis killed and 24 wounded during the controversial shootings, which civilian witnesses argue was unprovoked. The case was dismissed by US courts in 2009 but reopened just a few months ago, in April 2011.
Meanwhile, Xe’s polemical CEO Erik Prince has moved to Abu Dhabi to export his unique brand of mercenary training:
Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times…
Stay tuned for a separate post on what looks frighteningly like a School of the Americas for the middle east.
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.
