Vantage Point - Multimedia film

One of the best cop series of the early 2000s was Boomtown.

The premise was an event e.g. crime viewed from several different angles, a style called Rashomon - after the film title from that great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

For me it represented an interesting model for news and feature presentation.

The structure and content in news can often be about perspective and point of view; interpretation.

Experiment.

I once ran an experiment at a summer school where I had two young men run into the class I was teaching, shouting and yelling, scuffle on the floor and then take my bag on the desk.

After the class had calmed down, It was only about 15 seconds, I asked them what they'd seen.

You won't believe the different range of answers.

The excercise, once they realised it was one, was how we perceive and write up first hand incidents; effectively real news gathering as opposed to processing.

You won't believe the number of conflicting accounts I received.

Interpretation

So New's is about interpretation, and in punditry/professional comment you're seeking someone whose judgement aligns with your sensibilities.

You may disagree with them but they have the conviction of their argument, which explains why the same people crop up time and time again in punditry.

But what if you could choose your entry point into a news item via a multimodal point - the absence of a definitive visual linear hierarchy.

Think of an ensemble in a play etc.


The Future of News?

That's where I feel news has new areas to develop and why video hyperlinking will become a powerful model

This multiple strand look is the bed for Vantage Point starring Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker and Sigourney Weave.

As with most trailers the art is in the promo editing - breathless seemless palate of cuts

This is kinetic stuff.

Their site also introduces an interesting level of interactivity

Next week I'm giving viewmagazine.tv a make-over in expectation of a hugely important experiment being shared world wide, which I'm loking forward to sharing with a talk at the World Editor's Association in Sweden and Cultural Exchange

NB. No where near frenetic or even comparable, but the roll tape back effect is something I tried in a short piece Y-Generation, joining the CIA which you can see here.

Wait for the pic to load and click.

How the effect was made?

Make a mask in photoshop from any photo> gray scale> aply halftone effects and > radial Blur and import to your film timeline.
Process your film by 1000% speed deleting every other frame.

You'll get the juddering effect > then wash the tones through After Effect.