multimedia story Part 1

Just got the news that completes the Multimedia story package. Senior BBC Exec has agreed to the interview in the new year.

I'm thrilled.

Yeah the things that make me happy eh :)

Making of MM Journalist
Meanwhile Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors and me should be able to start The making of a multimedia Journalist from Egypt.

I apologise to the purists but it's a bit like pseudo bourne style meets wannabe Tony Scott.

You saw the trailer here some time back; if not here it is again: Trailer - Be a multimedia Journalist

Multimedia, Innovative Mobile Phone Reportage, ONA and Reuters

Reuters Mobile Reporting Phone Kit

A lot of things can happen in er a day.

Thanks to Peter Ralph at shooting by Numbers who had me in stitches and still has when he emailed me a response to a my earlier missive about the trailer for "So you want to be a multimedia journalists?.

Cmon Peter it was the high definition version that came in at a miniscule 7mb, which is why I sent an ee out.

Peter's response.

"I do, I do!

Please send cap and scarf!"

Fab - that's all I can say. An art in how to bring a fellow brit down a peg or two - fantastic.


Reuters
Yesterday's Reuter's Online News Association gathering was lovely - not a word I use often.

The whole set up with two hours of Q and A with four/five of their team walking us through the whole mobile phone correspondence kit.

Good turn out of heavyweight writers/ journalists and bloggers as well. Kevin Anderson from the Guardian, Martin Stabb from Press Gazette, and that talented multimedia correspondent Tim Overdiek.

Apparently the ONA's been growing at rate of knots.

Someone needs to correct me but some 45% in the last year and most of that out of the US.

Anyways so what I liked about the talk was the honesty from the Reuters crew; we're trying this out and we haven't mastered eveything, but we're looking at what it can do, they said.

I think I jumped on ilicco their mobile products manager when a point came up about neswpaper journos prefering the Nokia system to the A1 HDDV cam I use.

Video's not for everyone, yes, but those who have taken it - some 200 plus to date - are doing some fine work. I can give a fuller list in later postings.

Anyway others weighed in.

What are limitations in bandwidth?

Do the phones have a built in stabiliser to minise shake?

How long do the batteries last?

I'll post that video once I complete this post, and so on and so on.

In the hands of Citizen jo it'll be formidable - the whole kit looks like a point and click affair.

Only pressure I can see is from the I-phone - which I have seen at work from Robb Montgomery.

Now that is special.

Onto a good thing
But Reuters are on to a good thing and they know it.

A question about quality and camera steadiness was a red herring according to Paul Brannan (BBC); if the shoot is newsworthy who cares - his point?

Reuters grabbed interviews with William Gibson ( Cyber), Vince Serf and Peter Bazelgette ( Big Brother Boss) and aside from some film motion - me thinks it has something to do with the chroma shift or compression ( what do I know) - it looked and sounded fine.

Mobiles are the future
Mobiles are the future, now that looks a certainty.

That much was talked up today by marketing mogul Ricky Chopra from Quba.com talking to Commercial Music undergrads at Uni.

I gate crashed to see if I was missing anything in SEO, which he discussed.

Ricky, confident in his presentation spoke about the dash for digital downloads i.e. everyone wants to be on mobiles and how bluetoothing films, at festivals etc, was becoming the norm.

You can even go mobile: all you need is a back pack with a transreceiver, cost about 1400 dollars, and a laptop and some poor soul to lug it around.

Anyway what happens when you get passed by the cyborgy person is you get pinged with "hey here's my film", if you've got your bluetooth device on.

Does that mean Web sites will soon become redundant ?


The New Marketeers
But the best part of his talk involved the subversive area of "article marketing".

Mmmm the art of creating a buzz around your product by conversing with your market in "clever" somtimes underhanded ways.

The more savvy of you will recall Loreal and Microsoft's debacle, so it has huge negatives.

The positives: students can earn around 3200 dollars a month for "article marketing" around their blogs, and says Ricky they drove traffic from 1000 a week to 2000 a day or thereabouts when they took on a campaign.

I have got to get more facebook friends. Damn!

Meanwhile at the same time a department head went all google adwords today. Took us minutes to get on - further linning thoss nice levis pockets of google.

How much are google making from ad words alone - really - nice!

Intercontinental classrooms
And then back home Robb Montgomery from Visual Editors ask if I'll skype into a class he's taking so we can talk multimedia.

We're back where we started because I'm somewhere near producing this multimedia piece I have been banging on about- but meanwhile get some of this.



The FT have pulled a big multimedia bunny from the hat: The Rising Cost of Food I like this. And I'm sure you will to, particularly as it addresses a huge topical subject with such clarity and style.

yes yes the FT are friends, but this is still brill

the process of thought

It must intrigue you when you think you've come up with an original thought only to find somewhere someone a long distance away is revelling in the same mental break through.

It's no wonder most scientific discoveries involve some form of horse race to unravel what ever. I once remember watching that great dancer Gregory Hines talk about a new move he was proud to have invented only to find out watching black and white movies that Fred Astaire had executed the same sequence many years back.

Nothing is sacredly new.

On a much much smaller scale meeting the founder of visual editors, Robb Montgomery produced some of those moments.

Rob demonstrates on his blog today something I talk about called the IM6 approach - integrated multimedia.

He has a podcast, then with the same pod he adds pictures and then a third, he goes for video. Take your pic (er pun) really, but it is a version on the theme that CNN International may be responsible for: Kill what you can eat and don't spare anything.

Hollywood's done good at this approach in recent years. Make the film, make the making of the film, take the snaps, release audio for the radio stations, now produce killer sites and let you download the trailers.

It's a 4d quadrant approach. In a matrix sort of way it's like taking the vectors of the word "news" as applied to its regions: North, East, West and South and coming up with an imaginary (i) vector which we could quite simply call i for interactive.

News has a fifth vector but you have to work it. Robb also proves the other theory that "smart" people pick up things and work, re work them. You don't need to have been a broadcaster to be brilliant at being a broadcaster.

It's what the Harvard Business Review might call the Integrated approach, but simply it's about observing a paradigm an incorporating it into the body of your work in your way. There's such fluidity. I have already got onto Robb about some of the wonderful mash-ups he's behind.

This process of design, motion, video and obviously creative thought is behind my Phd which finally I have got round to applying and have been accepted.

If what we're doing now is considered revolutionary, how might we look in 10 years time?

Can we as a more networked, wired generation, shake of our antipathy to change as a threat, but as an enabler?

Can we trend extrapolate from the visceral and emotional qualities of story telling to get to a space where it becomes even more compelling. For instance, is there a designated size online, audio pass etc which triggers greater viewing pleasure?

And as someone joking said if everyone's publishing who's the viewer? That's an easier one.

I have come to love this saying now, It's about technique, not jus technology