Meeting Doc pioneer Albert Maysles

David Dunkley Gyimah meets an icon, doc pioneer Albert Maysles

Et voila the great Albert Maysles.

In the time I have worked for the BBC, ITN, ABC News and the rest I have met many stars and VIPS. In many cases I have admired them, but not been moved enough to want my picture taken. Also it's not, well, how do you put it, cool!

But I do have a select compendium: President Mandela, Quincy Jones and Lennox Lewis whom I co-shot his documentary fighting Tyson. All of them can be found on the site I built viewmagazine.tv. To that now, I have recently met Albert Maysles.

There are many reasons why Maysles message is still strong and should never be forgotten;  he is one of the rare and true pioneers in documentary. 

Whatever you're playing with at the moment, there's a strong claim Albert Maysles et al would have been there first in films such as: Grey Gardens (1976) Gimme Shelter (1970) and Salesman (1968). Then there's that unprecedented shot in Primary(1960), 

That Shot


And more recent stories such as Muhammad and Larry(2009) co-created with Bradley Kaplan. But this iconography goes beyond hero worshipping of the past. At a time of disjointed and complex imbricating forms in our digital ecology, to gain a better understanding of the future, we must look to figures such as Albert.

Last year as part of my soon-to-complete doctoral thesis on the Outernet and moving image where, digital codes works with the realism of film making I spoke to another pioneer, Drew.

I'm hoping to do the same with Albert and will share that with you soon and with the community we're assembling for our next BBC-BFI-UCLAN meeting- the inaugural one can was quite a success.

How to not win awards

David Dunkley Gyimah at awards ceremony

How not to win awards. Why are they sought in the first place is topic in itself, but how not to win them sounds tautological. 

It's like Fred seen here - a latter day version of Pee wee - sending out invitations to friends about NOT being invited to his party.



So yesterday I was one of four nominees for this Ghana Awards. And the winner was a barrister and deservedly so. Being nominated was more than I could wish. 

But it was a lavish fine show of talent and  awesome enough to be asked to come and sit down and sup with Ghana folk. There's always a funny incident where someone's giving me some food and has to describe it in detail.

"That sir is fried yam and a black pepper recipe called... "

"Me daase.. me nim..comes my reply in Ashanti saying, yes thanks, I know. 

The last time I failed to show my Ghanaian roots at some other function I got a ribbing from a couple thinking I was out of my depth with the food - believe me Ghanaian food can be quite chilli hot.

So back to the awards itself which frankly I didn't stand a chance in a room by myself ever winning. Mainly because I never told anyone.

After the nominations delegates were asked to amass votes for themselves online. Well that's me out as:

a) I don't have a wide friends base :)
b) It's a bit odd asking people to vote for you for what you do

Effectively we're in the realm of the X-factor. I could understand if it was a public vote for some performance the public might want to see again, but if you're a nurse, a doctor or a mechanic, your either good at what you do and your peers recognise this, or er you're not - and feel comfortable about it.

The idea I have to ring around my friends and mum, who'll tell her friends and what not, is a bit vain.

Now I'm not suggesting the victor did this. You'll have to know me better to believe I could think that way,  but I do hope at some point where appropriate we jettison the idea of X-factor voting for things that should be judged on merit.

Otherwise, in the future we could be voting for whether you get the hospital appointment, or whether you pass your driving test because of pubic votes, or the pilot flying that plane did so not because of her professionalism graded by anonymous peers, but a public vote.

Which in any case if it had gone that way, the winner of this award, would still have won given her many achievements. That's one thing I am pretty sure off.

How we teach newer media

Buy the book as its too late to attend the night club

There's a story I believe to be true about Robin Williams from his visits in Britain the 80s, and 90s. 

In the centre of Piccadilly Circus, next to where the Odeon cinema, used to be was a small dimly lit room club called the Cat in the Hat.

I knew this club well, as on Fridays it featured some of the damn funkiest people in London, dancing to what became 'rare grooves'.

These were  tracks from Maceo and the Mack, the JB's and Vicki Anderson's Message to the Soul Sisters (you need turn this up and kick of your shoes. Er p.s close your curtain's too otherwise the neighbours will think you mad)



Anyway, on Saturdays the Cat in the Hat would transform into its original domain - the Comedy Store. Now the legend was it, from a couple of people wanting to go dancing, was they stumbled into the club and stayed because there was this US guy doing stand up.

Many people went back and each time noticed his set was never repeated. Robin Williams did not have a parachute to protect him. He was just a wise-cracking flanneur who couldn't be contained.

Zudong - former online student. Picture by Valeria

Newer media is a set not so different from Robin Williams sojourns. Yes, for the sake of the following year's cohorts you might repeat things, but in reality, you end up with new material, and thus new enterprises for running your mouth.

This doesn't amount to a lack of structure, but more importantly an attempt to see past it. There are rules for everything in the media world, but in this mutating ecology, the only rules become there aren't any.

Wait there is one rule. Learn what they did, why they did and disregard it and strike out. In a couple of weeks a delegation from China come by our uni wanting to observe and understand how online and videojournalism get refluxed.

It's not the modules in themselves that are all important, but the strategy behind learning how to learn.  This involves a couple of things, I believe. Firstly don't teach perfectionism as the end-product, but the idea of understanding how being forced to make mistakes leads you to understand perfectionism and respect it.

Here's an example. We may speak about social networking, but in Journalism classes, its anything but, independence is still a strong charateristic of the new journalism. So how do you get people to social network amongst each other? You tell them?  Chances are though if they've not recognised the value of interdependency our instincts return us to type.

In other words we'll always seek to conform to our own traits and individualism, when frankly the wisdom of crowds done well is a powerful learning resource.

So one exercise we run is to give out assignments to finish against the clock, and then midway through this invent a crisis that forces people by default to work together ( the Hitchcockian crisis of dilemma) Then as we're nearing the assignment end we introduce another variable, which leads to the wisdom of crowds making decisions about their immediate outcomes.

In our case, we let them kill half their stories which had them decide who's would go forward and with ten minutes left on the clock asked the cohorts to kill all but one of their stories to present.

Inevitably I'm talking structural and delivery here, but there are more fine-grained examples I could give which look at the subject matter, which we'll leave for another time.

p.s I don't put former students comments up here about what we do, because well that's what we do and you need to keep you humility in check, but here's an extract from Zudong speaking about her experience from last year.

 I have to say it was quite challenging and during that time I constantly felt that I must come up with something good enough, worth your time and attention, which gave me great pressure, for i knew that you were really difficult to be impressed and set high standards at all times.

Methodologies in story form - viewmagazine.tv

A friend who's bought a 5D got into a protracted conversation with me over a story I'm making. I shot on super 8mm. Could he achieve the same look using After Effects?

Sure, I said, but I thought he missed asking a more appropriate question.  Why would he?

The allure for nice pictures can often cloud the purpose of the film. The problem though is two fold. Not knowing what you want the compositional elements of the film to say overall.

Videojournalism is a freudian chess game where you alone are trying to anticipate stages ahead, by playing against yourself and your alto ego - the lone audience.

Oh yes he knew to create a textual narrative, but understanding a whole set of parameters: his placing, framing, lens language, parrallel editing - that was a new conversation piece.

The moral to this edited logic is captured by Stanley Donen the great film maker behind the likes of Singing in the Rain (1952) speaking to one of the people I admire, Film maker and all-about-everything Mark Cousins.

"The camera's just a pen. It's how you use it". It's a well worn phrase, but Donen injects life and purpose into it. So 5Ds may be de rigeur but it's not unsurprising that an alternative look to the status quo should draw attention. Watch out how in ten years we're all be eulogising over deep focus.

Put another way the project and person dictates according to a set of variables, what equipment and style they should use and your methodology will differ, or not to mine.

The most rewarding task in lecturing is helping people find there; for there are no definitive answers. It's just that we're so creature of mimicry that it's so much easier to have the template there to copy and adapt.

Video Methodologies
Looking into methodologies opened up this window of interest.

• Last week a behind-the-scene shoot with the Master students putting together a news programme
• Tomorrow an awards ceremony I'm attending, from being nominated for an award

The GUBA Awards is Ghana's professional community recognising each other. As awards go, this lavish event will be a procession of the good and great: some footballers who wowed us in the World Cup, and pop stars with global fans.

Somewhere in there I have been snuck in for a nomination. I have no intention of entertaining the idea of an award. Yes everyone says that, but trust me on this one.

But the stories, think of the many stories - I do.  And not just at the Plaza Place hotel and the individuals, but back in Ghana, the biggest of which has to be the oil its discovered of its shores. How epic is that!

Meanwhile, my mental state back in the UK, I've all but completed the cut on our MAs at work, but a couple of things struck me so evidently in the process. Firstly, developing a variation on the human tripod that ensured a "steadycam" effect and secondly in editing.

That is how I could frame the outcome of the story into any number of forms or genres.  Herein lies the seeds of methodologies, how we convert something informational into something affective, complex into simple, or news into accelerated cinema.

As it happens I have spent the best part of that week writing up my methodological approach to videojournalism into my thesis.

So I have been living out of  my garage undergoing the equivalent of an archeological dig, rummaging through papers and articles from 1989 which have become sturdy references. Take this one from 2001 The Family - a videojournalism and multimedia artifact made in 2000 using game theory.

Strange as this may seem, but part of discourse is thinking in scale. Something delivered principally for online has a different "thisness' than something built up in scale for the big screen.

I have learnt that watching videojournalism films I have made being shown on the big screen in Berlin, various doc fests and at the Southbank Centre.

This is something rarely discussed as most of us don't have access to the silver screen unless we enter film competitions etc, but I believe this medium is becoming more and more commonplace and so I hope to share more about this at a forthcoming BFI-BBC-UCLAN event on videojournalism.

If you've come across the first one we produced seen here on the BBC Journalism College , the next one looks to go one stage further.

MAJI live broadcast

Some images from the Masters in Journalism students on the second live broadcast.

Sarah and Ahmed get to grips with Vox Pops. Er, 

Morning editorial meeting

Valentina and Ines discuss story with Preethi

Chinaaemerem and Wendy watching live broadcast on monitor

Sarah in between segments presenting the news

Group laugh at the end of broadcast - watching playback

Stefania querying news angle

Preethi and Ines

I'm cutting a behind-the-scene of their work, which I should post at some point

Videojournalism Egypt 2011- Videojournalism South Africa 1994 - a study

Egypt's generation now 2011, South Africa's generation 1994

Two different eras 2011 and 1994. 

What links them is the desire by each group to take control of their futures, defined by greater political participation in their country's rooted political process.

South Africa 1994 is a world away from Egypt 2011, but there are overlapping themes: racial equality, class equality and ways for all to better themselves rather than just the ruling elites.

What links these two stories also is me. I was there in 1994 in South Africa - contract BBC documentary maker and in 2011 in Egypt could claim to have some knowledge to produce the story: Tahrir Memento.

Phenomenology is about the self and experiencing and interpreting different ontologies (knowledge that has become our paradigm).

Cairo: Coaching journalists in from of Nile TV. 

The story of filming generation now, has great research implications, because it allows one to see growth, how individuals are making an impact on their societies, when they previously were, perhaps not so active.

For me it didn't start with 1994. BBC Reportage - the Networks ground breaking youth programme played its role.

However the difference with Successor Generation ( South Africa)  a videojournalism film for Channel 4  News and Tahrir Memento previewed at the Sheffield Documentary Festival is its a timeline for videojournalism and self expressionism.

At Sheffield I met briefly with the group 18 Days in Egypt who are using documentary film as a social tool to register and acknowledge the huge changes Egypt enveloped in the 18 days of its metamorphosis.

This is one of the hidden powers of video - or for that matter any visual tool that facilitates research methodologies.



Film shows the period and what people think. It also allows for its authors to reflect on the making of the film and their heuristic studies. The combination of these paint a vivid picture which allows generations beyond to understand moments and places.

In part that's what my PhD posits - a rich compositional narrative of different periods and how they can be contextualised. I'll post more on this soon.

More films can be found on viewmagazine.tv

Read: how television was a dominant medium for change in Egypt's revolution

Redux Enigma of Newer Video Making

My colleague does a lot of in-world stuff. It's the basis of his doctoral study. And me? Anything that mixes disciplines. So when he started talking about avatars, I could see how I could pull various elements of my archive and new footage together to produce this piece.

What's fascinating me is how the illusion of film can be taken various steps into other illusions e.g. meta verse to explain a reality. It's been a long standing device of one form or another for film makers e.g. flashbacks.

Sometimes the illusion of events says more about our perception of the world even when we're film watching: Citizen Kane, Jacobs Ladder and Inception to name a few. A pending artist in residence projects for the Southbank Centre focuses on this - a series of shorts about thoughts and anxiety,  rather than reality of anxiety itself.

Where are you going?

Road to somewhere

Last year and a bit, I'm on my way to Grahamstown, South Africa.

We stopped to take this picture to admire the landscape- a vastness and rich fauna quite resplendent. But it was the sign that caught my attention. Clear, sizable and unambiguous.

When we're driving we take this for granted, but the idea of signs is a human graphical invention designed to communicate quickly to drivers.

In life, or even studentdom (the life of students) where things can be fuzzy signing is almost paramount. But here I'm not talking literal signs, as important as they are, but structural mental ones that help in the learning process.

The task you're about to undertake requires a plan, but you can't implement the plan if you don't have an idea. And where does the idea come from - a concept, many concepts.

In the absence of such deductive or inductive thinking the task ahead seems amorphous, shapeless, with no beginning or an end.

Structure sits at the loci of the idea and planning ahead. Without a structure there is no meaning, rational way forward. If you're in the learning business this either sounds tautological or a bit strange. Yet these methods lead to the path of success.  There are very few geniuses in the world e.g.  Jobs, Turin, Einstein etc aside.  You get my point.

So processes becoming hugely important, and as boring as they are, we need to adhere to their forms to start with, at the point where we're fledgling, trying to find our feet, learning new ways.

Only after, unless that is you consider yourself an artist freed from the matrix of convention, can we begin to play with form, to undo the rules, to forgo convention.

Thus learning or the business of learning is not so much about which literature you're reading or what mathematical equation in trigonometry works, how Marxism is not about Karl Marx, or how to produce good television.

It's not about the subject in front of you per se, but how you understand the process of learning.

Here's a few tips:

1. Organise your work to sit in compartments and  approach work in a modular fashion i.e.  a piecemeal mode.  For instance in writing an essay, the concept-idea-planning-writing phase - all have different challenges and should be treated as such in their level of complication.

2. Following the idea, plan how you'll go about the task which will provide structure.  The structure then needs examining as part too as a "wisdom of crowd" approach.

3.  Talk about what you're doing. The process of talking, even to yourself,  provides a powerful link between the conscious and subconscious.  You'll find flaws you never thought existed.

4. When you've finished each task, give yourself room to reflect further. Reflection requires a time lag, between finishing the job and returning. I may complete this post in a couple of minutes, but I'll need to come back to it again at some point to iron out stray thoughts and the rest.

5. Look for sign posts from other people. How do the successful ones get by their work. Yesterday my Dean of Phd programme mentioned a Read-Write methodology, she had seen me undertake. It sounds strange, because I have always done that, but she was highlighting the idea that when you're told new things, given a lecture, reading up on it and then writing creates a strong link with the idea.

The ideas of others is built upon by your binge reading and then accentuated by your writing it.

6. Then see if you can engage with someone knowledgable of the subject you have just picked up.

7. And then construct your own structural approach how you would re-approach the task ahead. In effect this is systems and their analysis at a granular level.

8. Pass it on! :)

9. Yep I came back to this post to change a few things- reflection!

Cracking an enigma of newer video media

Enigma Machine - pic credit Wikipedia

It looks like an antiquated type writer.

It is anything but. For the Royal Navy it was the machine that would play a pivotal role in deciphering  Hitler's war machine in WWII.

In the 90s a reporting assignment brought me in close contact with the iconic device. Today the BBC and producer Julian Carey broadcast  a programme celebrating the wider achievements of Britain's code breakers.

Code Breakers: Bletchley Park's Heroes was a well put together doc - a history narrative with stylised visuals and contemporary footage. One of the programme's contributors commented that these extraordinary code breakers were misfits, dysfunctionals, academics who were the unlikeliest heroes and even now the full facts of what they did cannot be told.

However I took to the programme for other reasons. This morning I had to present to my colleagues at the SMARTlab University College Dublin about methodologies for deciphering a research conundrum.

I mapped it out, but all day the data analysis has been weighing on my mind. Just as well then, because half way through watching Code Breakers: Bletchley Park's Heroes, their own work sparked an idea which could be used in pattern recognition.

I'm no Bletchley boffin. Oh no, but if their techniques are transferable, then with my own distant Applied Chemistry background it's worth a decent shot. Weirder things could happen.

Data visualisation from IBM

Broadening this thought, one of the areas I believe will be a huge growth point for video makers and videojournalists will be interpreting data into story narratives, just as you might have come across in data visualisation.

This opens the prospect to construct rich meaningful films to reflect studies and research from companies and non-broadcasters in ways that allows any viewer access without, the feeling of reading a research document or watching a typical corporate videos
such as this one from IBM.


Tahrir Memento from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.


8 days, and more recently Tahrir Memento on viewmagazine.tv are examples of films which have ulterior motives. They are videojournalism films in themselves, but have secondary messages. In the coming weeks I'll post links to other stories on viewmagazine.tv on the page below which double as stories and research projects.

Viewmagazine.tvs menu I and II of selected stories

Know what you want, don't be afraid of rejection and be nice to people

Yixiang talking to MAJI students

"Know what you want, don't be afraid of rejection and be nice to people".

It's an aphorism that sounds like a humanist religion. For Yixiang its come to define how she's made her journey from determined MA student to a confident professional in the space of two years.

The former Westminster University student cuts a diminutive and slightly nervous figure delivering an impromptu testimonial of her life to this year's cohorts.

And the journalists-in-waiting kept her on point fielding a number of questions: what modules did you do? When did you learn financial journalism? Why did you do an NCJT course again?

If she could, she would have preferred to be seated listening to some other speaker than being the centre of attention herself - a touch of the imposter syndrome. Humility is one of her other endearing qualities remembered by the journalism lecturing team.

But such is her story, how a shy Chinese student fought to find work from one British media establishment to another: the BBC, The Financial Mail, Euro Money, that her story begs to be told. "I got a lot of rejections, a lot of rejections, but I believe if you really want to do it, you will", she says.

Yixiang's beginnings
Deborah Vogel, the course leader for the University's MA Journalism programme recalls the early signs of her now characteristic focus. On the first day of contact, says Deborah, Yixiang had prepared a shopping list of questions, she had clearly given much thought.

As one of her lecturers, Yixiang surfed under the radar for the best part of the first semester. In the second semester she opted to the online module. The running joke for online from Masters students is   "you will die and be reborn".  Apparently it's something I said in jest which took off.

However, because of the volume and nature of work the joke wears out very quickly. Students have to believe they can take the pressure of design, coding, writing, multimedia, whilst committing themselves to understanding technical and creative aspects of various softwares.

The close contact working with colleagues, sometimes enacting Soho Dotcom's Death March, means its not for the shrinking violet or those wanting an easy ride. You can't be shy working online in a team. So, Yixiang might have crossed my mind.

However two months in Yixiang wanted to meet for a problem. She had already consulted the "wisdom of crowds";  she was applying for a BBC online internship and wanted help writing the application, and only had a couple of days before the deadline. I asked her permission to use this email below.

from yixiang, many thanks

10 March 2008 13:34


Dear David,

I want to ask you that tomorrow could you kindly share some time with me discussing my application. I will have interview on Thursday.

I will bring my web critique and some other question answers, hope you could have a quick look, and comment on it.

Here is the link for the programme I applied:

www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2007/02/19/step_up_feature.shtml.

You might be very busy, but I really need some help, and your suggestions and comments will be useful for me. 

I thank you in advance

yixiang

I passed the ball back to her to write it up first, so by the time we met and bar the odd change and how you sell yourself online, Yixiang had prepared a meticulous document pulling everything she had learnt together.

Yixiang at the BBC

After three filtering processes and a day's long interview, she got the position. Look up the link and see how you might fare.  By now as I documented in this blog post back then, Yixiang was becoming a women possesed - something we've had good laughs about.

What followed within her internship was an extraordinary balancing act of working with the BBC whilst meeting the course requirements for the MA programme. In her final project Yixiang decided on creating a site to showcase the talents of concert pianists at the world famous Royal School of Music. Pianism.co.uk has since come down from the web.



Perhaps it's the less spoken about fact that she is an accomplished pianist herself or that she wanted to shine a light on those she admired. Either way after three months she emerged with a website which would earn her a distinction.

It wasn't without its difficulties. Some of the pianists in emails were plaintively rude, but Yixiang shrugged of any rejections and got on with the task.

Graduating
After graduating as any student will know came the hard slog for work. Yixiang got into selection panels for the likes of CNN and along the way accrued her fair share of rejections.

However she had made a decision, a plan she was keeping too. Going back to China was not an option, so she was intent on carving out a career in the UK.The thought led her to enrol on an NCTJ  print course where she buried her head in law, public affairs, shorthand, and local politics.

The University of Westminster's modules are based on the NCJT, as well as the BJTC - which it still looks to for accreditation, but Yixiang's quest was to specifically understand the Brit market with a desire at the time to work at a local level.

And then as she puts it she was finally brainwashed. Working in local newspapers and contributing to the university's much vaunted online newspaper,  HA1, a competitor to local newspapers,  gave her the sense of how community news worked.

Anyone who has worked in local news knows the benefits of getting your hands dirty. I recall my first radio piece for BBC Radio Leicester in 1987 when I mispronounced Groby as Grow-bee, when it should be Groo-be. I spent 6 hours trying to figure out overnight at the station how to change and record that one word, before it got broadcast. I survived and spent three years on and off working the local beat.

For Yixiang the sum total of her past was about to come to a head. Along her journey other jobs would open up: the Financial Mail and The Independent where she did a stint as an award. And as she puts it, anytime she visited Harrow she had a mission. "I'd be thinking of a local news story and how I could pitch it to the local newspaper editor, with a different angle", she says.

Pitching is an exercise at the University we place a premium on. If you can't pitch, you can't sell.

Today the story of Yixiang is about to take a more interesting and highly fruitful turn - Hong Kong.

It doesn't get any better than that. Yet the principles that underpin her rise are as unpretentious as she is.  There is no magic bullet to making it work. As one of my mentors put it, every rejection letter is one step closer to the job you're after.

Or as someone who inspires me, and hopefully inspires you too says...how does it go? "Know what you want, don't be afraid of rejection and be nice to people".

Never a truer statement.

Postscript: As I was finishing this article, an email from Yixiang's prospective employer marked "confidential" landed asking a range of private work-related questions. You can't imagine what I might have said, can you? :)

Yixiang takes the applause

Aftter Libya's Media Flow, What Next? 10 points to keep the flow going

Gaddafi's capture shot on a mobile camera

Libya ! Job done.

Not the death per se of its former leader Gaddafi which seals a profound chapter in itself, but that news would say we stayed the course. They got the money shots.

Just as the 1993 felling of a Sadam Hussein statue in Baghdad was caught, or some could argue, staged for television, followed much later by the gruesome phone hanging footage, television got its prize in Libya.

The similarities in iconography are quite startling and if that's anything to go by, Libya is about to join the forlorn hopeful looking to the world to further document their plight.

That doesn't bode well at all. Already a schism is opening in terms of accountability. Jon Snow on Channel 4 posed the question whether Gaddafi's death was an extrajudicial killing.

Foreign news editor Lindsey Hilsum in Libya weighed up public sentiment saying Libyan's aren't thinking that; they're just happy he is no more. Today, Libya's interim rulers the National Transitional Council were quick to dispel he was executed. He died in cross-fire, from his injuries before he reached a hospital.

The phone footage shown on television leaves many journalists and agencies with an unresolved story. Conflicting versions of the truth can't be helpful in a burgeoning democracy - where Press conferences often yield to the protocol: "we're looking into it".

But the pertinent question remains: how long till broadcasters abandon Libya for the next conflict?  This issue raised its head in a debate around war reporting at the Frontline Club, prompting videojournalist Inigo Gilmore to talk about the pornography of war pictures that drive broadcasters.

What happens he said when the Viagra, as it now will do, wears off?

News' Achilles

On the eve of South Africa's historic elections, Right wing factions detonate a bomb in downtown Johannesburg. It was two miles from where I lived. Within minutes I'm on the scene and follow up with a live report with the BBC World Service

This isn't a new topic. I witnessed it most starkly in South Africa in 1994. I was working as a freelancer and contractor for the BBC World Service and ABC News respectively. I'd been in the country for 18 months building up my experience on the ground.

The word in journalist banter and amongst publishing authors was that South Africa would implode. Afrikaaner right wing factions had promised a bloody end; uncompromising black factions declared "one settler, one bullet".  This was an impending war, but it never happened.

Just after Mandela was appointed president , the media upped sticks and headed north: Rwanda. South Africa, despite its huge problems was no longer paramount on the agenda. The same could be said about many news items which fall into the "grand narrative".

Television, many practitioners have claimed in the past, echoed by Frontline panelist Jon Williams, a BBC World News Editor, is a poor medium for telling complex stories. It's also a visual medium, so struggles at times in the absence of what Gilmore called "viagra" pictures to ameliorate the understanding of the viewer.

Its poor mediumness however may have held strong in the old order of media, but what about now?

The ROI (return of investment) of television news makers has set up an interesting dynamic in news production. The viewers are, its believed by editors, locked into a Vulcan mind meld. "We", editors will argue unapologetically, "give the view what they want", which amounts to a popular recipe of news. To evoke that old news maxim, its what punters will be talking about in the pub.

But that's complicated now by the fragmentation of the viewer exposed in our globalised suburbs and widely different taste and views. The popularism plaque also does nothing to eradicate a belief and the newsmakers' responsibility by default that, if it's not in the news it's not important anymore.

Step forward: Japan, Haiti, Burma, Congo and other stricken areas. And therein lies the fault line for news. Too many areas of interest and so little time to cover them. Each is lucky if it gets its fill once a month. "Ok your turn now!" 

In the old order pre-net, wars and calamity could be tenuously treated soon after intense coverage as diminishing areas of interest. Firstly there were fewer media outlets, and the arbiters of opinion were unequivocally the media  - who were deigned to know better.

Even where academics took umbrage, notwithstanding academic publications, they were reliant on the media to get their point across.

Secondly, what could the viewer humanely do post news? Nothing much in comparison to now. Today, we respond in various ways we can, aided by sophisticated aid agencies, social networks and blogs.

Information in an Internet age, doesn't just become about representation of events and its ephemerality, but the lasting effects, the indexicality of news, googled into our bookmarks, seared into our sub conscious enabling multiple forms of responses, beyond the old order of letter writing to the editor.

So traditional news, damned if it does and damned if it doesn't has inadvertently hollywoodised itself. The accountants started it off in the 70s.  If it's not a blockbuster, ( if its doesn't bleed....)  what's the point and any chance of presenting something cerebral misses the point. Here now, you're almost begging for different tiers, where you can make choices to continue building your knowledge.

I think as newsmakers, academics and viewers we could do better to overcome the pre-net sociology of news making, because the opportunities and infra structure are there.

In 2007 writing for journalism.co.uk Broadband's capacity offers scintillating innovation, it would be a shame to waste it,- my word - recylcing of old news and a constrained news bill.



There are answers:

1. Television news, and presentations on the web, could begin to feature media trails (on air signets) informing viewers where they can continue to find responsible coverage - even outside their own wall gardens.  This logistic of branded news by proxy i.e. ensuring efficacy when re-routing viewers can be worked out.

2. Using the Net to present tiered structures of news. Former BBC Editor Vin Ray said at the Frontline club a public service the BBC could have offered during the Bosnian conflict was to show viewers a five minute film of how and why the war started.

3. Re-investing in videojournalism. The saddest aspect for me as a videojournalist has been the misappropriation of the form's greatest strength. Videojournalism is not just an artifact of technological determinism. That is if you have a small camera and a laptop that's it, but also importantly a discipline to pragmatically delineate a fresh sociology of news.

Reflections on Egypt's Revolution - a short firm by David Dunkley Gyimah

For instance I use an aspect of videojournalism as a form of psychoanalyses, though hopefully its not detectable. Tahrir Momento is an example of where the subjects in the film will tell you, they told their stories yet I kept gently haranguing them for something else.

Instead of offering the narrative often given to the camera; the public face, they retreated into personal matters. Egypt's uprising became more than a nation's outpouring. It was happening to them at home. When Sarah says, she snuck away from home and her mum rang her mobile to express despair that she knew where her daughter was going,  it's micro rebellion manifesting itself on a wider scale.

When Sarah ends her story taking in a deep breath saying her parents now solicit her advice on family matters, it's a moment to savour. On Radio 4 when the The veteran Egyptian feminist  and novelist Dr Nawal El-Saadawi said let the young people run Egypt, the point is alluded to in Tahrir Memento.

Michael Rosenblum's own story of shooting in Gaza in the 80s is informative. Something that wasn't on the news agenda made it on, because he could shoot and was a former CBS staffer so knew what was required by the broadcaster.

4. Support the new wave of storytellers, who are looking to redefine news making,  providing fresh context and an aesthetic to reify your interest. There are so many, but I mention these now seasoned independents of foreign and war coverage as great examples: Brian Storm's MediaStorm,  Inigo Gilmore; Bill Gentile, Travis Fox.. 

5. Create technologies that enable viewers to drill into related news. The obvious is video hyper linking which I have spoken about on my PhD programme and was picked up by The Economist and Film Council. This helps the viewer to access material at their will

6. Create new schools of journalism in Libya et al; journalism which comprehends the past and correlates with the future and is set up to understand how to feed into traditional and newer media. For the last four years I have been working with young people in Egypt's state broadcaster, as well as a prominent newspaper in Beirut and the results have been astounding.
You can read more about this here.

Wider support for internet infrastructure and online schooling. See Rosenblum TV, BBC Journalism, MediaStorm

Training young videojournalists at Egypt's state broadcaster from 2007-2010

7. Create Outernets. This was one of my biggest challenges. On Apple's site here's how I envisage news breaking free from its appointment viewing into a town/village walk-by-access affair.

Outernet sites - created as part of my doctoral thesis in addressing news' prevalance

8. Greater access points for media and public to engage. We know about blogs, public forums and over-priced conferences, but what else? Here I devised a vlog butterfly which could now be produced dynamically. 

A Vlog butterfly in which a senior BBC News exec put himself forward to answer vlog questions from around the world. I produced, coded the project and curated the answers.

9. Stop using the Net as only a repository for Television news. Enormous work has been done here with newspapers and broadcasters, but I believe there's more to be done. On line Story telling devices should be made available

10. Greater interaction between academia and the media. Again some excellent work here, but its no surprise a new generation of journalists veer towards mimicing their predecessors. What should be encouraged is new ways of the two groups working together and looking at solutions. Here I'm harking back to project between the University of Westminster and the BBC in 2004 co-organised by Asha Oberoi, now a senior ITN executive and myself.

More of David Dunkley Gyimah's work on Viewmagazine.tv

New Horizon For Cinema Journalism

Berlin 2006, Video journalism Awards

Berlin, 2006 in a cinema house, I'm showing a clip to a group who have kindly stayed over from watching a film I made called 8 Days.

It featured the UK's first regional newspaper journalists being converted to videojournalists.  It was a story in a story. For in the first case, it was a film about how they performed and secondly a film building on cinema Journalism.

I'd been invited to Berlin as a finalist for its International Videojournalism Awards. The outcome, me taking the top prize for an independent can still generate high pitch wheezes.

At the ensuing lecture - an ecosystem I often get too excited with -  I would talk about cinema journalism and the photojournalism praxis. Way back in 2006 I didn't coin the word but it was a regular theme in lectures. In 2007 in this article written by journalist Zoe Smith she partly reflected on a number of films I showed to express a contemporary visual language on the up.

Image from Second Genertion, 1999

It still is, talking in 2002 for  Flash on the Beach,  and in 1999 using a digi-beta to film and direct Second Generation - South African's young urbanites voting in their second election.

In 1994 I made first time voters for the BBC - a documentary whose greatest honour was that the South African Broadcasting Corporation aired it a day before their historic election.  No other foreign made documentary was aired on their domestic stations on the eve to end apartheid.

In 2005 as a videojournalist labouring with the Sony A1, one of the facets of cinema which is shallow depth was achieveble only via pushing the zoom to maximum. That is squeezing the aperture, but thus also limiting the field of vision.  The added complications was a loss in steadiness whilst going hand held,which would lead to a technique I would develop  built on NYPD's russian footstep - a name coined in Soho.

That changed in 2009 with the 5D.  Now the 5D is synonymous with cinema, when oxymoronically cinema is much more complex than that. You might even phenomenologically see it as a state-of-mind. We could have a five hour chat abut that.

a fifth of tape collection

Film is not just my profession, which was crystallised around 1994 as one of the UK's first officially recognised videojournalists, but also a hobby. It's also become a new mission in an intense five year study in which a number of figures have generously given their time for me to explore a canvas I so look forward to sharing with you.

This all came to the fore today looking at the thousands of tapes Beta, DVcam, DV sitting in my garage which I'm about to digitise. It's a sort of living experience shedding light and context on factual film making and the concept of cinema journalism.

There is an interesting junction we're approaching which taps into Documentary scholar and Emmy Winner Brian Winston's notion debunking technological determinism.

By that I mean as we pay heed to less and less what the equipment can do, important though it may be, we're begin to relive the 70s-80s - a period when ideas meant more than anything else.

The film makers amongst you will recognise it was a period when Cinema was losing its currency, ideas were on the wane and it would take a new breed of thinkers to turn that around.

Condition ONE now on the Front line of Wars

Series of articles on the Future of Online content 

 

Released October 21st, Condition ONE, a game changer in visual story telling for the IPad

The student's question was a valid one. What does front line reporting do to enhance the story being told?

Inigo Gilmore, an award winning videojournalist, and one of four panelists at London's Journalism hub, #frontlineclub, discussing war reporting, got it.

Where reporting follows the frontline at the expense of backstory or context, it diminishes knowledge of reporting conflicts: context, human sufferings, the spirit of citizens trying to live within the chaos, that sort of thing.

My response was a little more allegorical. Following the question I tweeted the ff:

14 hours on had I been in possession of a press release that dropped in my email today I would have been reminded to expand on #frontlineclub the author of hellandbackagain.com - Danfung Dennis.

Six months ago I posted on Danfung's breakthrough application Condition ONE which was set to bring  a fresh hacceity of reality to war reporting et al. Today that app is imminent as a download.

What does it do to war reporting? Here's the experience- a transfixingly enhanced aesthetic.  War, as never seen before - as close to its brutality and ugliness as those on the ground see it.

New levels of information denied you in previous television, cinematic of web-based films - a combination of panoramic scope and seeing in HD  fields of vision we take for granted in our normal periphery vision.

So to the announcement. Ordinarily, like many journalists I'm reluctant to publish full press releases, but in this rare case. This is what it says below:


My Freedom Or Death - Condition ONE Beta from Danfung Dennis on Vimeo.

Mountain View, CA / New York, NY (October 20, 2011) - Condition ONE, LLC today announced that it will unveil Condition ONE, an immersive video application for tablets, on October 21, 2011 at the LAUNCH 'PAD Tablet conference in Mountain View, CA.

“Condition ONE offers a full spectrum enterprise solution for media companies needing to innovate and capture an audience in the rapidly emerging tablet market,” said Condition ONE Founder and CEO Danfung Dennis. “Condition ONE has created a new type of video technology to lead media companies into the tablet market. We merge technology and creativity and push the limits of visual content to create immersive experiences on tablet devices.”

Danfung Dennis conceived the Condition ONE technology while covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The traditional image was not enough to convey the realities on the ground.

The Condition ONE app gives users the ability to look in any direction, giving a visceral sense of ‘being there’. By pivoting and tilting the iPad^®, one literally manipulates the corresponding field of view. The highly sensitive motion controls produce the illusion of looking through a window into another reality. Condition ONE will offer highly engaging storytelling with a focus on visual content conducive to being experienced firsthand.

“We were thrilled to be selected to present at the LAUNCH ‘PAD Tablet Conference and while Condition ONE is creating a new medium through technology, powerful content is at the core of the Condition ONE application,” said Co-founder Karol Martesko-Fenster. “Condition ONE is focused on rapidly expanding the companies next generation product offerings: a proprietary tablet app, an immersive camera system, a streamlined workflow, advanced post-production technologies, and an immersive video player with a highly engaging interface.”

Media companies can license the technology and embed the immersive platform into their existing apps or create a branded channel within the Condition ONE app.

Condition ONE is currently compatible with the iPad 2 and becomes available for download from the App Store later this month. 

Early Notices for Condition ONE Beta Release
"provocative, mind blowing, awesome..." Filmmaker Magazine
"sure to change the way many see an event.." TUAW
"urgent and audacious.." Switched
"AR-style "window" into the battlefield.." Gizmodo
"a powerful experience..." Tribeca Film Institute
"a revolutionary phase shift.." View Magazine
"an unnervingly realistic 'magic window'..." Fast Company


About Condition ONE LLC
Condition ONE LLC is a technology company developing next generation immersive video applications enabling media companies to move into the tablet space. Condition ONE combines the power of the still image, the narrative of films and the emotional engagement of tactile experiences to create a new immersive language that shakes viewers out of their numbness to traditional media and provides them with a powerful emotional experience. Instead of opening a window to glimpse another world, Condition ONE brings the viewer into that world as an active participant. Condition ONE's co-founders are CEO Danfung Dennis, COO/CFO Peter Sung, Creative Director Takaaki Okada and Karol Martesko-Fenster. Contributors and advisory board members include, Ross Kauffman, Vaughn Smith, Patrick Chauvel, and Ryan Uzilevsky.
http://www.conditionone.com
On Facebook: facebook.com/ConditionONE1
On Twitter: twitter.com/Condition_ONE

About LAUNCH 'PAD
This one-day event at Microsoft's Conference Center in Silicon Valley brings together 25 of the most important companies and app-makers in the tablet space to demo their products, share lessons learned and discuss issues like product design, UX, business models and marketing. Over 200 developers/product managers receive free tickets, with just 50 tickets available to the public and select press. LAUNCH 'PAD is the first in a series of one-day events leading up to the signature LAUNCH Conference on March 7 & 8 in San Francisco, where 40 companies will launch or launch new products on stage.
http://www.launch.is/launch-pad-tablet-conference

About LAUNCH
LAUNCH Media covers and celebrates new products, services and technology in two ways: a blog/email newsletter and in-person conferences. LAUNCH was founded by Jason Calacanis, a serial entrepreneur, former journalist and angel investor.
http://www.launch.is

This is a story that has only just begun. I tested the product at the Sheffield Doc Fest where I shared a platform with Danfung, so I hope to bring you more on this. Not least that it will have implications in several fields of media.

Former BBC and Channel 4 News  journalist David Dunkley Gyimah is the recipient of a number of awards in innovative journalism. He's worked in the journalism since 1987 and is presently a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, PhD Candidate at SMARTlab on Future News, University College Dublin and Artist in Residence at London's cultural hub, The Southbank Centre.

The New University of Digital Empathy II

David interviewing VC Geoffrey Copland, University of Westminster. 

Knowledge is a gift.

It's difficult to think that way when the transactions today are real and challenging. Nine thousand pounds per head in the UK next year will put a strain on this.

But knowledge, while all around us, takes shape through a complex, yet looked-on-as-simplified exchange between educators and those being educated.

The gift is in the invisible act that those being educated may feel while they're being challenged, acquiring something beyond what they may have thought - though that may not seem the case at first.

I put together this video in which the VC shared his insight of the future of education.

It also requires from educators a fresh digital empathy. Take this example. I have come across some educators whose feedback mechanism on students work is to write: "this is nonsense", "rubbish" and Caps with "I HAVE TOLD YOU THIS BEFORE".

I have been horrified. A common sense approach and also mandatory amongst educators is to refrain from emotive language in the first place.  It may, just about may, be dismissed on the odd occasion through frustration, but to occur consistently?

That level of frustration requires a round in a boxing gym with a punch bag.

But where's the digital empathy in this?  It lies in the acronym before digital (BD) and after digital (AD)  The action lies in genuine attempt to understand how someone wanting to do journalism today may carry little of the notions that reinforced beliefs a decade ago.

Investigative journalism of a kind that meant pouring over newspaper cuttings and sustained methodological approaches seem byzantine in today's digital, so in fairness the student is not at fault.

That the use of "rubbish" etc should be banished, the frustration that might generate this, must be tempered with what educators now know.

If there ever was a time when the Jarari window plays a deeper role in education (remember Rumsfeld's known unknown) it's now, within this schism between the digital student and the analogue-digital educator.

Of course the role of educator including experience, social skills and a whole range of others layers the educator's role as simply a seller of knowledge.

Again this might have been the 60s analogy, but the role of educating today assumes a vast curatorial one. Educators engaging in dialogue over work they're not familiar with or its not in the module, but believe it has value.

We do this all the time now with links to other people's work.

Digital Empathy is testing all of us in ways we couldn't imagine because the rate of turnover of new artefact's exceeds normalised behaviour; people now walk on the streets head burrowed into their blackberry's texting, and seem to have no concept they may bump into someone.

Artistic practice would have me design corridors on the pavement for text hungry commuters, in the way we have signs saying "No Smoking" or "No phones".

In my next post, I'll explain digital empathy from a student point of view and how sharing, and journalism's fixated prerogative can lead to unusual situations.