Renewing your approach to communications - critical writing and video

David gets ready to talk at his session on IM Videojournalism at SXSW 09

One of the achilles of traditional journalism was it avoided exegesis, which is a critical understanding of issues.  No, that was left to the artsy literature folk.

Perhaps it was right to do this; journalism and audiences have broadly been served well. The evidence has been in viewing figures and the existing use of the word "Mass media".

In the 1950s as TV News was being created, the experts baulked at anything being beyond 2 minutes. Goodness that's a whole 120 seconds.

That approach combined with the sign of the times contributed to the adoption of television's most powerful media and language theories - Myths.

Myths in lay person's language means fables e.g. superman flying, Nike running faster than lightening, and so on. But the myth in media form is about the illusion of reality TV reposits, as we come to acknowledge.

We love a good Myth. Men are better drivers than women, people less well off are less intelligent, and the hero always wears a white hat, are just some of them.

And television in its short hand syntax to tell you a story plays on myths, otherwise it wouldn't only bring you stories of people suffering in drought regions, when there might be many other stories in the region.

The Net and you were meant to veer away from those perennial myths, and to some extent we have. Twitter allows for many more stories to be traded, though the super myths still reign. In any case, just as a technology like Twitter emerges, the phenomenon of re-mediation kicks in.

Here, those traditional media relearn the new skill, adopt it and et voila use it for their old myths again. You can't win?  But oh, but you can, not all old media is able to, or wants to match the new. There might be institutional reasons, or cultural reasons

This is not about who's right, but that simply if say you're playing basketball, you're not allowed says the institution of Basketball to kick the ball, otherwise you're playing football.

On the net, coupled with what I would call the flattening of cultural norms. Some people playing basketball want to kick the ball. What Chinese teenagers want today on closer observation you could posit is no different from California youngsters seek. Yes there might be differences, but those desires have levelled far more than perceived in the 1960s.

Yesterday, in a lecture, we broke down the story form of myth into component , and how playing on old myths we could conjure up relational new ones. That's where we're inching towards, but need to do more. Because for all the technology and learning about new apps, it means nothing if it does not bring about susbstantive change.

And by change, not just the speed of transmission of information, but of enriching and supportive ones.

After all the biggest myth is that we've entered the world of social network, but until social issues of the kind that assist each other and humanity are prevalent, rather than those that pit "them and us", we've made little progress.

Fiftyyears on we still, when we have the chance, don't want to be critical.

OUTWITTING THE NEW EXPERTS - GETTING MEDIA IDEAS DONE

Admit it, you're no more interested in what happened 5 years ago, than you are 60 odd years ago, when vast swathes of the media was taking shape.

But there's an interesting phenomenon, which I keep encountering which I'd like to share with you and why those yester years really matter. I have illustrated it with this oversimplified diagram.

1) It goes something like this. At some point in the 20th century or before, or lesser so now, an individual (an exemplar, genius) or a group, often unconnected, discovered something. Let's say in this case television.

2) A number of key figures then came up with their findings that suited them for personal reasons that they would share with others. Television news producers terrified viewers would turn away from their reports if they were longer than 2 minutes kept them short and snappy. They also devised a number of highly relevant schemes for the time, such as how to make a report. The TV equipment was heavy and cumbersome so it shaped their thoughts to keep the camera steady.

3) These key decisions determining television became sturdy and contemporary. If it's not broken why fix it.

4) Then you and I came along. What we observed as contemporary features suited us fine. They had to be true and meaningful, otherwise everyone else would not be using them. It's like your grand mother and father telling you a story. It's true, but it doesn't mean we too need to go and find bicarbonate of soda to clean are teeth.

6) We then decided, based on what we'd observed that this is how things should be and where they're going.

5)  Except that we'd missed out point 5) which arises because at the point that the exemplars (clever people) made their decisions, which were often correct, and before they became contemporary, a number of things changed. What's more, the people who often adopted forms from exemplars had different ideologies from the exemplars.

Why it's all different now
Society changed, the ideology of those who often pushed what the exemplars knew were different, culturally, we've grown, technologically the camera's no longer heavy, and philosophically a range of the original theories or even guidelines have been questioned.

Someone asked the question: what's the appropriate length of a video online. To answer the question, you either conduct your own research, which can be time consuming or expensive ( not really!) or you take heed of what some other clever person is saying. But what you can't say is, just because it was like that before, should be the reason why it is now.

What we know, is only as good as the period it was often devised, and some. Some of the exemplar features ground everything there is today e.g. the motor car, but to understand the true nature of the forces of change and how to get by the new experts, we need to go and talk to the exemplar.

There's a lovely point in the film The Facebook, and whilst I know its fictional, it may just have worked this way when Mark Zuckerberg figures out what people want to see. They want to know about each other, his character proclaims. Zuckerberg the exemplar of his time based his thinking on what people before him, such as Hobbes had discovered in the 17th century about social networking.

Now a brief point, the exemplar is not fixed in a time zone. They exist now as they have over the years, but what separates the exemplar is they started from scratch, with no readily available, prior concept, or already made creation that they mimiced to launch their idea.

And that is the Fork in the road syndrome.

The next time a media expert tells you something ask them how they know :)

David Dunkley Gyimah's Newswire Media in Motion presentation

I'm David Dunkley Gyimah and have worked for TV News, doctcoms, videojournalism outfits over the last 25 years. It was good to see some friends in the room: the FT (their story here), that I did some work with, and Joel from the Guardian newspaper, whose colleague Cameron I know.

One of the 20th centuries most eminent philosopher Gilles Deleuze marvelled at the work of another philosopher Henri Bergson for discovering something that was yet to be popularised.

Deleuze said of Bergson that: "the discovery of the movement-image, beyond the conditions of natural perception, was the extraordinary invention of the first chapter of Matter and Memory" (Deleuze, 1986, p.2)

Now, I'd like us to park that thought, as we'll come back to it.

So if you'll forgive me, I'd like to make an assumption - a big one at that.   That my being at this event, is I will assume, based on the notion I have something to offer, be it a tip or an idea.

That  essentially my experience may have some currency in assisting you. Perhaps that's why you've paid to be here, and why I have taken up being an academic.

If that's so then my experience holds something, and in talking about my experience I also aim to reach a conclusion - which unveils my tip or mega rule as I want to call it. 

This idea of hearing one's experience is partly the basis of phenomenology, but much richer under another philosopher, Heidegger.

So this is BBC Reportage (watch and read about its past here). I'm not sure you're aware of the programme, but in 1992 you could describe it as the Youtube of the BBC. It was a revolutionary programme, made by young people, that would change the style of BBC current affairs. These are not my words but execs who worked on the show such as Rachel Purnell.

Some of the figures behind Reportage are international and household names  e.g. Bruce Goodison who made Shoot to Kill for Channel 4 News and the indefatigable Hardeep Singh Koli, whom I worked with.

If Reportage taught how to discard the rules at a time when conventions were being challenged. Note, this was the time of  the YBA - the art movement; The Face magazine, Brit Fashion and the New Romantics.

Newsnight which I'd worked on before the programme removed the idea for me that news is immutable; that it can exist in what ever form you want: a discussion, a feature, a short news piece and on rare ocassions 20 min short stories, and so on.

In 1992 I could not find work in he UK, so relocated to a country which had the world's eyes trained on it. In South Africa I did many things radio, TV for ABC News, magazines, but it was the prospect of wiring up four young South Africans about to vote in their first ever election at 20 plus for BBC Radio 4 which got me going.

First time Voters  (FTV) used radio in a way that  got intimate with the four stars and they were stars. The feature played on Radio 4, the world service and on the eve of the South Africa's historic election after being bought and played by their network. My interviewees in South Africa today are huge e.g. Eric Miyeni and Niemann Fellow Gale Smith. In 1999 working for Channel 4 News I remade FTV to Successor Generation.

In the UK in 1994, a strange irony, the Internet has gone public, and Associated newspapers launched a strange concept called videojournalism.  Here I'm presenting an item for the web in 1995.

The motto for me was if you can think it you can do it. Most videojournalist shot two to three stories a day, totting up 500 plus in a year.  You can spot some celebs from here that now appear on BBC Breakfast TV.

After Channel One and short stint at WTN I became a regular freelance at Channel 4 News for four years, while prodding here and there, for what was possible. A report for the World Service involved an unusual deep sea dive to war graves from World War One.

To get my listeners to understand what it was like 40 metres below the sea I took an extended chord and tied a condom onto the microphone. Also I nearly met the big fellow up there, when I fell on some live arms and ended up running out of air.

The following years had their moments; videojournalism in Africa (Click the image for video behind it) , creative director for an ad agency, and working in one of the dotcoms that's still around today.

Then 2005 hits the year of You tube. Videojournalism has come full circle. The Press Association and me put together a programme to help train the UK's regional journalists. That very first programme we do is 8 day, because in 8 Days they had to learn Videojournalism because they were going live soon afterwards.

PA's programme over the years fulfil a curious thought, however much you think you've moved away from something you're still standing still. It's 1994 again.

From work, academics in China, showing how our university trains, to consulting for a newspaper in Beirut ( film here), to a four year study working with young journalists inside state TV in Egypt - an extraordinary programme that showed how much could be achieved if you're willing to go down the rabbit hole.

Mohammed - one VJ shoots like Hathor - and mad forty VJ reports in a month.

So from 1992 with this short insert from reportage - to this promo from Cairo, there's a theme that runs through these - we're back at phenomenology - the study of my experience, and when I do reflect something keeps cropping up.

Not that you have to chase and experiment in finding some of this field's elusive answers.

Not that sometime you have to travel to regions where the story is - as so many people have done.

But that the thread in this is.... Cinema!

Firstly I realise how laughable this might seem or indeed absurd, even dangerous.

Because at this point you're prone to thinking I have a tendency to fictionalise accounts; I'm not to be trusted. In the years I have practiced this craft of factual storytelling, integrity and truthfulness have met everything, so fiction is not a feature in my book.

However, if this was 1930, you would have no problem with the term "cinema". We'd be talking about Grierson or at least Hitchcock would. Then, experts differentiated from what they called commercial cinema, motion pictures and cinema documentaries and factual films.

Same could be said of the years to follow. But the notion of cinema I evoke is not exclusively physical  though I also claim a cinematic concept of story telling. Principally my notion is more a mental attribute. The thing that affects you. Information that is affective.

That's what Deleuze talking about Bergson was all about. Bergson talked about cinema and affectivity even before the machines that made cinema had been made.

When I approach a subject, I'm having an internal dialogue saying how best can I portray this so the audience, the viewer feels this like I am.

Now, if you still believe cinema is exclusively Hollywood - listen to one of the best film makers alive making a close point.



But now we have a conundrum. If you, as I do think cinema, the next question is who's cinema? What cinema? That's the interesting really, truly interesting question - and while I have an answer, this again is not the forum.

However, the reason why general tips about trends can be counterproductive is for that reason. Cinema, physical, goes in and out of season, it's mental state is what draws you to any number of artifacts.

Today it's shallow depth of field, a generation before and beyond it will be deep focus.

If you can agree, and if not there is a plethora of info that talks about cinema as factual film, ( so I'm not saying anything new) then we must also appreciate cinema is diverse.

I gave Rachel, the News Editor of Journalism.co.uk, and organisers of today's event, some water. She prefered non-fizzy, but it's still water, I said.

That's the problem with cinema. It's so vast, but it has inherent qualities. The films shown by Josh ( FT),  John from the Guardian mimic cinema's qualities e.g overhead shot of St Paul's former Canon; the head to head - which is Errol Morris, or the Lady in the Lake, which is a POV film.

But the question is what cinema are we talking about, even though cinema's internal engine is about affectivity. This is too big a conversation to go into here, but it's one I have ponder for a long while.

What do you make of this image below?

Here's the photojournalism film I made for Yannis as he won the world press award. It takes the cinema of affectivity into cinema physical. This by the way is still a favourite,

Can you figure out how this was taken?

In China, commercial cinema, the concept of hyper reality, has taken a step into interactive cinema. the seats and auditorium moves and as this young child is doing you interact with the screen.

We blithely, and I confess I harboured such thoughts too that TV was on its last feet.

Not a chance. I mooted as much at SXSW and for the last couple of years sitting as one of the judges on the RTS awards, what's coming through illustrates innovation and cinematic qualities - at least in my head.

These then are old established qualities

So to my Mega rule 1.

And those exemplars include Fellini, Godard, Marker, but yes there are contemporary ones who openly talk about how they've been influenced by that past.

Mediastorm - is an outfit that needs no introduction. They've won unteempth awards

Which leads me to Mega Rule II

And here I learned a lesson in1996, which would materialise in 2006 which perhaps was the knod from the Batten awards. I wanted to after all those years put into practice this understanding of media, So I coded, designed, made the videos and built this site.

So two strong ideas that guide me, a holistic look at the whole workflow and cinema. If we stop trying follow trends, and seek exemplars we'll be more diverse. Most of the companies you might quote as exemplars rarely followed others.

Remember that lovely moment in Facebook the film  - I know its fictional - but MZ connects Facebook to work, based on behaviours, what people want to do - connect. An idea as established as Hobbs Commonwealth.

So whilst I'm guided by trends I believe in a quality that Bergson promotes: that information has affective qualities. If we can do this in the construct the audience will watch. If not we run the risk of treating all info as equal - the problem with the package.


You can learn more about my methodology and training here me, whilst my Apple profile and all sorts of  gubbings exists here.

My parting links that excite me. 

http://mediaville.info/londonair/ FMR MASTERS STUDENT WITH HER AGENCY

http://www.make-your-choice.co.uk/site.html

http://archivo.elfaro.net/secciones/migracion/nacimiento_muro/index.html

http://stinkdigital.com/  AGENCY

http://vimeo.com/8191217 LAST MINUTE WITH ODEN ~ Eliot Rausch

The Rise of the Non-story - How to Teach it

Snow out London - 18 years worst ever from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.
Above an example of a non story, made at that moment in time as events unfolded.

In my last post I spoke about how knowledge has a shelf life.

Here I want to broach something even more heresy; the idea that the story form we've been accustomed to may have run its course.

This is not an unequivocal admission of a decomposition of the story form.

But an explication that in our hyperised society, of click- throughs, and gaming levels, that the story is never complete - the sequel consisting of fragments. Hyperised incidentally is my neologism meaning the rise of hypermediation.

This is not the first of such an enquiry; the surrealists made the non-story an art form, the French an industry and the Lumieres' their first film.

And we've become privy to the You tube blip - an expression of an event which peaks in seconds and is gone: a stunt, an event, a Lumiere moment.

We've become so attuned to the film as arc of conflict and resolution e.g. Hollywood flicks and TV that we entertain less anything construed as just reality.

Inside archive

Consider news - a mediated form of reality repackaged to produce that Aristotelian template we've come to worship since 330 BC. News borrowed the form from docs, which took it from film, which lifted it from theatre and herein drama- the Poetics.

But there was a time, as I research within national news vaults ( see picture above) when our knowledge of story form was well, skewed.

In the still image above, the video is of a runner starting mid flow and then at a well rehearsed point stops to provide an interview. The story itself is nothing worth shouting about. This is story form as we knew only 50 years ago.

We teach story because that's what the industry demands: film and TV. We see no need to teach the non-story for we see it as precisely that.

A story with no form; when it starts it has no definable middle and no end. It's the gibberish before you learn to speak, the stuff everyone does leaving no room for the professional, so has no value.

The Lumiere's La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (1895) is such a piece of reality, except because the Lumiere's pioneered film form this fabula is a museum piece.

Non story
In 1999 my colleague and I conceived of a story, the Family which made the finals of Channel 4's media competition. It too had no middle, no end. It went on until you stopped. Yet it had built in arcs.

the family

Today sitting in hospital, a thought?  Is that not sometimes how we construct new knowledge?

The amazing stories of those that recover from illness. Their stories defy being packaged because each day is another day of inspiration - its episodic.

More recently the head of BBC Newsrooms Mary Hockaday, who is responsible for editorial policy and manages across the BBC, spoke to me. Reality, the unmediated, is finding renewed interest within this powerful media organisation.

The conversation could end here, but I'll push its elasticity. In the making of 24 the series with Cinematographer Rodney Charters would hire the best camera operators to freestyle; those shaky shots.

The irony of it all. The best of the industry were being paid to undo all the pro shooting they had learnt to producing something raw and unpolished. Could not a rookie shooters have done the same?

The question is analogical for professionals shooting the non story or stand ups telling non-jokes. Can a pro story maker produce something which is engaging but not a complete story.

If so what are its variants? How do stand ups with dead pan deliveries engage us with the most banal of narratives?

To break the rules, first we must understand what they are and the purpose they serve. More soon.

For this piece is no more complete than the story form I'm seeking to explain.

Rise of the Machine. Let the Machines make the News - how humans keep failing

Terminator 3 Rise of the Machine - Columbia Tri Star 2003

At the point that everyone understands the narrative, how to get their point across re; Newsnight, how to even manipulate the events and plots as observed through programmes such as Big Brother, there cease to be, what could be described as "truthful events", just self-mediated narratives, David Dunkley Gyimah asks is it time to hand over the media to the Machines.

By lending John Smith $250,000, Drew, an analyst, knew Smith at some point would default. 

Drew in turn through a labyrinthine  transaction would bet against a particular bank writing off that debt, and also posting a downturn in their balance sheet. $250,000 was small enough to go unnoticed but big enough for him with 8 such clients to make his small fortune.

That was the story?  This is my fictional account of an event that would become cataclysmic and spiral into truism, so stay with me.

Writing in Business Week Peter Coy investigates how subprime lenders hid an impending crash from vigilant overseers. It goes back to 2004 he adds, with this from Michael Youngblood an Asset Manager who's talking about how subprime went unnoticed for so long:

'The change was little-noticed, because the lenders actively denied it. "To my disappointment as a long-time analyst," says Youngblood, the major lenders insisted that they had not lowered their credit standards long after they had begun to do so".

Just over a week ago a London city trader Alessio Rastani caused widespread shock in the industry when he told the BBC this story that:

"Traders 'don't really care that much' about the prospect of an economic collapse... He said: 'Personally I've been dreaming of this moment for three years. I have a confession, which is I go to bed every night, I dream of another recession'".

Lots of narratives, stories, but at no time in the intervening years  of subprime and even before then have we heard such a story, which we deem to be truthful.

We all tell stories, some believed to be more important than others. The feature story sates our craving for the "enjoyable" story. Its value may be distant, so it impacts in a different way. The documentary for the untold, now to-be-told and the news story plays to a more immediate impact. Its value has a greater currency.

But there's a problem - one in which social scientists have girdled their portfolios with standards and practice to combat: yellow journalism, ethical dilemmas, the hypodermic needle theory and the rest, so the question is:

1. How inadequate is the media at large, at this time, in capturing and retelling truthful stories?
2. Should we hand over the retelling of stories to seek truth to the machines?

The first point must be explained a bit further. This doesn't mean not professional or poor at telling the truth, but it is increasingly finding it difficult to find a mechanism to extract, relay truth for the narrative, within its existing methodology.

And as such the story telling and narrative have become a currency debased. Just tell any story, the story that we expect, our narative - who cares?  Publish.


Psychologist Julian Jaynes using one of the earliest artefacts in storytelling Iliad posited the idea that
humans circa 500BC were different mentally to today's lot. They lacked consciousness, so obeyed without questioning their gods.

Consciousness, and the period of enlightenment altered this. Deity and religion were challenged.

Two questions arise now. Has our consciousness in this day and age evolved sufficiently from the aforementioned period to make the right decisions. Yes! Secondly, have we consciously become enslaved to new gods within the media? We hold that what we hear in the news is unquestioningly true.

And if the media doesn't say it, we can be certain it's either not important or its not happened, or did and has been resolved. So the famines in East Africa, there are none any more.

There are two issues here; getting to a story, and its truth, and how that story is relayed truthfully.

Poisoned Media Tree
The story at the top shows how fruit from the poisoned tree perpetuates, with each media organ largely retelling or not a flawed narrative, so the not telling of the truth in subprime, the media not telling that story,  becomes a tsunami later with unimaginable consequences.

You could apply this to everything that emerges from the media. After all the media is human and thus responds to existentialist qualities of being human e.g fear, emotions, consciousness.

It attempts to address qualities of truth and getting to the story by the use of a plethora of  standards refined over the years.  But that still hasn't prevented it from getting it woefully wrong.

And if you thought subprime an exception,  consider The Guardian's Paul Lewis on how he believes the reporting of the recent London Riots was woefully inadequate, despite its back to back coverage.  He might be a lone voice, but I believe we should pay attention.

The end question I consider then is do we need machines to make our news? Could the machines do a better job?

Of course this begs the question of what I mean by machines? Something non-sentinel that is not prone to emotions and can get to the truth and eschew congnitive dissonance.

To an extent we already do that in cameras recording, television's relaying pictures and the rest. Before the camera we had no way of retrieving for analysis what someone said. We took our notes as gospel at the time, but even with the camera as Roland Barthes notes the image does not project a truth.

Through the lens of a camera the story is still mediated by human agents. But as I write this and blogged months ago, manufactures are looking to address this.

The rise of the machine here is a  camera with secondary sensors. One that records data e.g. pupil dilation, skin temperature, voice register etc. that when added to the narrative can bring more valuable information to the veracity of the subject's narrative - though again that data is likely to be interpreted by humans.

The telling and interpreting of stories is seemingly the stuff of Sci-fi. In Kubrick's 2001 HAL the space ship's computer shows a fallability, if not seemingly displaying emotion to getting to the truth.

In a film shown by former Edingburgh Film Festival Director Mark Cousins, a South East Asian reporter investigating a highly secretive story buried from WWII is seen on camera beating the truth out of his interviewee. When the secret is revealed he backs off; Canabilism amongst the troops.  In A Few Good Men (1992), the point is dramatised: You can't handle the truth!

I'm not suggesting violence to extract the story, the truth - for torture and the ethical question of getting the the truth of the story by justifying the means is contestable, and clearly wrong according to the former head of Britian' Intelligence Service Eliza Manningham-Buller 

Let the Machines make news may seem far fetched, until you consider Robert Harris' research for his new book Fear Index about how Super Computers are preying on our human fear to make money. He writes in the Mail:

"In the 20 minutes I was watching, the machine made a profit of $1.5 million. This hedge fund has made a return for its investors of more than 80 per cent in the past three years, at a time when most of us have seen the value of our pensions and tracker-funds go down in a falling market".

Harris' point is the machines are the one's running the economy, with humans merely in attendant similar to fly-by-wire piloting. And if the narrative resides in the few who entrust machines to make money, surely to meet their match it's as a good reason also to have machines decipher and tell the news.

It's like the equivalent of Kasparov playing Deep Blue - even then when it was a crusty computer.

How we use Machines might be the lesser connudrum than the economic and technological debate of its consequences. But it's worth consideration, unless that is....

David Dunkley Gyimah is a PhD Candidate at SMARTlab, University College Dublin. A former BBC and Channel 4 News freelance producer and winner of a number of international journalism awards and would be interested in expanding on this at talks, seminars and conferences.

Movies of the mind

The idea of storing data in your mind like a mobile hard drive may not be far fetched.

In a fast approaching world where all data is being shared courtesy of the Facebook Internet by-law of 2018 - 'Share or we'll kick you offline", the only place to hide data may not even be a hole in your cranium.

Credit: Image courtesy of Freie Universitaet Berlin

If scientists can drive cars now purely through thought and electrode cables, then how far till we a) attempt to manifest these thoughts in a corporeal form e.g. movies, and then for someone to hack them anyway.

That's another discussion.

Movies of the mind already exist. Fictional Cinema. The illusion of the zoetrope - of flickering images that convince us of movement is a conscious aberration which we've shrugged off and accepted.

But creating films from the mind, well - that could involve a different sort of data excursion. Liquid films, altered realities.

This whole schema kicked at me this morning thinking about projects for the forthcoming festival of death at the Southbank.

Jude Kelly OBE, the Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre called us ( artists in residence) for a meeting about what we might have planned. I have got several, but one involves a taxonomy - which has emotional as well as business/ commercial values.

Language lives. We find new ways to express ourselves linguistically, though when was the last time you did this visually. Cinema linguist Christian Metz would have had something to say about this.

VideoJourney Beginning

 

Journey Beginning is an example of work which expresses transitions. In many way it represents the aestheticization of data again. By that I mean, we have become pre-occupied with making everything look appealing, as opposed to beautiful ( Kant), though I accept beautifying data is also on the rise.

Hans Rosling in this video on TED is beautfiying data

In the midst of writing this post, I went over to my tweet account and saw this:

zimbalist Michael Zimbalist

by evanvucci

Scientists use brain imaging to reconstruct the movies in our minds. You've got to watch the video to believe it. Wow. newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/bra…

Amazing ! We're nearing the area of videojournalism transcendentalism or reverse psychoanalysis. 

where were you?

Another world's sun

Out there

Last remnants of the old world

The road of no return

Viewmagazine.tv research, strategy & practise - new ideas for the future

The mood is changing. Slowly, surely in redefining critical theory from an unfurling future of journalism,  we're reconciling attributes that previously were divided: research and practice.

Part of the cause has been educational cutbacks, the other has been policy changes. The result, to push for academic research, which brings kudos to an institution and individual, with practical current knowledge of the status quo  - a tall order sometimes.

By research I'm referring to a reflective practice of interrogating existing knowledge or finding new ideas. And broadly, broadly, speaking practice in industry can be that which is traditional i.e. it always happens this way, or artistic.

Artistic practice rarely gets a look in within journalism which is rule-bound. It should, and will increasingly become so. That's the essence of multimedia at work.

The rub between theorists and practitioners is a perennial one. Theorists might talk about changing semiotics, practitioners film/shoot what feels right. Critical theory and strategy emerges from studies, yet the parameters of what and how we study sets up its own truth value.

Old journalism needs new creatives. Well yes, it always has, but what's different this time? And what are the certainties that still need to be retained?

Meanwhile, the thought becomes: How do I do this, better, yes, OK, but financially competitive than before, Or otherwise how do I do this at X cost and reap a dividend of Y profit.

We want to create the polymaths; I welcome that, but as an exercise its futile if there is no incentive from within oneself and what's perceived as industry expectation.

Shifting Media Aesthetics
When I use a third-shift aesthetic in my work. The term second shift emerges from Prof. Caldwell's book on New Media in 2003, I'm referring to collapsing different disciplines and rewiring a new practical-theory. However I can, I believe only understand what that process will yield if I have sufficient knowledge of both disciplines - as practice.  I must also be aware of what's going in industry.

Multimedia Sound from Viewmagazine.tv

Good multimedia I contend comes from an implicit deep understanding of sound/ audio and the image within the context also of creativity. That's why we bookmark sites like Devigal's Interactive Naratives, Multimedia Shooter and Honky Tonk Film's , to name a few. 

Creating websites from scratch which Viewmagazine.tv, my site, stands as one example that may have little currency for someone entering mainstream, I know that! But it otherwise may foster an entrepreneurial spirit. This is the currency of research and practice in action.

The schism between research and practice manifest itself all the while in Hollywood.

Experts talk about catering for the audiences, while another set claim the audience does not know what it want's until it's given it. No one was crying out for a film called Avatar, or Blade Runner. These were visions of the practitioner, but we all flocked to the cinema.

At some point research and practice combined:  audience research kicked in, defining publicly in this case an alternative ending to what Ridley Scott wanted. He would later release the Director's cut.

The point here is that storytelling is phenomenological, it emerges from within you. The subject informs you, and whether by rote or artistic practice you set about building your creation. You the creative decides.

Converging Research and Practice
So here's a question. Has the Internet changed journalism? There's a philosophical pursuit that despite the turmoil of the last few years can still be justifiable written up as "undecided". Arguments and sophistry, as opposed to dialectics, set out to mark victor and vanquished.

"You want the truth, you can't handle the truth" was uttered from A Few Good Men(1992). In practice, the truth combining practice and theory is an evaluation that reveals elasticated flaws and truths on both sides. It depends who you've read, who you cite, and how they tally with your own beliefs, and the logic of your own argument.

For a good while now we've been caught in an eddy of an industry looking for answers, sated by one mega conference after another extolling what's next. It's big business now, though less frenetic than it was three years ago.

Bridging what exists in journalism industry real world, with theory/practice in academia can often be the tail wagging the tail of another dog. The industry looks to new ideas from outside itself, but often may disregard them, until as such time its perceived as a critical mass effect.

Editorial systems often mean one person holds the key to any change. And sometimes for  legitimate reasons change cannot be implemented.  Real world issues such purchasing new macs are prohibitively expensive when for the last twenty years you've been windows-based. The practice-theorist ought to know that.

Yet often theorists and practitioners clash. Real world, and exercise world are parallel universes, touching each other but not, well, overlapping. That's what could change. If the future sees more of the convergence of practitioners with research knowledge who knows?

We might start producing some interesting truths.

David Dunkley Gyimah has worked in the industry since 1987, and lectured Masters, as well as MBAs and industry professionals since 1997. He is currently completing his practice-based PhD with SMARTlab, University College Dublin. Viewmagazine.tv is where he discusses industry practice and theory.

Creative fight Club - working after the Storm (Brian Storm)

Tyler Durden: I want you to hit me as hard as you can.
Narrator: Why?
Tyler Durden: How much can you know about yourself unless you have been in a fight.

 WHOOOOOA! WAIT.

Fight Club is a phenomenal film on so many levels: the script, the directing (Finch); and the philosophy embedded in the above statement.

Now for the many of us who don't want a fisticuffs and bruised body's there's something else to savour.

I rephrase: How much do you know about yourself unless you have been in a creative fight?

As much as I can, I take the chance. I cheat a bit because as a lecturer I get some students who creatively push me. Educationists and trainers know about this. But then there's the other side, the hardcores.  These are the pros at the top of their game who in Bergsonian speech:

"...imagines relations of magnitude, which adjust themselves to one another. mathematical functions which go evolving and developing their own content: representations, laden with the spoils of matter".

Bergson's talking about philosophers getting to grips with consciousness and images in Matter and Memory published in 1912 (I have become interested in memory as storytelling). Yesterday I was in Brian's creative fight club. Brian Storm of MediaStorm.

"After Fight Club Brian we all started seeing things differently" - (Fight Club script).

Creative Nudge
You know what it's like, someone, sometimes, does that. And then YOU raise your game. They're human catalysts: the preacher, the pastor, the professor, the evangelist.

Sit down and listen. Really listen. Humility matters. Because sometimes it's not only what they say, but the chain reaction of a series of unintended consequences that they trigger.

Brian Storm with Ex BBC Foreign Affairs editor Vin Ray and a couple of us in the Frontline Club after Brian's session

In the bar later we had a chance to catch up. I saw Brian present in Miami Wemedia  two years ago. I was "squint eyes" impressed then, as I was yesterday, but this time I got a more in depth measurement of his philosophy over the day as he set about deconstructing what MediaStorm does and its knowledge value.

I have worked for BBC Radio over many years before going into TV, so I reckon I have a firm understanding of many of the principles of sound and few people do sound/ audio better than the BBC. But Brian has found an illustrative way of informing learners that is elegant, powerful and compact.


This is one of my first BBC Reports in 1988, having just graduated It's Nelson Mandela's Tribute Concert at Wembley with Peter Gabriel, Natalie Cole, Anita Baker, Neil Kinnock MP etc.

Uber Adam Westbrook and Producer/Director
Jane (Fandango Media)

On his format for storytelling he's tapped into the rich seam of Sassure's and Walter Benjamin's semiotic to unveil the meaning of the image. It's a masterclass in visual language without the accompanying epistemological terms of signified and signifier or Benjamin's Punctum.

His publication continues to grow as he builds on a strategy of firstly an absorptive form of storytelling, yet also addressing subjects, that mainstream media would deem difficult and thus leave. I speak from experience here having sat in untold number of network TV editorials. Therein lies Brian's humanitarian spirit, displayed further when he talks of his company as purpose-focused, rather than profit-focused.


And then from his past, which raised a chuckle for me, how he has drawn from a penchant to experiment and build, whether it was at MSNBC or Corbis. The irony, where he tried to do so much, but ultimately hit a ceiling became the defacto inspiration that forced Brian him to make his own way, and what his company is today.

Chuckled, sorry, yes, because I too remember the dark days and nights of quasi death marches creating CD roms on Director 1; burning through hundreds of CDs because they would not self auto start, because a line of lingo code gone astray.

Playing to the Audience
Then there's Brian's hidden pièce de résistance - his player. Built from the ground upwards, it's frankly something you might have expected from a bespoke tech-player company e.g. Brightcove et al. But it isn't because Brightcove's profit perspective I suspect rather than the customer focus played to a different strategy. One that had many users smarting when Brightcove announced they would cease to share their player with the creative community -sans fee.

The elegance and backendness of MediaStorm's player  hides a potency that is persuasive. It's designed to meet the solutions a producer encounters. You want one :)  It's a matryoshka gift when Brian breaks open the back of his company's two year old upgraded website - now skinned via drupal. Nice!

The Business end of making money amounts to a book: How to make cool media and sell - MediaStorm, I suspect will be in a bookshop, their own online bookshop - sometime. All of this all snuggly bound together; textual with arresting imagery.


Part of the art of creative fighting is to talk about your philosophy by engaging with others, without any hubris of talking about yourself. What emerges then is a series of narratives of life stories and how to overcome one hurdle after another.

And each hurdle represents a problem that is universal; so it has relevance to you. The brand and the knowledge go hand in hand; they become one in the same. Just as if you wanted to understand ET, you'd interview Spielberg, so here to understand a range of media variables in the intensely-unfurling-evolving-media, you speak to Brian.

My motto has always been, "if it hasn't been done, it's waiting to be done",  and the journey to get something accomplished is a narrow and lonely one -at least for a while. And that lastly don't hide it, don't leave it under a bushel, but that in the process you will find naysayers telling you it can't be done.

That's almost the theme for doing a PhD in the academic world. Brian reminded me and many others of the creative fights needed to up our games in in the public world. There's work to be done after the Storm.

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ABOUT DAVID

Apple Profiled David Dunkley Gyimah is a Knight Batten winner in Innovations in Journalism and an International Award winning videojournalist, among other accolades. He publishes the award winning  viewmagazine.tv and is a senior university lecturer, artist in residence at London's prestigious Southbank Centre and is completing his PhD in innovative news at the SMARTlab University College Dublin. His part includes working for the BBC, Channel 4 News, ABC News ( South Africa) and devising news programmes and training programmes around the world over a 25 year career.
 


If you into creative media working with the BBC we're organising another creative fight club" on videojournalism. I can't wait.

p.p.s  A big thank you to Charlotte and the FrontLine Club for hospitality - as usual. And for the free membership for yesterday only of the Front Line Club. Hurray!

The Unreality of Reality

Release (Director's Cut) from Kendy on Vimeo.


Webby's Gala Opening Sequence 2008 from Rob Chiu on Vimeo.


Two entirely different visualists: Rob Chiu and Kendy. Rob Chiu I have had the pleasure of knowing since the early 2000s. Kendy's work I stumbled across watching Channel 4's Urban theme: Concrete Jungle.

What unites them is a visual DNA, and also scores not too dissimilar to the undiscerning ear: Hecq and OBNY.

To their fans the two are way different, but all highlight a growing tendency in our visual culture: the unreality of reality.

In Sontag's epochal book On Photography, and if you're a theoretician in photography and you haven't read it, it's the equivalent of a playwright ignoring Beckett, Sontag pokes at the unreality of reality.

A photograph or image draws us to a realism in which more credence is attached than sometimes the real thing. In the past citing Gombrich she notes the image and its real thing were indistinguishable.

Today, our heightened sense of visual pleasure, brilliant colours, flares, noir has made cinema our reality.

Strangely, we'd rather watch the two videos above and marvel, than being given the rawness of the real thing. More so for a generation born into cinescopes' reality: games; films, music videos.


The Retwitter Show titles - journalism 2046 from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.


My work researching a doctorate draws some ideas, such as the reinterpreting, or reversioning of an event to heighten its affect; not for the sake of a 3 minutes of wanton pleasure, though that does happen, but an approach to burrow into your psyche - to disturb you or make you feel happy.

When those grey-suited men conceived of news and the recording of events in scientific mode - a stipulation that freed it from abuse - they did so as the nannying statesman protecting us from the deviance's of others e.g. yellow journalism, fakery etc.

Unless however the event ( news) is more gratuitous than the former its grapples fail to hold us, so in feature news e.g. docs, visualisation and sound scaping are designed to lock us in. By the way visualists have been doing this from time re:art movement to art movement. Note how the impressionists usurped the realist in the 1900s.

The unreality of reality sees TV being emasculated by 3dtv, composited form driving out what was its referent, by illusions overcoming physical states.

The unreality of reality was at the heart of the schism between classical film theory and post structuralism. In years to come it will become ever more crucial a factor that delimits our view of events.

And as the visual language grows, we can just about be certain, that a next generation's use of fluttercuts, flashframes, crushed blacks and the rest will itself become obsolete.

What then?

Meanwhile I'm enjoying this unreality/reality

Apple- profiled digital filmmaker David Dunkley Gyimah  and  internaional award winning innovator in media presents to industry on media and innovations. You can find more of his own work on viewmagazine.tv and contact him here

A Philosophy of Videojournalism

If somethings not done yet it’s waiting to be done.

If the idea you have isn’t recognised, because it’s not been done before, you might be onto something.

If you seek professional mischief making over popularity, you represent something.

If the task at hand represents an embodied experience, in which you wrestle with subjectivity and objectivity, aesthetics (kantian) versus aesthetic (corporeal), you represent something.

If your representation, is questioned and you’re prepared to listen, you represent something.

If you move with your camera as a haptic device and your words envelop poeticism, you’re saying something.

But often the question is who’s listening?

Something’s happening. We seek doors to enter in believing adventure is on the other side. And you are helping to shape that key for others.

Your audience is committed, ambivalent or not interested. You cannot bask in the glory of finalities. Because there are none.

Each task begets another and another. The only thing fulfilling is to be unfulfilled. But that’s what you love — the chase!

If your glass is never empty, but you know how, and choose whether you want it filled, you’re onto something.

If the road less travelled, is the road you’ve taken, then often you’ll find the solo traveller awaiting you. Here you’ll share ideas that pass by the mass consensual dogma.

To you there are no masses. There is no mass media. The media delimits the message. Your message is unbridled. Meta. But your path is your own.

If you believe it so much, and the air is dark, and the naysayers make their point. Listen, but excuse yourself, because you’re onto something.

Shhh (quietly) I believe you represent something. BIG!

Developing a heurestic for videojournalism
David Dunkley Gyimah
PhD SMARTlab, University College Dublin
Artist in Residence at London's SouthBank Centre
Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster
Royal Television Society Juror, 2011-12 Innovation in Media
www.viewmagazine.tv
10th - April - 2011