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.

Hell and Back Again- Sheffield Documentary Festival and why we'll be speaking about Danfung for a long time

Danfung Dennis in conversation with Beadie Finzi @SheffieldDocFest

Why do you wanna be a soldier?
Because I wanna kill people.

This and other mind-gnawing exchanges emerge from  Hell and Back Again (2011)   one of many memorable days at the 2011 Sheffield Documentary Festival. Thus far the film has punched through the independent cinema festival circuit garnering accolades and awe, as well as awards.

The World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Award and World Cinema Cinematography could just be middle-layer, because you suspect the topping could be the Big- O, though Hollywood's predilection to narrative -issue NIMBYISM, doesn't bode well.

Twenty-five year old Sergeant Harris says in the film the army's recruiting team said that was the best answer they'd ever had.

(Fade to black - Sheffield Documentary Festival Day four closes )


Hell and Back Again clip  Danfung Dennis on Vimeo.



Off limits
There is a conversation that resists being shared when going into conflict. Individually, it weighs on your mind, but you don't speak about it. In any case, skill, experience, maturity and providence are meant do their job.

Reporting from Ghana on US Forces training ECOWAS forces for Liberia campaign 97 and South Africa reportage from Townships in 1992

I believe I know this because I grew up in a country which was shaken by military coups: Ghana, in the 1970s and 80s and that much later I would re-locate to South Africa, reporting at the time of its taut transition from Apartheid to democracy.



David reporting from the troubled townships of South Africa. A freelance report broadcast on the BBC World Service circa 1992.

Yet, comparisons to Danfung's Hell and Back Again, though relative, are diametrically starkly different.

At the Sheffield doc fest, in conversation with Beadie Finzi of C4s BritDoc Foundation Danfung is peeling back layers of the "how" and "what" for Hell and Back Again and the result gives rise to liminal thoughts about "this conversation".

The audience learns how Danfung, a photojournalist already embedded with the US army is looking to be dropped with Echo Company going the farthest into Taliban territory.

The soldiers were destined to be there "for a long time", and the intel and hollowing emerging from later  arms exchanges suggested they had little idea of the Taliban's strength. Electricity and water would either be absent or hard to come by. Danfung with all this knowledge is set on going.  Beadie's pensive look and sharp intake of breath could be an acknowledgement to "this conversation".

Just before boarding the Chinook Danfung's tells us his camera button jams. His inner voice poses the question, what is the point of me going, if I can't shoot anything. Weaker minds would have capitulated.

However the malfunctioning button is resolved by the same ingenuity and tenacity that's become Danfung's trademark in either his camera set-up, the rig, or Condition One - the new immersive viewing screen he's pioneering. This time it was his finger nail digging out the dirt to set him back in course.

Inside the Kill Zone
There is a scene in one of my most absorbing war movies: We Were Soldiers (2002), starring Mel Gibson as Lt. Col Hal Moore in which a young photojournalist Joe Galloway boards a chopper to the LZ zone - the kill zone.

The soldiers have been been stirred by their Colonel. All of you will be coming back, but not all of you alive. Joe Galloway played by Barry Pepper witnesses a deeply horrific mind-numbing assault on the unit by the People's Army of Vietnam.

The morning after, pool photographers and TV camera crew are flown into a sanitised kill zone. As a gaggle, they search for motifs to relay this bloody battle and then come across Galloway.

That conversation now!  Galloway has become the story doing something the rest of his colleagues could either not do or would prefer not to. Forty six years on, Danfung has become Galloway.

When the audience applauds, I find myself doing so not just because of his film which is shot with the hand of Malick, the eye of Lelouch and coruscating brutality of Lu Chuan (City of Death 2011), but that he also had the kwai to tread into the unknown - the kill zone.

That is the conversation. Invariably it's one FOCs (Foreign Correspondents) talk about when the beers are flowing, when they might also light-heartily joke about near-misses. It's all about trust, says Danfung in relation to the unit he was with, which was reciprocated by Sergeant Nathan Harris et al - who would become his main character.

Self belief and trust can be endemically unwavering. In 2002 when I was assigned to be Lennox Lewis' videojournalist, I entered camp with a a hint of doubt. What if Tyson actually won. I was chastened not to think that away. Two weeks in camp I was a convert. There was no way I now thought Lennox was every going to lose his heavy-weight crown to this bruiser.

The Art of War
At the Southbank Centre, where I am an Artist in Residence, last year about this time I'm spell bound by a clip online called Battle For Hearts and Mind*, later changed to Hell and Back Again. I email the photojournalist and he promptly replies.


For two and a bit hours given the bent of my research  my questions to Danfung have a specific line of enquiry. His answers are illuminating and in my guise as artist, journalist and academic, I'm continually digging and documenting precious responses.

Then Charlotte Cook, one of the most erudite, social media practitioners I know, who is part of that august outfit, the Front Line Club emails to request whether I wouldn't mind being part of Sheffield Doc Fests debate on Cinema Journalism.

She's looking to Danfung as one of the panelist. She's hardly finished the sentence and needs no convincing before I nonetheless weigh in: "You gotta get Danfung, You gota get Danfung".


The Cinematic discussion
Restrepo (2010), by the the brilliant Tim Hetherington, whose life was cut dramatically short showed war as the new breed of photojournalists would realise it. The Bang Bang Club (Carter et al) painted South Africa behind the news headlines in 1990s. Yannis Kontos I have had the privilege of working, a World Press Photographer Award Winner and some 18 other international prizes, continually delivers on the immanence of the image.


PIXELS WITHOUT BORDERS from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.
Yannis Kontos Promo I produced for his 2006 World Photojournalism Award. For more go here

Yet, Danfung, many affirm, has done something quite different, so different.

 Hell and Back Again and the small team that shaped it: Roast Beef Production Producers Mike Lerner and Martin Herring; the editor Fiona Otway whose Felliniesque intercut and parrallel editing weaves silk through the film. In addition, Sabotage films, Thought Engine and the Britdoc foundation are contributing to Gombrich's schema plus correction model for narrative-art film making.

The cinematography is lush, the characterisation indelible, its narrative reflexively beautiful, the finished product - a must see.

Academics, and I am one of them in film will reflect on the frenzy. We're not being priggish. In wars gone by (WWII) many photojournalists and cinematographers assigned to the US Army's photographic unit shot with small Bell and Howells.

In contemporary history, Vaughn Smith of the Front Line Club covered wars with his Hi-8 in the 1980s; Inigo Gilmore a one-man-band whose work I deeply respect, also a panelist has too covered conflicts; Veteran film maker Bill Gentile, now of Washington State who is pioneering Backpack journalism has the eye of Odin.

So what's changed? The reconstitution of cinematography and full-feature narrative (parrallel storytelling) designed for the cinematic space.

A profession whose technical and creative efficacy would traditionally have tapped many skills and which points to an uncompromising epistemology of non-fiction movie-making is problematic to emulate.

For Hollywood et al to approve of Hell and Back Again, as it did giving a nod to Restrepo is to acknowledge finally the world is no longer flat; civilisations of DSLR technology exists beyond the horizon and they're coming. Oh Yes they're £$££@@% coning. And they debunk the Fordisation structure for professional film making.  Woops!

Danfung, in his calm and collected way refers to it as Immersive film-making. Immersive for the viewer in its aestheticism, yet the embodiment of its filmmaker in hostile territory to get the story is overwhelmingly impressive. That conversation!

+++ END

* thanks to Saeed Taji Farouky for pointing out

Coming Soon: What camera to use where and visual hallucinations on film


Tahrir Memento from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

David Dunkley Gyimah was a contrributing panelists to Cinema Journalism at the Sheffield DocFest. He's been a journalist since 1987 freelancing for BBC, ABC News, and C4 and has covered conflicts. As a dedicated one man band videojournalist since 1994, he now teaches videojournalism and cinejournalism to clients such as the FT, PA, in  the UK and around the world. His film Tahrir Momento - about Cairos revolution was previewed at Sheffield. He is an Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre and is completing his PhD in film and news. He publishes viewmagazine.tv.

P.S to comprehend more on cinematography study Turner 

Danfung Dennis' Media Revolution for Film makers and Videojournalists

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


Award winning Photojournalist Patrick Chauvel in Libya road test's Award winning filmmaker/photojo Danfung's Condition ONE app out mid 2011

He's done it!

The IPad, a portable screen on the cusp of being a haptic device and a 3D viewing technology which yields  a panoramic remmersion vision - touch the screen and you roll the field of view around.

The result is something that fuses game culture in news' paradigm. Danfung Dennis, a photojournalist and now celebrated documentary making with his apocalyptic "Hell and Back Again", has turned the axis of film making quite literally through a revolutionary phase shift.

John T Caldwell, an eminent media scholar coined the phrase "second shift aesthetic" to define an interconnected relationship between offline and online media. If he would allow me to, this constitutes a "phase-shift aesthetic"; 3rd, 4th...

Similarly my thoughts go to "Yellow Bird" a filming revolution, which provides 360 vision.

Revolution in film making
In the early last century French film maker Abel Gance, did something revolutionary in the use of camera mobility. He wanted to make "actors out of the audience", so he found a revolutionary way then to use a boxed camera that you needed to crank to work.

It was the Debrie Parvo, an unwieldy beast that in scenes of his seminal film Napolean, explained by Film Historian Kevin Brownlow, inflects a "being there"perception.

Depending on which generation you are we've come to marvel at immersion/remmersion and the POV. It's what binds the Gaming Industry. It is the revisioning of that gold- at-the-end-of-the-rainbow "reality".

We see it in Avante Garde films, Westerns, Hollywood flicks like, The Lady in the Lake(1947) and more recently in video  Dan Chung's Mongolian Racer (2010). One of my favourites is Point of View a short film by Doug Smith

Being there is part of the quality that the great French philosopher Roland Barthes explained so comprehensively in his Rhetoric of the Image.

Newer Media (Video Journalism) Break throughs
A hundred years on, the scope of media technological advances are to numerous to note, but breakthroughs in miniaturisation, Canon's filmic mode, 3D viewing and the zeitgeist of the tablet in the Ipad are key to what Danfung has now achieved.

Pulling it all together, one prefigures though was no easy task. Often it's a big itch that comes from working in a field long enough to see its flaws and weaknesses.  Just ask Garret Brown, a cinematographer who invented the Brown-Cam, that would be renamed the Steadicam.


The article A New Way to Photograph War on Time Magazine we can be assured will be one of a plethora of pieces. There we learn that celebrated Photojournalist Patrick Chauvel in Libya is road testing Danfung's Condition One, claiming:

"It's not easy to use, you have to watch not to get your shoes in the frame of your shadow or your face... But the result is worth it".

The film maker himself quote here from  Film maker magazine sums up everything:

"This disconnect between the realities on the ground and the perception at home shaped the course of the film ( To Hell and Back). By using advanced technology, I hoped to create a powerful experience that would shake people from their indifference to war"

Last year I had the pleasure of interviewing Dangfung in a detailed conversation for research I'm conducting as part of a study and for the SouthBank Centre and for a revisit to Apple Store presentation below ( Youtube Link here)

 He mooted the idea, but what's emerged is truly deserving. Having reworked war-doc making, he's now fashioned an app which will have ramifications far beyond Wars film making.

This June I'll be appearing at the Sheffield Doc festival in a panel as follows, where I'll be contributing to a discussion on cinema journalism. I'll also be previewing my latest IMVJ project Tahrir Memento

Moderator: Charlotte Cook

Participants: Tom Happold, Danfung Dennis, David Dunkley Gyimah, Inigo Gilmore

I

End++

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

RTS Award Prelude- juror for best of the best in journalism

RTS Judging package arrives with DVD

Nestled between CS5 and code hints and introductions to polysemic documentary making,  I can see on my diary, RTS awards.

[Read here for response to Mike looking for further explaination  of RTS Award Prelude]

This will be the third year running I have been invited to sit with a panel of experts to adjudicate which UK TV or newspaper takes the Innovation award for Journalism.

Two years ago, it was for me unequivocal: 10 Days to War by BBC Newsnight - an impressive dramatisation of the lead up to the Iraq war involving what looked in the end- a hand in glove fit between documentary mode and drama (fiction).

The programme didn't have it its own way. A rigorous vote ensured from a shortlist, which itself proceeded arguments for and against contenders.

Sitting down to Judge the awards. In shot Toby Castle ( ITN), Nigel Baker (Chair) APTN,  Iain Dale, Deborah Gorbutt (APTN), Martin Turner (BBC)

What got me thinking was how the concept flagged up the notions of embedded videojournalism. That wasn't the casting vote, for by itself 10 Days was an imaginative piece that tackled a subject which wrestles the collective conscious.

It was a sort of Green Zone - Dir. Paul Greengrass, but more newspaper journalism than novel-cinema.

Its relevance can't be over emphasised enough. What really happened and why the world (a US-axis with Europe et al) went to war is still as contentious then as it is now. The programme should be made available for all secondary schools to study.

I pondered though, what if programme makers got videojournalists into these pivotal events?  In  cases, some of the scenes were predictable according to the press. Almost any follower of the build up would have known from the media that Colonel Tim Collins would be delivering a rousing speech.



"You tread lightly there. You'll have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people  than the Iraqis. You'll be embarrassed by the hospitality they offer you even though they have nothing. Do not treat them as refugees in their own country".

The above from the loquacious Shakespearean actor, more recently the director of Thor, Kenneth Branagh, underscores the paradoxes of war.

Two years later, I caught up with the figure behind the series. Peter Barron, an old acquaintance from my Newsnight days in 1991, who also hired me to work on Channel 4 News from 1997-2001 and is now a senior executive at Google. Peter reflected on the programme.

"It was bold", I said, "What of fact-fiction storytelling?"

It came with huge risks and must be treated with due care, he cautioned.

Last year that latent thought materialised in the shape of photojournalist and self-taught cineist  Danfung Dennis  Battle of Hearts and Mind. ( Please note there's swearing and some scenes could be considered not appropriate for youngsters)




Here was a film that had the affectiveness of cinema wrapped around factivity. Zeitegiest! I interviewed Danfung - an incredibly humble and self-effacing person at the Southbank Centre - as part of a programme for my artist in residency.

Danfung had thrown film form's vividness into a dramaturgical cauldron wrestling verisimilitude . 

By that I mean the notion now of what's real in cine-mode, resurecting debates around neo-realism, and dramatic constructs of  Honore' de Balzac or more recently epic realism of Brecht.

[Added notes next day to clarify: the cinema mode is not just the screen look e.g. Shallow depth of field, but founded on several principles refined since cinema began. Video as a format has struggled with this, read David Bordwell]

Show the two videos side by side to the screen generation in secondary schools and they'll be hard pressed to consider Danfung's piece as verity outrightly. Is that cinema? it looks real one youngster told me during an exchange with a group talking about modern day filming. 

On the night of the awards, I couldn't make it to black tie do, for I was many miles away in Miami at Wemedia, where thanks to the huge support of Dale and Andrew, its founders I was being treated untold generous hospitality - shortlisted in their game changer award.

A year later and a submission would raise the bar, courting a wee bit of controversy from us jurors. but that's for another story.

.. continues next week
End

David Dunkley Gyimah is midway into PhD study on hyermedia film and is a juror member for RTS 2011 Innovation in News Journalism Awards. He lectures at the University of Westminster and publishes Viewmaagazine.tv where he showcases processes and techniques of the digitalisation of film form e.g. Interviewing with former CIA chief.