Creating cine-sites using the integrated videojournalism approach

Creating cinema-sites along the lines of the Apple Trailer page uses the integrated videojournalism approach.

It's been a busy couple of weeks and won't relent, so I have been absent from these pages, but I did want to share with you a project I have been doing for the last couple of days, in-between book chapters and the rest.

Site starts with a short promo featuring Shlomo, one of the world's most acclaimed beatboxerspercussionist. who was working with Colin Currie - an acclaimed

In Jan early this year, as part of my residency at the Southbank Centre I participated in a programme called Collisions. Well, I'm now looking to create the legacy of that event, and some event it was.

The strategy falls along the lines of what I call an "impact site" or Outernet. It's when you take a single subject and engineer its reportage through video and online.

South African Poet Lebogang Mashile performs for the audience.

Thanks to the wonderful pics of Dominic Brewser, the job was a joy. Here's the ongoing results. I have treated the photos to enhance their aesthetic and am adding appropriate video where I feel firstly I have and secondly where it will be appropriate.

Thanks to Adam Westbrook whom I invited to join as a videojournalist. Some more of his directional work, which I'm editing will be up soon.

Food and cooking was an integral part of the programme. We all took turns in the kitchen aided by the Company of Cooks and SE1 United. I cooked on the first day, Jollof Rice, spicy plantain with an avocado mix and spicy chicken. I have never cooked for 50 people. Was I nervous? Not until my sister range me up to say she couldn't come to help. The video of my Jamie Oliver moment, er no, will be posted soon.

This methodology is one I also lecture in as final project modules for Masters students. In the end it's all ones and zeros. Flash, which I have been working with for more than a decade, provides the platform.

The bombastically talented Dave Clark

I'll be deconstructing this and others e.g. how to produce rostrum camera production slides in a forth coming book, in which I have been promised one of the most sought after film directors as an interview. Fingers crossed. To peruse the Collision site go to http://www.viewmagazine.tv/collision/collisions2010.html

Penny Woolcock the director of 1 Day - a grime hip-hop feature length film which she street cast and had the rappers breaking into song as with a musical was one of several artists, who I had the pleasure of meeting.

Multiple award winning poet, writer and recently MBE Lemn Sissay on the final showcase of Collisions

What's videojournalism gota do with the arts

"You mean journalism as art", one of my journalism board members emailed me.

I replied, "Well then you'd have to define journalism, then art!"

It sounds an incongruous pairing. Gene Hackman's character Brill in Enemy of the State says it:

"You're either very brave or very stupid".

Well its worth chuckling at the thought, but it's neither. Journalism and Art have cohabited for as long as...

Dandyism, Flaneurism, Addison and Steele, one of the Britain's first recognised journalists, circa 18th century, combined the adeptness of writing with being literati consuming the arts.

Indeed Tatler, the magazine was something of an arts magazine, not art, but the arts.

Film Director and professor of cinema studies Peter Greenaway who's appetite for innovative film making is only surpassed by his eye for the artistic in his many installations and Julian Issac who's seminal film about Black UK in the 80s, Young Soul Rebel, demonstrate crossing boundaries.

Many BBC execs often leave the corporation to fulfill other roles such as running the arts.

I am neither of the above. I only mention them because I know and it adds, if anything, an interesting ellipse to any conversation on videojournalism and art practice.

But videojournalism dyed in news, awash with all its semiotics, is hardly a contender for the arts?

Well here's where I beg to differ in a big way.


Video is art
For the practice of shooting with a video camera was long, long exercised by artists, and yes it was news.

Indeed the inception of the moving camera under the Lumiere's may have taxed the minds of the brothers to how a) they would commercialise and b) whether it was art, but it didn't take long for the likes of Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) to spot the art which could emerge from the moving camera.

What art often achieves news fails both in substance and longevity and when news of a kind is able to break into the psyche, we often attach the references reserved for art.

It is not the arts' place to explain, is the patter, but to evoke, cause reaction, make us consider, be reflexive and question the context of what we've seen and its impact on us.

An Inconvenient Truth is art personified within the walls of an environmental essay empowering us with richer knowledge to choose. What more could you ask for?


Art, Videojournalism and Beirut
My trip to Beirut to train some videojournalists also yielded a short ( 20 mins, ooops) film I put together on-the-fly. I blogged while I was in Beirut about how I am reminded of my first trip to South Africa.

Oh the ignorance. In my first visit to South Africa on the second day I was in Soweto being scared witless coming up against a Caspir (armoured truck).

But I was amazed at every turn. Soweto was right on the heel of Johannesburg. It had a BMW plant. There was a middle class base. In Yeoville a a new youth, graduates, more sure of the prize were forging ahead. It went on. The news I'd watched. The programme I used to present on the BBC did not equip me for all of this.

In Beirut, similar internal gasps. The city needs no introduction. Its wars are well known. 2006 and then further back. Those remnants still exist. Monuments left as reminders to those who are no more.

But the city's vibrancy is electric. The youth run are visible, strangely unlike the UK !@$$@. I did not have the time to venture far - something I hope to do next time - but my snap shot impression was some matrix.

There's a heady mix of the "beautiful people" who know how to beautify themselves. It's not for nothing, Beirut was once dubbed the Paris of the Middle East.

And, and there is an incredible thriving arts scene.

If you've watched the news lately you'll probably not know there were elections. No, because Beirut was not featured in full regalia on the international news front. By regalia I mean Before and After.

So that's where the job of a videojournalist comes in. Not me per se, but the group I trained with, already carving out an assortment of diverse stories.

If what we produce can in some way spur others to think and rethink again, then it may not be your classical definition of art, but it is without a doubt something that merits being called art.

And yes art can be in the eyes of the beholder. Here's where I quote Kant and his treatise on beauty. No, another time.

So what do I have planned for my tenure as artist in residence. Quite a lot, but that's another self indulgent post. Art huh!