Last night was nostalgic. The lights. The humidity. The long stretch of sideline: parents in lawn chairs on one end, sophomores grouped in a chanting cluster on the other far end, separated in the middle by the video dad and the announcer doing his best at providing play-by-play over a small sound system. The Thai equivalent of a hot dog stand was the ice-cream guy who strapped a portable freezer to his motorbike, surrounded by the younger kids. The ref. The tense field play. Then finally, after a 2-2 tie, the shootout that would determine the fate of a season.

It took me back to my senior year in high school when all this was a weekly tradition that shaped me. I didn’t realize until towards the end of the game, that this was a juncture night. The final game to be played by a number of the players on the field who have sweated together, tourneyed internationally together, won and lost together, and grown from boys to men, for as long as a decade for some.

After all the official snaps were made, and the parents cheered, the team gathered on the far end of the field for their own time. I couldn’t help but walk in their direction. It was quiet. All the emotions were spent. Just silence. Soft voices. I find that it’s often in these moments that all the action, toil, athleticism and effort speak the loudest and most clearly. A moment where the essence and virtue of any human interconnectedness is seen more magically and clearly, moving beyond the mere sum: “So if there’s any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind … Have this mind among yourselves…” Phil 2

~Chris.

]]> http://chrisphoto.com/2010/05/soccer-moments/feed/ 1 http://chrisphoto.com/2010/04/seniors-2010/ http://chrisphoto.com/2010/04/seniors-2010/#comments Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:24:40 +0000 Chris http://chrisphoto.com/?p=345

You ever wonder what it would be like to grow up in some far-off place like Thailand, go to an international school where English, Korean, Thai, German, and more languages are heard through the halls, then come to your Senior year, your mind begins to think more and more about which country you’ll move to for college, or gap year, and beyond?

That was the story, a uniquely formed identity, that I was trying to capture in a single image as I was preparing for a Senior picture shoot with 3 friends, Matt, Taylor and Evan. After living here for almost 5 years, what comes to my mind are stupas, orange, deep red bricks, evening light. So we met up first at the school, played around in the gym with a cheap lighting rig I rented from a local shop, then went to Wat Oo Mong here in Chiang Mai right as the sun was setting (I timed it out so we could get the deep blues and fill light).

I haven’t done many shoots with this approach. I lean towards the purist journalist, no flash, no staging. But when the time comes, embrace it baby. Your limits are now your creativity. I suddenly wished I was a trained stage lighter.

Regarding equipment, I had two battery-powered LitePanels, and enough parents with legs to move my light around on demand (an awesome idea. Better than static stands, I tell ya.). The LitePanels were made for video and dim light, so I knew they didn’t have enough output for bright day-time portraiture. I had to rent a separate light kit with DC-powered heads for the day-time shots, to push out enough wattage to overpower the daylight. But as dusk fell, I knew the LitePanels would work well as ambient fill-light. So at that point you’re basically working with model lighting. Shoot it with a Canon that has Live View mode (I used my 5D Mark II), and you can see your shot instantly, and dial your settings to taste on the fly. Bye bye old school light meter days (I run manual all the time, so it was lazy indulgence).

So as the technology changes to be more convenient, the creative preparation can take charge and explore new things. And when friends come along, it’s the perfect setup to just “see what happens,” get some “sure” shots, and then experiment.

I hope you enjoy the selection … and if you have a senior who needs pics, I know some people

The above piece was largely shot in two afternoons, and edited in one afternoon, during a recent trip to find personal stories of Haitians who were helping themselves in the aftermath of the Jan 12th earthquake that shook large swaths of Port-au-Prince and surrounding cities. By the time I got there, the press had made the point: the destruction was devastating. I agree with Chip Litherland that the media coverage were that most of the viewer response was largely carried by the photographs. The galleries from the Big Picture, or the NYT revealed amazing, personal moments, with range of context and mood. That’s what I was seeing re-tweeted over and over. Not the videos. Stand-up acts by white guys was the last thing anyone was engaging with. I felt they were appallingly impersonal. I was hard stretched to find personal stories of Haitians delivering aid to themselves.

By the time I got there, the few people I work with had some leads. We pursued one, and Pastor Ronel Mesidor proved a resilient man helping everyone around him, by converting both his church and home into shelters and clinics.

In creating the piece, I wanted to share some learning points I’ve reflected on:

1. Deadline work and Interviewing Foreign Languages
I’ve gotten in the flow now, to be able to quickly shoot and edit foreign-language videos. It involves:
- The Interview: Do the interview with two lapels, one for the subject, one for the translator. The translator sits off-camera next to me. I instruct two important things: the subject looks at the translator (more natural for him to talk to someone asking him questions in his own language anyway), and I take as much time as needed to make clear that the subject needs to contain thoughts to 2-3 sentences and then pause and wait for the translator. The translator also needs to pause and wait for the subject to completely finish his sentence before translating. Translators will often jump in and begin translating on the fly, thus making the subject’s audio polluted with faint English statements. I struggled with this piece to rid the Creole of English audio fall-off from my translator. Lesson learned for next time.

- transcribe the interview in a text editor, then run through and highlight the story. You’d be surprised how fast this goes when you realize that a 40-min interview in a foreign language is half translation being spoken, so really is 20 minutes of talking, which when the statements are broken up a moderate typer can keep up without hitting the pause button. I typed out the above piece in maybe 30 minutes.
- Once transcribed, it’s no harder than skim-reading to find the story in 5 minutes. I edit in TextEdit on a Mac, and just change the font color of key statements to red. Then go find those red statements and cut them into Final Cut. That makes the base of my narrative.

2. Musical Choice.
My company subscribes to FirstCom, so we have a pretty large library, which makes it even harder to find the gem song for any particular occasion. This occasion was “confusion.” As the pastor began his recounting, and I listened to his comments on the timeline, I wanted a musical selection that reinforced that state of mind. The track used had rough beats, drums and strings that were abrupt and sudden, going in and out. I thought it was fitting to help “wrap the emotions” as one colleague put it, using music to guide the emotive response…

3. Value of Subtitles.
I’ve had a recent discussion with some friends on a partner project about this. To do voice-over in English, or native language with English subs? Both have different effects, and are appropriate for different occasions. For this piece though, which was going to be largely distributed and viewed in web browsers, I went with natural language and subtitles. I did this because I felt the subject’s tone carried part of the story. His cadence communicated something to me. Second, I wanted viewers to hear Creole, to hear a local speak, instead of a British-accent pundit standing in front of another bad scene. But here’s some general guidlines to understand when doing subtitled videos:

• Keep the pacing slow. Attention is divided between words and images. So your shot pace has to be slower, and you need to time transitions in a way that when reading the end of a sentence, there’s something to look at for a few seconds before the next sentence or thought begins. Let it breathe more than the average piece.
• You’ve doubled your audience by using subtitles: Haitians can take ownership in a Creole piece, and English speakers can run with it too. YouTube now offers subtitling support, so you can have friends create multiple language versions of your movies. Keep in mind which audience might prove to be your ‘power-spreaders’ who take vested interest in your film because you’ve delivered a documentary in their language.

If you’ve read this far, this post is largely about the production. Not my experience in Haiti. I reserve that for personal inquiry, and might post on that later.

This is a tutorial I recorded quickly for some colleagues who all use Photo Mechanic, and would love feedback (it’s my first screencast).

In this tutorial, you learn how to use Photo Mechanic to auto-sort your stills and video into separate folders during ingest, so you don’t have to manually find the .mov files or .cr2 files yourself. This tutorial basically utilizes the power of Photo Mechanic’s many variables, namely the {mediatype} variable, by inserting it into the folder option in the Ingest dialogue. I hope it helps speed things up for you a bit. It does for me.

I recently found the gem of a site that brings me face to face with all the historical documentary film legends. I’m listening to Errol Morris talk about his initial work:

Documentary wasn’t just one thing, it was many kinds. Then for whatever reason it devolved into a certain style of filmmaking. Call it verite, call it the handheld school, the fly-on-the-wall school. People started to take this idea of truth cinema seriously … But it evolved into a kind of cinema journalism. And I never liked that idea. It’s not that I don’t like journalism. I consider myself a kind of journalist. But I never liked this idea that this film journalism had to be practiced in a certain way. Like the documentary film police telling you it has to be shot this way or that way. In Gates of Heaven, I wanted to break every single rule of documentary. Instead of being a fly-on-the-wall, let’s make everyone completely aware of our presence. Let’s have people talking directly to us, perhaps performing for us. Let’s put the camera on a tripod. Let’s not use natural light, let’s light everything. Let’s not get portable gear, let’s get the most obtrusive. So that’s the start of it.

Then there is the voice of Silvain L’Esperance, who says that cinema verite is not objective truth at all, that’s a subjective truth of a relationship that’s eminently personal, and if there’s any truth to yield, it comes from the authenticity of the relationship between creator and creation (filmmaker/subject).

As I listened to their voices, I was head-nodding their statements to my experience. Coming from a photojournalistic background that stresses fly-on-the-wall tactics, but yet in the pool of many photographers who have, in pursuit of ‘multimedia’, moved into video production, the jump in mediums requires an additional realization: compelling documentary will take advantage of cinematic liberties, and non-compelling won’t.

Now why does this matter to me? It allows me to make more confident decisions when selecting whether to use music, whether to record my own voice asking the questions during an interview (I might cut myself into the edit to make it more honest of a feeling, much like Ira Glass does on This American Life shows), whether to recreate scenes and cuts that present many angles (when in fact it was one camera that shot it all), and overall cinematic impressions.

There are many genres of documentary. If I have a nervousness about a particular one, it’s about mixing heavily dramatized or recreated scenes. Errol is known for this, as I saw Standard Operating Procedure earlier last year. The idea of including footage that is completely made from my mind and conception and doesn’t offer any voice from my subject, is hardly a relationship between me and my subject at that point.

In conclusion, I’m discovering that cinema verite, from the point of view of documentary filmmakers who had no journalism background, considered it a point in the evolutional history of documentary film, and saw it as an approach that hardly afforded the creative expression of a relationship. Relationships by nature are fluid and expressive, and how comfortable someone feels talking with me as a camera is rolling is a direct result of the previous off-camera conversations and histories that we’ve shared together. My relationship is what I have to offer to my audience: a condensed record of my experience with others at a certain place and time, and one that is deeply personal, full of mystery, honesty and transparency. That’s probably why I love this form so much. It’s a personal journal in a way. I’m always timid when I show my work to others for the first time. If it was truly cinema verite, I don’t know that I would be … So for us journalist-converted filmmakers, the leap into personally expressed stories might require a big gulp, but is enthralling and pushes me towards my subject even more than I might otherwise be willing to go. Far from the wall.

Thoughts?

Q) Where do you believe multimedia fits into today’s society and how will that role change over time?

A) I was struck by a recent comment from a friend on Facebook about Lady Gaga. They couldn’t understand how someone with unimpressive musical ability could be so popular. I commented that the next generation doesn’t listen to Lady Gaga, they WATCH her. The next generation is visual, not verbal. The next generation has video and multimedia in their DNA at a fundamental level, in much the same way that language shapes thought in previous generations. Multimedia has become a basic form of communication. Thirty-one BILLION videos on YouTube in a month. ‘Nuff said.

via Innovative Interactivity | Innovative Individuals: Chuck Fadely.

I have many writer friends, and yes there’s a place for meaningful text. But the issue I find important is the point of engagement with an audience–it must be visually dominant. In the vein of Inspire, Inform, then Entrust as a cycle for media involvement with users, it’s the Inspire point that must be visually dominant, and text or other layers of Inform-ation can vary once you captivate or ‘wow’ them.

In the end, it’s a number of factors that determine whether a piece of media or story is a success, but I think Chuck tapped into one of the more important factors that need to be appropriately considered during production…

“There is a wonderful book called The Profession of the Stage Director, by Georgi Tovstonogov, who writes that a director may fall into one of the deepest pits by rushing immediately to visual or pictorial solutions.”

When I read that, I thought to myself, “that’s precisely my downfall as a photographer.” The first thing I usually do is scope out the scene and look for the best ‘shot’, and maybe think a little about motion and people coming in and out of frame. Then I might consider audio, and….

He continues in his book, “This statement influenced and aided me greatly in my career as a stage director; and, subsequently, in my work as a screenwriter. If one understands what the scene means, and stages that… one will be doing one’s job for both the author and the viewer. If one rushes, first, into a pretty, or pictorial, or even descriptive staging, one may be hard-pressed to integrate that staging into the logical progression of the play.

And there he describes my common predicament: I pull all my shots right into Final Cut Pro, and have no clue what they mean. They’re all pretty. But when I look at the script, or the interview, or ambient moments, I’m hard pressed at times to stitch them together into something that means something. Because, after 10 seconds, it’s the ‘after-taste’ or impression that the viewer is left with that counts, and not so much the aesthetic of a particular single shot (though ultimately the interplay of visual and audio are what makes the magic happen).

Anyway, this is looking to be a great book. I enjoy books most when I’m in the middle of an intense project…

I ran into this amazing video while surfing Vimeo’s 5D Mark II channel to see the different flavors of video people have been able to accomplish. Most of them are quirky short films, as can be expected when kids get new toys and tinker about, but when you get one in the hands of a journalist knowing what they’re doing, and can use the tool to it’s storytelling strengths and powerful moments and good editing, you can get something like this: Afghan Hearts and Minds.

Mark Day: He’s the Comedy Content Manager at YouTube. He is responsible for supporting the comedy community on YouTube by tracking humor trends, identifying top users, featuring original videos, and developing contests and programs to foster the creation of quality comedy content.

Man we need to have more jobs like this out there. Someone who knows stories well enough to track them, who has a strong enough sense of taste to follow, connect, and market good work. Too many of us throw good work into the air and hope it gets caught for some reason by the wind and carried to high places. Do you have room in your workplace to get this kind of position? Are you marketing your own work manually? Like coming up with interested bloggers or online outlets that might do a quick writeup and embed your work, to drive traffic and visibility? What’s the distribution strategy? Whatever that is, it will fuel the generation of an online community. No strategy, no community, no audience, just a video. It’s inspiring to think of how some are out there dedicating their time to creating both incentive and connection to good stories…

Season Two out now.

This American Life continues to inspire me. It’s about average folks with average tastes, and telling stories “at human scale.” Listen to this great talk from Ira from back in 2007 but just released via the Gel Conference website.
I then realized Season Two of the television adaptation of This American Life is available for order. So I got a copy of that on order and searched for some reviews. For those always looking for story ideas, see if you can avoid the obvious emotionally gripping stories and pull something sweet out of the usually mundane, like this list of Season Two.

My major takaways from his Gel talk was: Human Scale. Broadcast journalism (TV news) puts stories at a different scale than we experience them. He talks about the funny weather guy at the end who makes a joke, or the sports blooper reel. He’s all about wedding the two, where stories are full of surprise, emotion, suspense, humor – elements of the human experience that help us connect with each other. It’s these elements that need to be told in stories. But for those of us brought up in ‘the system’ have developed habits that don’t lend themselves to this kind of storytelling too easily.

For a photographer, it’s easy to capture funny moments, but how would you build suspense? Only over time. And that takes taste, which was a quick but profoundly important comment he made: most producers for This American Life have a pretty good sense of taste. They know what stories will resonate with a broad crowd, with everyday people. The have mastered the art of Subtle. It’s Subtle that Seth Godin mentions in his new book “Tribes“:

“Smarts and Style will beat the machine … We want novelty and style. If you want us to follow, don’t be boring.”

The new audience of the internet age celebrates and rewards Subtle narratives. But as most things, there’s risk involved. You either get a huge response, or deadpan nothing. Go big or go home. Start experimenting and trying to throw in elements of surprise, build suspense, make things funny when they should be, and learn the art of the narrative arc. Start simple with your family or friends. Try and tell them a story over dinner. Chances are, if you’re a good conversationalist over dinner, then you’ve got what it takes to tell a good story. Then it’s just a matter of perfecting that in the edit bay and being vulnerable to honest feedback in the production phase. Or something like that…