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…

The Places We Live

There have been a handful of stories I’ve seen that have approached the fact that 2008 has seen, for the first time in history, a larger urban than rural population. Worldwide, more people now live in cities. Of the stories and packages I’ve seen on this topic, The Places We Live is one of the most elegant. I could preach for a few hours (after enjoying for a few hours), everything I think Magnum understands about elegant online delivery of stories (mainly that they know that design elegance matters). Here’s a short list of what I mean:

1. Selective UI Design. The site, like others Magnum sites such as Access To Life and Magnum In Motion,  practices design discipline. For instance, on The Places We Live, there’s no sound controls. I think this was partly a director’s decision to deliver a controlled narrative, but it also elevates the visual content by having less to compete for my attention. Their designs show restraint.
2. Linear intros that Inspire me. Most of their sites have a powerful movie that plays right off the bat, summarizes the site stories well, and feels and has the impact of a movie trailer.
3. Color. Grey is the new white. OK. Let’s admit that just as YouTube as a brand decided so much of online video business and user expectation, so has the New York Times video site (another design favorite), Hulu, and other great multimedia showcase sites chosen grey to highlight the visual work as being the top priority. My site included…
4. Padding. The designers understand that the space around a photo becomes part of the photo. They pad everything from titles to descriptions to icons as if it was a print product. Design is in the details, and they pay attention. Somehow, less is more, and I’m free to enjoy the content, as opposed to getting frustrated trying to figure out what to do.

I could go on. But now I’m tired and hungry. Going to dinner.

What are you thoughts? Other sites that hit the high bar of design and content like this one?

Movie: Ballast

Here’s a list of Ebert’s best films of 2008, many of which you’ve probably not even heard of. He clarifies the reason at the end of the article:

Looking back over the list, I think most moviegoers will have heard of only about 11, because distribution has reached such a dismal state. I wrote to a reader about “Shotgun Stories,” “I don’t know if it will play in your town.” She wrote back, “How about my state?” This is a time when home video, Netflix and the good movie channels come to the rescue. My theory that you should see a movie on a big screen is sound, but utopian.

The movie he references, Shotgun Stories, has it’s own meta-story of distribution redemption:

This film has literally been saved by the festival circuit. After being rejected by major distributors, it found a home in smaller festivals, where word of mouth propelled it into its current wider release. It has qualities that may not come out in a trailer or in an ad but sink in when you have the experience of seeing it.

Sigh. I keep twiddling my thumbs wondering how to creatively get my work in front of the right eyes. My anticipations keep pointing to the living room as a hopeful video savior: Start by pushing the cable box aside, and jacking an ethernet port in. Personally, I’m going to start this list by watching Ballast. Something tells me the characters are really raw. And the visual style is right up my alley, based on the trailer (which seems honest).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gu0iu0xwls[/youtube]

I conversation over email sparked my drive to write this entry. Fragmented, debased, partial, immediate, indulgent. These are words that shape the era. Not a particular demographic. If you’re connected to the internet, these types of words come with it. They are habits of consumption that lead to habits of expectation. And if expectations are disappointed, the message is lost, all effort is muted. Sobering.

Nothing hurts worse than having a kid-like eagerness to whip out my laptop, show my latest video piece to a friend, and watch them react to all my edits – to the story I’ve chosen to weave together – and then right in the middle of watching it, they answer their cell phone, or start talking to someone who walks in the room. They miss 10 entire seconds! (which took 10 hours to edit!). I hide my upset feelings, kindly hit rewind, and resume. Or if someone asks me a question during the video, I simply don’t answer, hoping that my non-responsiveness will signal to them to “hold questions until the end please.”

I think everyone who slaves for hours in the edit bay wants the gratification of knowing that their hard work counts. That people will actually pay attention. Every producer wants their work presented in as close to a theater-like environment. Nothing to distract. Not even cell phones. Turn em off. I wish that type of experience was preserved onto multiple devices, whether mobile phone or laptop. Things are moving towards the living room, which is encouraging.

So the posted item above is a little ironic. They’re playing video games. I don’t think there’s a more numbing expression of the mind’s wasting away in a conscious nightmare (“you want bullets?”). But then I say to myself, “I wish my video stories could get that much attention.” What I can do outside of crafting a story to help get people’s attention?

Finding this answer has driven me to learn code, develop and present websites, make things Flash-y. The assumption being that it’s the delivery that counts. Whatever it takes to win this war on — story, right?
Thomas Friedman is one of my must-reads. I still remember his words from Nov 2006 , how they resonated then, and now, and keep me driving to solve this storytelling dilemma:

Yes, technology can make the far feel near. But it can also make the near feel very far…When I shared this story with Linda Stone, the technologist who once labeled the disease of the Internet age “continuous partial attention” — two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one — she remarked: “We’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. … We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere — except where we actually are physically.”

Maybe I should do a story about the thread on story. But then how would I deliver it?

POV Blog: Outside The Frame

It’s easy for me to get wrapped up in creating a slick website that will make people go “wow” and then click on my content, so much so that I lose focus on the actual content that I have to tell. After reading a great post about MediaStorm’s approach on the PBS POV blog “Outside The Frame” (which is a great blog by the way for those interested in the science of documentary storytelling), I was challenged to reassess exactly where the lines of value between interactivity and content are drawn. If creating an interactive “story” experience on your own, it’s hard. There’s tons of things to think about and hats to wear: producer, developer, designer, content gatherer, director, editor, cinematography, and frig restocker.

After reading the article, I found myself compelled to comment. Here’s what I wrote (weird quoting myself):

I work with folks who are driven by this mantra: Inspire, Inform, Entrust. In that order. First you have to inspire people, you have to get their attention. It’s the initial reaction. Having a slick website might tell you that the content is amazing too. Like the Pangea Day website. But then the content quickly takes over and it’s a first-person telling. A singular voice. Moving on, once someone is inspired, you begin to inform them. This can be done through “narrative”, though not exclusively through a first-person telling of a story, but created through many veins of an inter “active” experience. But where I think your side and the side of Storm’s finds tension with each other is in: what do people actually do after they’ve consumed some content? You have to then Entrust your story to the viewer, to let them glean meaning and significance. If it hits home with them, they’ll retell their own version of it in words to a friend (whether oral telling or via twitter), or input their piece of the grand pie like one in hundreds of blog post comments. The Entrust phase is where I think it goes out of the bounds of “story” definition and becomes more of a non-linear narrative. But your post really helps make a strong point, that it’s a constant balancing act between design/interactive and the actual content and story you have to tell. The breadth of thought between these two is usually too far for most to accomplish well, yes. But at the end of the day, I will tell my friends about the midwestern families or the women struggling to raise kids with AIDS. Story and Timelessness go hand in hand, and that can’t be underestimated in the changing tide of the media landscape.

I also read a great blog post by Mindy McAdams, who teaches online journalism, who discussed Andy Dickenson’s blog post, and had some great thoughts on the concept of “what is a story anyway?”

You know, what I think is humorous is the fact that “story” is a word like “love.” Used in a ton of places it shouldn’t be used or doesn’t qualify. Many of us work somewhere in the solar system of online narrative experiences, and so we see the word coming up all over the place. What both of these articles leave me with thinking is: why did a word like “story” ever get as popular and used in such a broad way?

In the age of digital sharing, things are mashed up, narratives intertwine, many people are putting in their voice. And I think it’s overwhelming to many people, even young folks who’s social life can be summed up in a dorky word like “twittering.” What people are always out hunting for is an intimate, quiet, singular voice. They just have to dig for it through clicks of a mouse. If you can make the clicks fun, and optional, along the way, then that makes them want to stick around and listen to the story even more. And if you give them the ability to interject their comment or voice in some cool way, then they feel an affinity with your content. Just like kids learn a little better when they go to a museum where they can actually touch stuff, not just stare behind the glass. It becomes interactive.

But at the end of the day, an intimate voice leaves you influenced. It sticks a lot longer. It’s more timeless, not just in your head, but in it’s truth. And timeless stories hit at truth, hit at reality the way actual things are. It’s not a “well that’s how you experience it and that’s neat”, but a “YES, I’ve experienced that too.” There’s cultural levels of similarity, but beyond that is a layer of human similarity in experience that transcends the cultural layer, the layer where truths stick to us, become part of us, influence us, and instill a sense of affirmation in self-identity (be), or new identity (become).

I’m going off the philosophical deep end at this point, but isn’t it true that good, timeless, well-crafted stories are a philosophical workout to present not just artistically (subjective) but coherently (objective). I love the challenge of moving between all these spectrums in my work… You?

I have a growing stack of Moleskin notebooks, but never have filled the pages quite like this. Today I was inspired to go and buy crayons and water colors, or at least something more than the ratty hotel pen I’ve got tucked in it now.

MoleSkin art from Smashing Magazine

NYTimes video

I just used After Effects to do an Indiana Jones-style map title sequence for a journey I took on a recent assignment overland in Asia. I didn’t really know AE before then, so I spent some good time in tutorials, mostly at VideoCopilot. It’s basically Photoshop, on steroids, with a timeline. Since realizing the power, I’ve been on a AE high. This morning, I watched this video from the NY Times on the latest in the election, and the first minute of video, the testimonials, was amazingly effective at giving me elegant yet simple visuals of the audio being spoken. It’s a simple narration piece, but the visuals are stunning, and make it well worth the 80 MB of download, which by the way is coming in super fast even in podunk Thailand. The Brightcove switch seems to be working out.
So there’s some techniques that I want to learn, like super cool depth-of-field mimicking among others. Anyway, it’s a super-cool video, is told in a great way, and is displayed and delivered effectively. Many things to learn from the NYTimes Multimedia dept.

Why I love life, whether American or not. People are an endless flavor:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyu2NHlVm1E[/youtube]

Annie Leibovitz: Life Through A Lens

I like to splurge on an iTunes movie rental on the weekends, especially when it’s raining. Usually I try to select from the documentary section, and something of interest. Past rentals have included “Helvetica” which provided great inspiration on design and how typeface influences our decisions. This time I wanted to see what made Annie Leibovitz tick. After watching it, here’s my takeaways:

She makes a difference by provoking people. Mad or happy, if you get people out of their chair, then you’ve done most of your job. Getting them to do the right thing at that point is crucial. But nevertheless, this approach fueled her desire to do things like shoot Demi Moore nude or go on tour with the Stones. The Moore picture took Vanity Fair from 800,000 to more than 1 million subscribers. Getting noticed gets people’s attention. Inspire, then Inform, then Entrust, as someone I work with likes to say. And in that order.

Her move to work for Vanity Fair after a career built with Rolling Stone wasn’t seen as jumping ship on music photojournalism to fashion and glitz. It was a new playing field to learn new moves, styles, etc. It only built her photojournalism qualities by venturing into well-crafted pre-conceived portaiture.

But she admits this was the bane of her existence, with each celebrity shoot pushing the edge of demand, anxiety, and concept.

Towards the end she says of this danger, “I started in this business so young that all the other lives did seem much more exciting and adventurous. You do start to think you’re living that life, and you forget to build your own.

So her friend Susan Sontag told her to come to Sarejevo and document what was going on there. No crews. And when she got there, to go straight to the morgue so she would get the full reality of what was happening. Boom. Hit hard. She suddenly didn’t see which side of Barbera Streisandt’s face was better to photograph as something important. Reality check.

She saw herself at 50, and forgot to have kids. Had kids. Her world became “round, not flat.”

In the end, what’s the bridge between her portraiture/fashion/glitz side and her journalistic side? What’s the thread that makes her work more than the sum of the parts (that makes it multimedia?). It’s humanized.

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty was a Pulitzer-winning fiction author born in 1909, from Mississippi. She hesitantly wrote her autobigraphy “One Writer’s Beginnings” where she explains her journey in learning to see, learning to hear, then finding a voice. In fact, it was her delving into photography that she found gave her writing a keenness to gesture and enhanced her writing (last quote). She died in 2001. I’m thankful for she has left behind for us, and hope you are too.

I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn, of mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer… A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began to write stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding of human events, is the way I begin work. Just as, of course, it was an initial step when, in my first journalism job, I stumbled into making pictures with a camera. Frame, proportion, perspective, the values of light and shade, all are determined by the distance of the observing eye.

I have always been shy physically. This, in part, tended to keep me from rushing into things, including relationships, headlong. Not rushing headlong, though I may have wanted to, but beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly; noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart, I did venture closer to where I wanted to go. As time and my imagination led me on, I did plunge.

It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside a person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step and his last too, I suppose… But I think [mother] was relieved when I chose to be a writer of stories, for she thought writing was safe.

I painlessly came to realize that the reverence that I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures in the capital of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing in a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than the changing sky. I’m grateful that, from my mother’s example, I had found the base for this worship – that I had found a love of sitting and reading the Bible for myself and looking up things in it.

Another quote I identify with:

I do not know even now what it was that I was waiting to see; but in those days I was convinced that I almost saw it at every turn. To watch everything about me I regarded grimly and possessively as a need. All through this summer I had lain on the sand beside the small lake, with my hands squared over my eyes, finger tips touching, looking out by this device to see everything: which appeared as a kind of projection. It did not matter to me what I looked at; from any observation I would conclude that a secret of life had been revealed to me–for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment.

And one more:

It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon it’s gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words–there’s so much more of life that only words can convey–strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. The direction my mind took was a writer’s direction from the start, not a photographer’s, or a recorder’s.