College Web Guy

Last week I reluctantly completed a multimedia web feature.  This was one of those rare all-consuming projects that I was resigned to keep noodling with until it was perfected and/or ruined.

Check it out.

It all started when a coworker nonchalantly gave me a cd, saying “Here are some photos from a student trip to the middle east.  You might want to do some kind of multimedia thing with them.” So I pop in the cd, expecting to see the standard fare of student travel photography that we’re all so familiar with in these kind of Higher Ed stories: Poorly composed group shots of said-student-group in front of tourist trap A, tourist trap B, tourist trap C, intermingled with party pics that should have been filtered out before handing over to any kind of university staff or administration.

This wasn’t that kind of cd.  These weren’t those kind of photos.

The first file opened up and caught me off guard.  I literally had to catch my breath.

They were captured by an anthropology student who’d received financial support to accompany her professor on an archaeology research project in Yemen.

I have to admit, I knew NOTHING about Yemen.  In spite of being a news junkie and eating PBS specials and documentaries like candy; in spite of being a fairly informed individual, you know, geopolitically and stuff, Yemen for me was a blank.  The only thing I knew about Yemen was that the USS Cole was bombed in a Yemen port during the Clinton administration.

Strictly in terms of subject matter, any grouping of photos from Yemen would have interested me.  But I was caught off guard by the composition, the humanity, and the general awesomeness of this photography. Pouring over the contents of the student cd was probably as close as I’ll ever get to being a photo editor at National Geographic.

Needless to say, it was obvious that something special had found my desk, and I made a quiet commitment to do this story justice, and share it with our university community.  Only recently I’d posted something here about wanting to take a bigger step into multimedia storytelling, and I knew instantly that this project would give me an opportunity to take a giant leap in that direction.

Materials Gathering

Tossing the photos into a simple slideshow would have been an injustice. I scheduled studio time with the local public radio station (housed at our university) and invited Elizabeth to come and talk about Yemen, about her experience, and about her photography.  I was afraid that she might be overly nervous.  I was afraid that she might not be able to recount her experiences well enough.  But she proved otherwise.

We sat down in the recording studio and I setup a laptop.  We used it to page through her photographs as we talked.  Each image had a story behind it.  Some images, multiple stories.   We recorded about 40 minutes of audio.

After we were done, she handed over another cd filled with little videos she’d recorder with her Flip. Then another cd with popular/traditional Yemen music. At that moment, I knew I was in way over my head.  Not only was I sitting on top of 40 minutes worth of interview recordings, but now a pile of video clips and music.

At any point in a project like this, you expect to hit a snag.  Your subject isn’t well-spoken; your media assets are lacking; your equipment faults;  …but none of that happened.  There would be no excuses.  Only increased pressure to produce.

The Edit

As a general rule, you never have time to work on really cool, intensive projects.  You just kind of make them happen, somehow. To weave the photos, audio, and video clips into something that made sense, took the better part of October and November, working about an hour each day.

I’m not a video producer, editor, or any kind of audio technician.  I’m a pixel-pushing web designer.  So maybe the post production took so long because I didn’t have a defined process or workflow.  I tried to work out a loose storyboard on paper, which helped, but the finished product didn’t resemble it in the least.

I started out by making an inventory, labeling all the assets.  For the audio, I’m an Audacity guy.  In all, there were three BIG audio files, and I brought them all into one audacity project and for the first time used the labels function to make notes on top of the timeline.

Putting it all together

So I exported specific audio clips and imported them into iMovie, along with all the photos and video clips. Then whatever “process” I tried to inject went out the window.  I tried to string together some kind of narrative and match the audio descriptions with specfic imagery.

This is where, I think, good editors and storytellers shine and/or fade.  Many roadblocks.  Many afternoons I’d hit a snag and get lost, give up, and go home.  I had no idea this stuff could be so complicated.  In the end I was able to make progress only when I quit trying to be strategic and just went with what felt right.

Then one day it was done.  13 full minutes.  It was less of a multimedia feature and more of a mini-documentary.  Actually I think it needs to be trimmed by a third.  It’s funny how you can chop stuff off and make a project more compelling.

With a complete video, I started thinking of ways to package it.  Throwing it on youtube seemed obvious, but I decided to take it beyond that and design/develop a page for it to live on, in the spirit on the online magazine’ish features that I’m fond of at espn. This way, I could also throw in a few audio clips that didn’t make it into the video.  I’m also planning on getting an interview with Elizabeth’s professor who was also on the trip.  Throw in some website fixes,  …IE 6 alignment issues and cleaning up my inline CSS.  …Then it’ll be done.

I think.

View the almost-completed feature.

Now I have a personal goal.  I want to always have a project like this in the works.  I need to work on ways of going out and finding stories that have potential.  Sometimes they fall in your lap.  But not very often.

See Also:

A set of videos by Ira Glass of This American Life, is a great place to begin for me.  I don’t think it really matters if you’re talking about audio, video, photography, or written word.  Storytelling is an artist’s craft.  If you’re starting from the ground-floor with no experience like me, those videos are very educational.