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Welcome to this session on storytelling. My name is D J Clark, I'm a multimedia journalist
and educator based in Peking. Today I have Brian Storm with me, the executive director
of MediaStorm and founder of MediaStorm, based in Brooklyn New York. Welcome Brian, thank
you very much for joining this session. Can we start by introducing MediaStorm to the
people who haven't come across it yet? And tell us a bit about how it has changed since 2005.
MediaStorm is a storytelling company, it's founded largely on the principle that
photography is a super powerful way to communicate but it also has its limitations. The big limitations
that I've been trying to chaise for 20 years now is the idea of adding sound to still photography
to essentially create films. We originally started the company in 1994 when I was a grad-student
at university in Missoury, then I left after only 9 months to go to Microsoft and I worked
for NSBNCfor 7 years. I came out to New York and worked for Corbis for a couple of years,
and then brought the company back in 2005. We are almost 8 years old now and we have
seen a lot of change since 1994. Largely in two places, not really in storytelling, that
is very old and hasn't changed much. Where I see the changes is in two places, one in
the tools, and the other in the distribution. The tools have absolutely been revolutionized,
the tools are high fidelity, you can get an HDcamera for a couple of thousand dollars,
where it used to be a 250 000 dollars. The production tools, the software to produce
films, where Final Cut and Premiere is, is just revolutionary, as opposed to have to
edit tape to tape, I think that the production tools have changed dramatically, but the distribution
is to me the real revolution that we are living through now. The idea that anyone can start
a company or produce a film on their own and put it out into the world and there is no
real gatekeepers now. Ten year ago you couldn't put something on YouTube and get an audience.
If you have something to say there is an audience for it, the tools to get it out there is there,
especially though social media. Social media has been the gasoline on our fire. Someone
can watch our films and embed it on Facebook or share it via Twitter to their group of
followers, that is a very revolutionary idea that is still pretty new. Something that is
helping us to get the word out that we are creating. - MediaStorm is know for great storytelling,
what do you think are the key elements to keep an audience engaged when you are putting
together linear storytelling. In this particular session we are dealing mainly with linear
than interactive. How do you keep people watching in these days when it's so easy to click away
and if you find something else more interesting than what you are watching on the page.
What makes a great story is something that has a good structure to it, a beginning, middle
and end, a surprise, it has a resolution, these are classic conventions, they are not
revolutionary. These are things that have been known for a long long time, how do you
tell a good story. These things are not being invented in 2014. People have been doing it
for hundreds of years. That is why the interactive thing to me, that is so new. There is no model.
Everybody understands what a play-button is and how it works, but when you have an interactive
experience you have to figure out the whole navigation structure, which is new. I think
that is a real challenging thing compared to linear. Linear is definitely the right
move for still photographers to start with because, they already have big challenges
that they have to overcome. They are visually sophisticated already and that is a real advantage.
That is what helps make a great story, having visual sophistication. If you think about
it, most documentary films are a good audio track with bad visualization. What we can
bring to the industry is a really sophisticated visual layer to what we are doing but we have
to get good at the narrative structure. How do you create the beginning - middle and end,
how do you create the surprise in a story, how do you have a payoff. I give you an example
of a film we did called 'Kingsleys crossing'. We did it in 2006-2007, we put it online and
it was a 21 minute film. Even today in 2014 if you say 'we are going to put a 21 minute
film on the web'. Everybody would freak out and say 'that is too long'. Everybody thinks
that there is a 3minute attention-span on the web. We have found that to be absolutely
incorrect. If a film is powerful, if it's interesting, if it's engaging, people will
stick with it. Kingsley is 21 minutes, we have a 65 procent completion on that film.
The reason for that is beacuse it is a great story, you just have to know 'does Kingsley
make it'. He is going from Cameroon to cross the desert, cross the ocean, to get to Europe
to make a better life for himself. In that case Olivier Jobard spent 6 months to make
the story. I think one of the things that makes a great story is time, time to report,
time to do post-production well. And really trying to bring everything you have out of
the material that has been gathered. You fall in love with Kingsley, you are with him on
the journey, you have to know does he make it. And once he gets there, there is another
thing that happen. The storyline continues to propeller itself forward, you cannot turn
it off. You are hooked, you are stuck. You are not going to leave that story at 17 minutes
because you want to know what happens in the end. I don't know if there is a receipt, there
is a framework that people work with on storytelling, but every story is unique and you have to
work with the material that is in front of you, try to make the best of it.
You touch on this a little bit, most of our audience are photojournalists. In your experience
what do you think are the key challenges for photojournalist who are moving away from the
still image into linear storytelling? Working with video and stills on a timeline.
The fundamental thing that I learned, I have been working on this model since 1983, it
has been over 20 years now that I have been thinking about it the fundamental idea. It
is sort of a bummer that I realized that the most important thing to a story is not the
visuals, it is the audio. The audio is the key to the whole thing, it would have been
better if I came from a radio background as oppose to a photography background. I think
what makes our work unique is that the visuals are so powerful and that we learned how to
do well with sound. Sound is the spine of the film. It is the key to making it really
great. That is really the first step that a photographer has to take, they have to learn
how to gather good sound, they have to learn how to conduct an interview, which is tough.
Most of us got into photography because we didn't want to write, we love the visual part
of storytelling. What I found early in my career is that I didn't have to write if I
asked a few good questions and just shout up and listened. The subject would write the
story for me. They were basically giving me captions on steroids. The bottom line is that
if you have still photography and sound, you can make a film. That is basically what Kingsleys
Crossing is. We did a video interview with him, we used his narrative to drive the story
forward. Photography becomes the visual layer. That is what I would start with, not with
video. I would get really good with audio, because that is the key thing to the process.
Once you moved to video, sound is the gateway to video, it is the thing that allows you
to get really good at he important part of video. When you move to video, you are already
a visual person, so you understand the language of visual storytelling. Video also has it's
own language, an important aspect of that is what we call 'shooting for sequence'. It
is the idea of walking into a scene, shooting a wide and a medium, a closeup, and an extreme
closeup, and trying to build a visual sequence that represents that scene. As opposed to
making a decisive picture, the one moment that encapsulate everything. Video is more
about creating a full picture about what is there. It is a different language, a different
way of thinking. I think that is one of the great challenges when a still photographer
goes from just stills to video. All of the sudden they have to deal with sound which
is a craft and an art in itself, and then they have to figure out how they shoot for
sequence, which is a different way of thinking than finding that one moment, making a frame.
The explosive moment when it all comes together, then you are done. Video doesn't work that way.
Over the years you talked a lot about monetizing. The incentive that a lot of photographers
have, is potential money, especially for photographers coming from the developing world, this is
a key point. What is the financial incentive? How do you feel about that now? I haven't
spoken to about this for a few years now, and the market is changing quite a lot. What
is your insight in the economics of still photographers investing in some extra gear
and try to get into time-based media as well as doing the stills.
I hope I never presented the financial reason for doing this as the reason for doing it.
I really feel that the reason to make the step is that you just tell them that they
can make a more complete story. I mean fundamentally instead of takings someone's picture you are
giving them a voice and their own story. I think from a storytelling perspective it's
a more a robust way of reporting, it's more honest to the subject, it engages them in
the process. It gives them a narrative and their own story. To me it's a more complete
compelling way to spend your time reporting. Yes, it does have financial implications,
in the reporting process and certainly in the post production. If you shoot 8 hours
of still photography I can edit that in about 20 minutes. If you shoot 8 hours of video,
that is about 80 hours in post for me. Linear media just takes a lot more time to edit.
It has a huge cost associated to taking this approach, from the time perspective, from
having the gear, from learning all the skills you need to learn to get good at this. Potentially
the financial payoff is greater, because now you are able to licence and distribute into
broadcast format, you have a richer product for the web. You can still do all the print
elements that you were doing before, like books and exhibitions and all that stuff.
In my mind it's about doing fewer projects but doing them in a much more robust way and
try to become relevant with the in-depth storytelling as opposed to quick, surface, one media type.
If someone doesn't post your work on Facebook or Tweet it, does it matter in this day and
age? So how do you break through that? I think you break through it with really compelling
storytelling. It all fits together in my mind, in terms of economics. We are 8 years old
as a company, we have grown and we have been able to make enough money to stay in business.
We are not making piles of money, but we are not trying to make piles of money. If that
is your goal then don't choose journalism. It is a really tough field to make a lot of
money in. I tell people that you will lead a rich life, you are not going to get rich
but you will have rich experiences. If financial return is your goal then please don't get
into this field, it's not what it's about. That is not the goal of anyone who operates
on a very high level.
On your workshops you emphasise teamwork a lot, this is something that may be new to
photojournalist, particularly on long term projects are used to working by themselves.
How important do you think that is for photojournalist who are thinking about working in this medium
to start thinking about teaming up, working with 2-3 people instead of trying to do everything themselves?
I think that is a really good question, it's
one of the challenges. We are thought from the start to be lone wolfs and flies on the
wall, in the background and be really independent in the vision. I think those things can still
remain, but I do think there is a place for collaboration, both in reporting and certainly
in post and distribution. In the field it's really hard for a person to do all these things.
You can't do it all at the same time, you can't shoot video and take stills at the same
time. It is not possible, it's a different way of thinking, a different way of working.
So when I send someone to cover something I usually send two people. We are going into
a lot of dangerous situations so I like to have two people just for safety reasons. We
are also sending people for a long period of time, you get lonely out there. Having
a sounding board is valuable. For interviews, it is impossible to conduct an interview by
yourself. Someone needs to run the camera, and someone needs to do the interview. We
think that a second person in the field is valuable for a lot of reasons. Once you get
to post, you can spend 10-15 days covering a subject and then you sit down and try to
edit that, you are too close to it. You know everything about that scene, and I think the
value of working with someone else who wasn't there... I mean I never go and meet the subjects.
I don't want to walk into the room and see the wallpaper and smell it and know everything
about it because that is forming my idea of what is there.
As a producer who was not in the situation, all I have is what is in front of me. Someone
will come back and say: 'this is what I think the story is about...' I say 'that is neat,
but you don't have that, you have this... this is what is really interesting about what
you have'. I'm someone who has a complete fresh perspective on what is there. So I think
that separation remains really important. Then you get into things like, motion graphics.
Asking a photographer to learn how to do motion graphics is a lot, asking them to do sound
that is a lot. How many of these new skills can you become excellent at? Asking someone
to learn how to market, distribute and monetize, manage contracts...we are up against a lot
of things. Teamwork is finding people who are likeminded, share the passion but have
complementary skills to you. If you are really good at shooting maybe you want someone who
is a terrific interviewer to be there with you. If you are a still photographer maybe
you want to collaborate with a filmmaker, to bring that video to the table. Although
I still think that still photographers should learn that skill because I think it's an obvious
progression for us. It is hard to do everything by yourself.
We just have one last question that we like to ask at the end of these discussions for
one tip. This week we are looking at storytelling. Is there one thing that you would put above
all else for photojournalist looking to create a new story.
Yes very simple, it's what I've been saying to every photographer who I ever met. The
last 20 years I've been saying the same thing. Don't just take someone's picture, give them
a voice and their own story. Interview the person that you are documenting, they will tell you
what the pictures are that you need to go make. They will actually write the script
for you. If you ask them a few good things and listen, truly listen, they are going to
tell you things that you never thought about. They know their story really, really well.
Instead of taking you can give in this process, and that is a beautiful way to tell a story.
Brian Storm, thank you very much for your time, this has been really truly enlightening.
Of course.