Click -- and look.
Click -- and look.
Click -- and look at this one. Now that's a nice shot.
Slide shows. Dull, right?
Think again. A lot of people at Visual Edge 2002 are betting that the bane of bored students everywhere, the lowly slide show, will bring top-notch photojournalism onto the computer monitor (it's already begun), the TV (they're working on it), and even the movie screen (maybe some day).
Brian Storm, a vice president at Corbis, thinks they're the next big thing for his company. He sees them as a way to extend photojournalism's reach, and to expand the photojournalist's reporting role. They were a hit at his last stop, MSNBC.com. Now he wants to sell them to everyone.
Visual Edge 2002 is buying -- the idea, at least. Many of the photojournalists at this Poynter-hosted workshop have spent their time here producing the kind of web slide shows that Storm's MSNBC.com crew pioneered. No mere stacks of images, these presentations have motion, transitions, music, and -- perhaps most importantly -- an audio track that is an extra layer of reporting.
No sign of stale vacation snapshots here. No sign of slides, either. Welcome to the growing world of the souped-up slide show.
A form with roots dating back to The Civil War
David Snider is an independent photojournalist who has, in his own words, "helped push along the idea that a still photographer can produce network TV" -- he's engineered four segments for Nightline and been featured in a fifth. He is focused, laser-like, on opening up TV to the world of multimedia slide shows.
In a way, it already has been -- Snider and Brian Storm both pay homage to Ken Burns, the documentarian who somehow made slow zooms on yellowed photos of Confederate generals really, really interesting. "Just a little bit of animation -- that's the Burns style," Snider says. "I didn't invent it -- but I'm in love with it."
For most photojournalists, "Burnsvideo" -- the cinema-conscious marriage of pictures with voices and music -- is the model for the new medium.
Slide shows ten feet tall
Brian Storm calls a multimedia slide show's audio track "a caption on steroids." Besides words, you get subtle cues -- the hiss of the freeway in the background, the crackle in an old man's voice. "That's what it's about," Storm says. "It's about telling a better story."
These souped-up slide shows might just seem like video drained of its vitality -- cinema on the cheap. Storm disagrees. He thinks there's something special about the "deconstructed video" of the slide show. Even when frames are sequential, almost like animation, the slide show isolates them. "Single moments," Storm says. "One at a time." There's time to focus and unpack the images.
And besides: "We're going to keep selling our pictures to print."
That's the key to Storm's plan for Corbis: selling, and selling, and selling again. In the future, Corbis -- and anyone else that cares to try -- might package a single photo essay for a:
- newspaper
- glossy magazine
- TV broadcast (as a souped-up slide show)
- website (ditto, plus interactivity)
- gallery (possibly a slide show here, too, displayed on flat-screen monitors)
- photo DVD ("the coffee table book of the 21st century," Storm says)
- movie theater (played as a cinematic slide show along with the previews).
News photos projected onto a screen ten feet tall would be pretty cool -- but for now, 700 pixels is about the best a photojournalists can hope for.
Maybe there's something to this
Cecilia Bohan, foreign photo editor at The New York Times, probably doesn't spend much time thinking about slide shows -- she's rooted firmly in the world of print. But during her presentation to the Visual Edge group, she implicitly made a case for the slide show with an expertly-produced montage of Times photos peppered with comments from the staff, all played over a rock music soundtrack.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning pictures splashed up on a projection screen, images of New York and Afghanistan, strains of U2 and Paul Simon under it all. It was truly arresting.
If you'd like to try your hand at the multimedia slide show, either with existing work or with photos you'll take expressly for the web, here's a start.
| How To Create a Slide Show, Visual Edge Style At Visual Edge 2002, Keith Jenkins, photography editor at The Washington Post Magazine, and Phaedra Singelis, a producer at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, offered tips to the Visual Edge crowd on how to graft their own photojournalism onto the web. Tip number one: Learn Flash, or make friends with someone who already has. To that end, let's make friends with Larry Larsen and Andrew Devigal, two of Poynter and Visual Edge's resident Flash kingpins. At the workshop, they helped students set up a basic Flash slide show. Now their tutorial files are available for you, too: [ Download slideshow.zip, 4MB ] It's not a perfect tutorial -- some of the instructions are specific to Poynter's computer labs and, in typical workshop fashion, the Flash file has been improved a bit since the text was written. Take a look, see if it's useful to you, and feel free to use the file as a template for your own work. If you don't have Macromedia Flash, you can download a free 30-day trial. Then, check out FlashKit.com for more tutorials and downloadable resources. And for inspiration, check out the Visual Edge 2002 website. --R.S. |
Visual Edge 2002 Slide Show
