Urban Expression
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One man jam
Brave Combo Jeffrey Barnes remains one of the most unique individuals I have ever had the pleasure of interviewing for a story. As the saxophonist for self-described punk polka band Brave Combo, Barnes exemplifies the group’s eccentric, eclectic personality. Writing a feature story on him for DallasNews.com was an honor and a pleasure. You can read the story here and watch the slideshow by clicking on the photo below.
Tango Night
This is an audio slideshow I created for my Multimedia Storytelling class. It was extremely dark except for small pools of bright light on the dance floor. It was challenging, exhausting and a lot of fun. Hope you like it. Click on the image to see it.
A few from my trip to Chicago
Chicago is a beautiful city, more manageable than New York and cleaner than Los Angeles. I never really got out of the downtown area, but that was enough to see the city’s depth of character and personality. The above photo, the lower photo of the famous Navy Pier along the lake shore, and the man grilling were taken at the Taste of Chicago festival. The last was at a small lake west of the city.
Tapdancing Panhandlers in Chicago
Going to the Taste of Chicago food festival last week was a great experience, but my favorite part of Chicago was the wealth of panhandlers — the most inventive ones I’ve ever seen and all focused on music. High schoolers beating on plastic jugs with drum sticks, middle-aged men dancing puppets to Van Morrison and Coltrane, and numerous saxophonists accompanied by a boom box blaring kitschy synth: they were all good enough for my one-dollar bills. But my favorite was the group of tapdancers seen here. A lot of energy and obviously some real training made for a great show in between Chicago pizza and sauteed goat (don’t ask).
Farewell Sony Handycam, I hardly knew ye
I should have spoken with more poor people.
Kyle Phillips disagrees with me on this point and believes that I placed us in dangerous situations out of our control. Maybe. But I think we should have done more of that. Alright, I admit that residential foreclosure may not be the best topic in the world for a multimedia story for reasons I have described in previous assignments. But I still think it could have worked with more time to find the right people and then spend time with them before whipping out the camera. I wanted time to convince people of my sincerity and professionalism, to find that common ground upon which all relationships are made and build upon it unfiltered emotion of all great storytelling.
But I choked. I could have created a great story on foreclosure, but I didn’t realize the difference the camera makes.
Every time I approached a house required an act of will beyond anything I have experienced before as a journalist. I felt an invader, a predator, and incredibly out of place as a scrawny white kid dressed to the nines in the middle of Denton poverty I wasn’t even aware existed until a map of foreclosed homes took me there. It wasn’t that I was scared, just wrapped up in the Western obsession with personal space and privacy. How could I not be when I knew that was exactly what I was robbing from these people?
It has made me question whether people want or need this. Does Joe Schmo want to see this story? And if he doesn’t, is it really the journalist’s responsibility to feed it to him anyway for his own good?
Of course, it’s not like I surrendered to these inhibitions or let them influence the project. No, it was actually my confidence that hindered the story from coming to its maturity. I expected that it would all work out as soon as I gave my effort to it because that’s how this whole first year of journalism has been for me. It’s all just worked out and success was a given. Perhaps I simply hit a wall of what I am capable of without learning more and trying harder. Or maybe I’m not capable at all.
As you can see, I am plagued with far more questions than answers. In a way, this project is a fitting end to the year because it encompasses everything I’ve learned while dangling all the potential I have sought. After trying so hard in the music program and receiving no positive reinforcement, I switch to journalism and everything takes off. That juxtaposition, if nothing else, has kept me humble. All these accomplishments and I feel like I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. My failure to instill this project with the quality it deserves is testament to that.
Oh, I don’t know, I think I’m rambling, now. At any rate, I enjoyed having you as a teacher and knowing you as a friend. I will try to come say my adieus tomorrow… if I wake up.
Death by blogging, it shall be
I can understand the pressures of a 24/7 working life. Absolutely. But this article should have made itself more flippant about this subject. To call bloggers the sweat shop workers of the future is not only silly, but it also belittles all those prepubescent workers grinding their health away in third-world countries for first-world corporations.
Stop eating McDonald’s, for god’s sake. Take some time off. Throw back some Prozac. This is the 21st century. These people aren’t dying because they are forced to work long hours by some whip-cracking troglodyte. They are simply the latest group of obsessive-compulsives with a new and better toy with which to manifest their pathological need to avoid intimacy (and probably human interaction in general) through long work hours.
Working from home (and alone from what it sounds like) is hardly the place to claim imminent danger from stress. One guy works from his bedroom. What is pushing him to self-destruction? A wife who spends too much at Saks Fifth Avenue? Most of them don’t even make that much money, so why not spend those many twilight hours of mad typing doing something that could bring more bread home? Like baking.
Maybe its the joy of spreading their opinions around like a virus, commenting on anything and everything while feeling as though they deserve to be heard. Hell, this article refers to them as “growing legions of online chroniclers.” If that’s not an inflation of this job, I don’t know what is. Check out the article by clicking here.
Bah, humbug.
The ninth ward of New Orleans
Travis Fox’s “The Pioneer of the Ninth Ward” is a great example of minimalist storytelling that succeeds because of technical finesse and Fox’s eye for the aesthetically pleasing.
First of all, the camera work, like all of Fox’s work, is rock solid to the point where the story evolves like a photo slideshow, complete with the artistic bent of that medium.
Fox created this story to fit the subject matter, letting the audio and camera work move in a slow rhythm from frame to frame, mixing with the overgrown fields and dilapidated, abandoned houses.
The sequences flowed as though we could have met this woman and the street and were invited into her home. The general quiet of the natural sound gave an intimacy to the story that might be lost, a quality further helped by the soft indoor lighting and dark contours of the “pioneer’s” face as she watches the television.
Even with the deeply human perspective, Fox made sure to address the broader issues of government funding and a New Orleans possibly forever changed. t’s a sad story with not much hope, and Fox conveys this with many wide-angles of the stark and empty surroundings as well as detail shots of the trashed remnants of human life.
This also helps the audio. The all-important hope that this woman feels bites with more force and irresistable empathy when it is spoken in a low-voice still crystal clear through the excellent mike job. The entire video was sequences, but always performed with the same methodical perfection of time, lighting and angle.
In short, I wish I had his equipment and his job.
Here is the link: click here.
