Wire & Lights

Recently exchanged emails with radio reporter for Bauer media, Adam Westbrook, about his ambitious multimedia side-project oneweekinIraq.net.

He recounts a lot of his approach at Tracy Boyer’s Innovative Interactivity. Essentially, Adam was assigned to go to Iraq for a week to do radio reports on the final days of the deployment for British forces based in Baghdad in Basra.  While there, he shot video and gathered assets for a much larger multimedia endeavor on his own time.

The multimedia package is a rare glimpse into the lives of the British soldiers.  It struck me that while I tend to see a lot of multimedia on the lives of the U.S. troops in my job, I rarely see projects about coalition troops or other countries.

In Adam’s II post, I was struck by his candid acknowledgement of the struggles in putting together a full multimedia presentation on ones own.

“One Week In Iraq” is my first multimedia product and it’s been a real learning curve. From getting to grips with covering for several platforms, to learning how to build a collage; I even taught myself CSS. But at the end of this, I have to ask the difficult question: has attempting to cover the story in so many ways watered down the quality of the final product? If I’m honest I would say yes. In attempting to cover so much, I’ve ended up not covering that much; what’s really missing is a central character and a gripping plot, which sucks you in and spits you out: those ancient elements of storytelling which never change, even if the technology does.”

I can definitely sympathize with this.  Sometimes on deadline, I  go out on an assignment to gather  assets, and don’t always have a clear sense in my head of where the whole story or entire package will go.  Sometimes the story finds you, but it’s a crap shoot. Finding that narrative arc means taking some time to step back and take a thoughtful approach.  And often it means another set of eyes that can see your same story from a different angle.  For me, finding that powerful story arc while keeping so many balls in the air is always the hardest part, but it’s the part that gets me out of bed in the morning.