|
Multimedia Storytelling Requires Special Training and Creative Thinking
By Shellie Branco
Panelists (from left) Janice Castro, Paul Grabowicz and Mindy McAdams |
When Winston Churchill died in 1965, Life magazine assembled a photo lab in a jet airplane and flew to England to
get pictures of the funeral. It was a clever idea: Develop the pictures on the way back to the United States in order to save
some time.
Unfortunately for Life, television networks aired footage of the funeral and audiences got their fill of the memorial service
long before Life’s pictures hit the newsstand. Sales for the magazine’s Churchill issue were disappointing.
That anecdote was a reminder from Northwestern University new media professor Janice
Castro that editors’ creative ideas
must be balanced with the realities imposed by new technology.
Castro was joined by Mindy McAdams, Knight Chair in journalism at the University of Florida, and Paul
Grabowicz, director
of the new media program at the University of California at Berkeley, who discussed successful student and professional multimedia
projects and shared best practices for teaching multimedia skills.
Today’s Web-savvy readers want to touch and navigate their way through a story, Castro said. Users are becoming accustomed
to an online experience that includes 3-D navigation, allowing them to drive through the content and make choices among the media
types they encounter.
At UC Berkeley, students create content-rich Web sites with video, moblogs and more. Grabowicz said he advises students working
on Web content to create storyboards, work in teams and keep the focus simple.
McAdams said that anyone designing a Web project should have a working knowledge of Flash animation. But she cautioned that
not every member of a project team has to be a superstar Web designer.
“People can’t be good at everything, but they can be good at two or three things,” she added.
She also advised that story packages should be prepared in advance during a graphic artist’s downtime, especially before
requests start piling up later in the news day.
McAdams presented examples of USAToday.com’s interactive display showing how the Columbia shuttle blew apart and the
timing of the explosions that struck Madrid’s trains during the recent terrorist attack. She added that Flash shouldn’t
be intimidating to first-timers—her students learn it in the first class. Learning layout is much more difficult than learning
Flash, she said.
In discussing the importance of visual media, Castro noted that after Sept. 11, online editors saw a spike in page views for
photos. People stayed on a page and lingered over the photos in an unprecedented way, she said.
She also pointed out the dominance of photography in most newspapers and magazines, adding that the articles themselves are
starting to become mere “connective tissue” to graphics.
“Readers expect to see the story,” Castro said. “Text is no longer enough.” |
