October 20, 2007
Magnum In Motion: Getting the story online
Bjarke Myrthu
This is the third and final part of a multi-part article series on the work of Magnum's multimedia department. The first part of this series was entitled "The philosophy behind the story", the second part "The importance of sound". Bjarke Myrthu, the executive editor of Magnum In Motion, grants us a view behind the scenes and shows us how the Magnum In Motion team brings life to static photographs on the web.
While the Internet sometimes limits the possibilities of storytelling, it has also made it possible to post stories to the entire world from almost any location. Last week the Magnum In Motion team sought new inspiration by moving the office to Tea Lounge in Brooklyn for a few hours. © Stephen Taylor, Magnum In Motion intern
After a month and a half of hard work we are at last screening the final edit of "Libera Me", the latest Magnum In Motion essay. Everything is received well by Alex Majoli and the rest of the people that watch it. However having a movie that plays merrily on the computer is not the same as having a finalized online piece. Some hard work still lies ahead. We need to make the movie run smoothly online, making it viewable on a reasonable fast internet connection without loosing too much quality, and we need to add the extra features and chapters that make this story different from an offline video.
Naturally the most important thing is the content and the story. But the online platform holds certain technical limitations that inadvertently influence the stories. However having certain technical boundaries is nothing new to storytellers. The old day moviemakers had to stay within twenty-minute sections, because this was all a camera reel could hold, which, newspaper and broadcast journalists have time and space limitations and so on. The important thing is how you play with the creativity and use these limits to form your storytelling.
The challenge online is that the better and bigger the visuals look, and the better the audio sounds, the more data has to be pushed through the internet pipeline, which often means that the viewer in the other end will experience a jagged and slow playback. To be sure that the story plays well it has to be compressed, but then the images risk becoming small and pixilated and the audio will sound canny and chopped. One of the ways to avoid this has been to chop the story into smaller elements, giving the end user less to load through the internet.
Screenshot from the Magnum In Motion essay "Revolution" by Burt Glinn
This fragmented way of telling stories can, however, work nicely if you either use it to give the viewer control of the navigation, or you trick the viewer into thinking it is one long story, because certain parts are loaded while the others are being watched. A story like "Revolution" is actually build from small pieces of photos, graphics and audio, but they load in a sequence that makes it look like one long movie. In "Libera Me" we choose to chop the story into several different chapters. This gives the viewer a better overview and leaves a choice to watch certain parts of the story separately, which I think makes sense in this story (other stories are more suited to be kept as one entire piece), but technically it also ensures a better playback.
Making something look nice and giving the viewer a good experience has definitely become easier over the past years, with the rise of fast broadband connections, streaming flash video and improved compression methods. With the introduction of the latest flash video format the quality has become so good that we can actually produce a movie in FinalCut (video editing software), export a QuickTime movie, and convert it to flash video directly using a tool like On2 Flix or Sorensen Squeeze. Earlier we had to chop the movie into pieces and rebuild it inside flash to get the image quality we wanted (I could do a longer technical and nerdy explanation, but I will leave it at this).
Another challenge is to add interactive elements like timelines, maps, links and other extras - either inside the actual video or as an attachment to the main story. It involves quite a bit of Flash coding to do this. At MIM we have created a special content management system that enables us to avoid a lot of the coding, but some flash skills are still necessary. So I recommend learning basic Flash to anyone who wants to do real interactive storytelling. But once again if you are creative and bend your storytelling a bit to suit the technical barriers, you actually do not need to know more than the basic Flash techniques.
Even though the workflow has become easier with the introduction of the new flash video the final steps can still be quite painful as a storyteller. Your crisp clean audio and visuals suddenly appear canny and pixilated after being run through conversion and compression, and features that you thought would work smoothly are jagged and broken. And if there were only one simple solution, if it were only a matter of using some extra hours on redoing a defined mistake, a lot of frustration would be saved. But it is never that simple. There is a reason most videos on YouTube and other online places looks quite horrible compared to broadcast and print, and that if you occasionally stumble upon something with of nice quality it takes half a day before it starts streaming on your end.
There are many parameters that can be adjusted and tweaked when preparing online content and all of them interact with each other making results unpredictable - so the only way to go about it is to test, test and test again until the best possible result is achieved.
The process will be easier the better the source footage is. Clean sound and moving images without too much shaking and bad lighting come out much better. Advanced transitions inside the video, and filters and effect on the audio will also make your life as an online storyteller more difficult.
Keeping it simple is still the key word online. But it does not necessarily mean that the creativity needs to be restricted. In the case of Libera Me it was actually an easy story to get online, because of the simplicity of the images and transitions. But nevertheless I find the story quite powerful.
Looking back at producing Libera Me I think what we did well with this story was to create a cinematic experience, with a really good rhythm between images and sound, and a lot of feeling and emotion. In this sense we have moved the language of visual storytelling, which is one of the most important missions behind Magnum In Motion. However, I still feel that we could get much further with the interactivity and non-linear storytelling. In the future I would like to give the user the option to navigate different ways through the story like a spider web, instead of a traditional storyline that resembles a film. We have the ideas, but we need to overcome some technical barriers. But I think we are getting there.
Any comments, feedback and suggestions for our work at Magnum In Motion are highly appreciated.
Published on the Magnum Blog on October 20, 2007
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