Misha Leybovich, an international technology consultant, likes to tell stories the old-fashioned way: in person. But, as a technologist, he also wanted to tell stories using the Web. “There needs to be an easier way to tell [digital] stories,” said Leybovich, as he recounted the conception days of Meograph, a tool he created for sharing stories in space and time.

There have been more than 22,000 Meographs created.  Some have been created media companies to tell time- and location-based news stories or to document historical events.  Others have been created  by students and teachers to explain scientific concepts. And one was even created by a husband to celebrate his wife’s birthday.

The best way to understand a Meograph is to experience one.

A Meograph is a linear multimedia infographic that combines maps, timelines, audio narration, photos and video in an evolving, intuitive online interface.

Meograph’s user interface and feature set has taken a multi-stop journey to arrive at its current, intuitive state. Leybovich explains that the first version, which the company thought was easy and groundbreaking, was surpassingly difficult for users. “We watched the numbers and watched people use the tool and realized something had to change quickly.” So Leybovich and co-founder and developer Francis Escuadro released a vastly different interface, going from a WYSIWYG editor to a more common wizard user input model, and quickly saw a change in user behavior.

The latest upgrade to Meograph includes longer voice narration and “drag and drop” map integration. Also, the road map includes adding custom styling and security features for subscribing customers.

The platform is built on Ruby on Rails hosted on Heroku and Amazon S3 with Haml and SASS front end. It integrates media services such as Flickr and YouTube and uses the Google Maps API.
Other posts that might interest you:

• Featured Tool: Infogr.am
• Behind the scenes: “Soul of Athens: Our dreams are different”

Inside the Haiti Earthquake is one of three components of the multi-platform documentary project, Inside Disaster.

Inside Disaster (release: January 2011) is a three-part documentary series that follows the Red Cross humanitarian response to the January 2010 Haiti earthquake from the inside.

InsideDisaster.com is an interactive website that combines content and themes from the documentary series with original photo, video and research created by the 16-person web team. InsideDisaster.com is the definitive online resource about the Haiti earthquake and humanitarian work.

Inside the Haiti Earthquake is a first-person simulation that combines footage and stories from the Inside Disaster documentary with original video, photos, and music recorded by Nicolas Jolliet in Haiti. The result is a genre-bending interactive experience that lets users step inside life on the ground in the chaotic aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.

1. How long did it take to produce this site, both in-the-field and post-production? How many people were involved?

Michael Gibson (writer / co-director), Nicolas Jolliet (Co-­‐Director, Cinematographer, Sound Recordist, Editor, Composer, Music Supervisor) and I (producer) began developing the idea of an interactive experience set within a humanitarian emergency in the Fall of 2009, before we knew the crew would end up shooting in Haiti.

The web and documentary crew were in Haiti for four weeks after the earthquake, and returned several times afterwards for additional material. It was about a year from concept (October 2009) to launch (October 2010), with about eight months of full-on production.

Over twenty different people contributed to the project, including the PTV Productions team, Michael, Nico and I, the documentary crew, the designers, programmers and testers, and our colleagues in Haiti (fixers, drivers, musicians).

2. How many steps can users choose from in each of the three paths?

Each character follows a simple branching narrative, choose-your-own-adventure style, with dozens of choices along the way that eventually lead to about five possible endings per character.

“I wanted to create an interweaving storyline that connected the three main characters, and also revealed the conflict between them” says the simulation’s Writer and Co-Director, Michael Gibson.

“Rather than offering the user solutions and opinions, we let people experience the doubt, chaos, and shock that most of us felt in Haiti,” says Co-Director Nicolas Jolliet, who spent six weeks in the country as part of the Inside Disaster project.

3. How did you come up with this type of storytelling and storyboard the interaction?

Nicolas Jolliet and the documentary crew returned from Haiti in February 2010 with over 200 hours of film and 1500+ photographs between them.

To create the first draft of the the script, Gibson and Jolliet spent hours looking through footage for storylines, while Gibson interviewed Nadine Pequeneza, the director of the Inside Disaster documentary series, about what she witnessed in the country while filming survivors, and the Red Cross.

Gibson probed for stories about how survivors, media, and relief workers interacted after the disaster, focusing on the challenges, conflicts, and moments of human empathy that arose that arose between them.

“From the beginning, all three of us were committed to the idea of the simulation unfolding through the eyes of the three main players in any disaster relief operation — the survivors, the aid workers, and the media,” says Katie McKenna.

“I was attracted to the challenge of the material itself,” says Michael Gibson. “How do we create a first-person role play simulation of a monumental event, using raw documentary footage, from three different points of view?”

For the project leads, the final product has been difficult to define, lying somewhere between the new media worlds of “serious games,” “newsgames,” and interactive documentary.

“We don’t call it a game,” says Michael Gibson. “With few exceptions, everything you see onscreen is documentary material from the first days after the earthquake in Haiti. These are real people living real experiences; it’s certainly not a game for them, and we want the user to feel that way too.”

4. What kind of traffic has this site received? Time spent on site?

About 60,000 unique visitors since launch, steady traffic even since Haiti fell out of headlines. Our Flash server provider doesn’t track time on site, unfortunately.

5. If you could go back and do anything differently, what would it be and why?

I’d want to make the experience more interactive — show the branching narrative along the bottom as the user progress, to make it easier for them to explore ‘the path not taken’, and also leave opportunities for comments and feedback throughout the site.

6. Who sponsored the site?

The site was produced by PTV Productions, with funding from TVOntario, the Canada Media Fund (CMF-FMC) and Bell Broadcast and New Media Fund, and the Government of Canada provided through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

7. What was your role in the project and how can readers learn more about you?

I was the site’s Interactive Producer. I’m now independent and can be found at katiemckenna.ca or on twitter @ktmckenna.

I am thrilled to bring you an exclusive interview with Kat Cizek, Emmy award winner and director of Highrise, an innovative project by National Film Board of Canada on urbanization and highrise architecture around the world. Last year I featured an earlier project in the series, Out My Window. They recently released their latest project One Millionth Tower, which is an immersive 3D virtual documentary built with HTML5, webGL, open-source Javascript libraries and numerous APIs. You can either watch the 7-minute documentary is a passive, sit-back fashion or as an interactive 3D experience. For users with dated computer technology, there is also a simple HTML version. Hopefully you can experience the “super-techie version” (as Kat says!).

Q. How did this story come about?

A. One Millionth Tower is the latest installment of a larger project called HIGHRISE at the National Film Board of Canada. We are exploring the human experience of vertical in the global suburbs. Our last project was a very global one, we told the stories of 13 apartments from 13 very different cities set in one “virtual highrise.” That project was called Out My Window, and it won an Emmy, among other international prizes.

For One Millionth Tower, we wanted to start very “hyper-local,” so we returned to a group of highrise residents in suburban Toronto, with whom we’ve been working since the beginning of the HIGHRISE on a participatory media project. We had learned a lot from them about the conditions within which they live, and we wanted to harness their knowledge and creativity to envision a better highrise neighbourhood. We teamed them up with a group of architects, ERA, who have been studying and advocating “tower renewal” – an approach to rejuvenate tower neighbourhoods. Together, they chose 4 sites around their building, and re-imagined the spaces using photography and illustration. We then thought it might be great to bring the illustrations to life, so we brought in a team of animators.

Meanwhile, I had begun discussions with Helios Design Lab. I asked them to look into an emerging project at Mozilla, called Popcorn, which I thought might be an interesting way to make our little documentary video behave a bit more like the web, by bringing in real-time contextual data. Mike Robbins, of Helios, went much further than that into the HTML5, and brought back the idea to place the whole story in a 3d environment directly in the browser, using emerging technology called webGL.

So the whole project and process is very iterative and organic, merging social innovation with technological innovation. We explore the story of re-imagining a physical world by telling the story in a re-imagined virtual world.

There’s also more about the genesis of the project in my director’s statement.

Q. How long did this project take from conception to completion and what was the budget?

A. We’ve been working with the residents since 2009 and that’s very important to note: participatory and collaborative work needs the time to develop. One Millionth Tower as a concept started in the summer of 2010, our architectural workshops happened in the fall of 2010, the animators worked from late 2010 to March 2011, and then Mike, the 3d creative technologist, started working on project in earnest in the spring of 2011. The budget was around 100,000$ CAD (Editor’s Note: ~ $96,260 USD).

Q. What equipment and software were used both in the field and during the website production phases?

A. We used a simple audio recorder and photography “in the field.” We used Final Cut Pro to cut the main story and the special features. The animators used Photoshop and aftereffects, and then Mike used almost entirely open-source technology to create the website: webGL, Mozilla’s Popcorn, Jquery, Three.js, Blender, WebM, Ogg Vorbis. We draw on universal subtitles for crowd-sourced translation (so far users have helped us with Spanish, Chinese, Portugese and Dutch versions). We also use a bunch of APIs: Yahoo weather, Wikipedia. Flickr, and Google street- and satellite views.

Q. What was the biggest obstacle you had to overcome during the production phase?

A. Innovation is always exciting but also complex as a process. No one has really gone before you, so there aren’t always tried and true structures to follow. We ended up using web technology that didn’t even exist when we started the project a few months earlier. So that was really a challenge, to take what had started as a simple linear animated documentary and turn it into a non-linear story set within a 3d space. We went through many painful rounds of user-testing through the summer, and thanks to Mike for always being up for try something new, we eventually worked out some really interesting solutions to the limitations of the project, and we’re all pretty happy with the results.

Q. If you could go back and do anything differently, what would it be and why?

A. It’s important not to dwell on regrets when you are working in a context of totally new technology in an iterative process. The point is to experiment and try different things, and just constantly move forward (that was our mantra during user-testing: move forward!). In the fall of 2010, while at the community site, Heather Frise, the Community Media Lead and I had some wishful thinking of making the project in 3d space, but at that point, it would have been financially and logistically impossible to spend so much energy working with the conventional 3d systems.

It’s only when Mike discovered webGL in the spring of 2011 that it became a possibility. It’s also really thanks to our Senior Producer, Gerry Flahive, who is always open to new ideas and supports innovation at any stage of a production – we were almost done the animated documentary at that point, and we had to seriously reshuffle the budget and the production process.

So staying flexible and open to new ideas and not looking back too too much is a really important part of doing this kind of work.

The biggest lesson I learned, back while still making conventional films (from my co-director Peter Wintonick) was to always do a lot of screen-testing and user-testing, and I think that one can never do enough of that. So if there had been more time, I would have liked to do more user-testing.

On the other hand, releasing at the right time was an important part of this project, one can’t hang on to things in an innovative environment striving for everything to be “perfect” There’s a balance of just letting the work go into the world and contribute to a contemporary discussion. It’s all a balance.

Q. If you can, please share any other usage statistics such as time spent on site and numbers of pages visited.

A. One Millionth Tower has had a huge immediate international response. We premiered on the front-page of Wired.com, and within 48 hours they had 40,000 hits. Gizmodo picked up the story, and within 24 hours they had 30,000 hits on their article about us. Within the first week, we were in 4 of Technorati’s top global blogs – TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Engadget, Boing Boing, and Gizmodo. We’ve had great response from the social side of things too, a fantastic article in The Atlantic Cities blog came out that same week, which is a huge honour. Also, a great interview on BBC world services Radio.

We’ve had users from 180 countries within the first week. From what we can tell, our biggest numbers of visitors are coming from the US, then Japan (!) and then Canada. So, apparently, we are big in Japan.

Q. Is there anything else that you would like the viewer to know before visiting this project?

A. The project is built in an emerging technology called webGL, which is available to users who have webGL enabled computers (new-ish graphics cards, essentially) and webGL plays in Firefox and Chrome. So based on the stats available to us at the time, this meant the 3d version of this story would reach only 42% of users. So what we did was create an HTML version of all the content, so that all users across all computers (and mobile devices) could watch all of the stories. Mike developed a browser detection system so that users would be automatically sent to the version best suited to their computer systems.

As it turns out, our own early numbers are suggesting that way over 50% of our users have accessed the webGL version, which is pretty amazing. It means we’ve reached a tech-savy crowd, but it also means that webGL is moving very fast. It’s been around for 6 months, and it has somewhere between 40-50% penetration. Most other new tech have taken a much longer time to get that kind of pickup. Things are moving fast.

What is also clear, is that users are understanding that One Millionth Tower is not just about the technology. We didn’t just choose webGL and Popcorn because they are cool and new. We chose them because we feel strongly that use of space as well as a deeper connection to the web are both fast becoming the next important evolutions in telling documentary stories of our times.

Until recently, as a documentary maker, I had only access to audio, visuals, locked into a small 2d box. We chose to tell One Millionth Tower, a story about space within 3d space. We also chose to connect a “real-life” story connected to real-time data across the web, thanks to Popcorn. For example, when its raining at the real tower, its raining in One Millionth Tower.

And I think users are getting all that. People are really inspired by the residents of the highrise tower to envision and re-imagine something better for the space around them. It’s moving.

I was as really happy to hear @Terry_Whyte, of rural PEI, one of 2000+ twitterers who’ve tweeted about the project so far, say, “Came for the HTML5, stayed for the story.”

Mapping Milwaukee’s infant mortality crisis by JSOnline

I have blogged about JSOnline’s impressive multimedia packages several times in the past. This time around I’m excited to take you behind the scenes of “Empty Cradles,” an in-depth series on infant mortality in and around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Below is my Q&A with fellow UNC grad Emily Yount, who helped produce many of the interactive pieces for this package.

Q. Why did you choose not to bundle the story sections together?

A. The interactive pieces, including “Mapping Milwaukee’s infant mortality crisis,” “Prematurity’s costs,” “Timeline: Millie and Simona,” and “Inside the modern NICU,” that ran on Sunday, Sept. 25 are part of the story “Priceless preemies, costly care,” by Mark Johnson and Guy Boulton and are a part of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s year-long series on infant mortality, “Empty Cradles.”

You can access each interactive from the story page and all of the content for the Empty Cradles series can be found on its index page. We plan to produce a more custom landing or index page for all of the Empty Cradles content before the final installment of the series in December.

Q. How long did this project take?

A. I worked on the four interactive elements for approximately a month. That includes brainstorming sessions with the reporters, research into the technology of producing each piece, compiling data and then producing each element. However, the map is a culmination of research and work for each installment of the Empty Cradles series since January. Our goal was to bring together data and resources from every angle of the story we have covered thus far.

Also, reporters and editors have worked on the “Priceless preemies, costly care” piece off and on since the spring.

Q. How many producers worked on it?

A. Five people with a variety of skills had a hand in the production end of the project.

Lou Saldivar, Graphics Editor, consulted on design and produced the graphic for “Inside the modern NICU.” He also produced the print version of “Prematurity’s costs” which was the basis for the online version.

Ben Poston, Data Editor, compiled and cleaned up all of the data, geocoded the zip codes and pointed me towards Google Fusion Tables as a means for producing the map.

Bill Schulz, Senior Multimedia and Video Designer, integrated the map and charts into our CMS, and produced the 360 degree panoramic “Inside the modern NICU” with photographer Rick Wood.

Jim Conigliaro, Director of Interactive Technology, worked on the map’s compatibility with Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

I designed and developed the interactive map, worked with reporter Guy Boulton to define and map “Access to Primary Care” for each zip code, produced the interactive version of “Prematurity’s costs,” and produced “Timeline: Millie and Simona” with the help of reporter Mark Johnson and photographer Rick Wood.

Q. What technology did you use for the timeline and map?

A. The navigation and functionality of the map is built with HTML, Javascript and jQuery. Each polygon zip code layer or set of points on the map correspond to a table in Google Fusion Tables. The data and information windows are set within Google Fusion Tables and are queried with the Google Maps Javascript V3 API.

The timeline is a free tool from ProPublica called TimelineSetter that our developers integrated into our CMS. The tool allows you in categorize content and include text, images, audio and video with simple HTML.

The dynamic charts use a combination of HTML/CSS, JavaScript and the JavaScript library Highcharts.

What was the biggest challenge?

A. I produced all of my previous projects with ActionScript 3.0 and I expected making the switch to HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery to be the biggest challenge. Surprisingly, I found the transition less difficult, but faced problems integrating the pieces into our CMS and making them compatible with older browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and 8. In an effort not to exclude 50% of our readership that uses IE 7/8 we back-tracked on our use of HTML5 in exchange for standard DHTML.

Q. What would you have done differently if you were to redo the project?

A. We designed and developed each interactive piece, and the map in particular, in a way that can be easily repurposed and improved upon, in hopes of making the newsroom capable of responding to both long-term projects and breaking news with interactive content. We have plans to improve the map with custom styling and improved interactivity. For example, I would like the info windows on the map to appear on roll over or on click and to display images or graphics when necessary.

We would also like to improve “Inside the modern NICU,” by integrating the 360 degree panoramic with the graphic that highlights each piece of equipment’s purpose and cost, while maintaining its accessibility across platforms – online, mobile and tablet.

Goa hippy tribe

Last January I took you behind the scenes of “Africa to Australia,” a multimedia site by SBS Online. Their latest project “Goa hippy tribe” is another Flash-heavy, video-rich site that incorporates Facebook connect to personalize the experience.

I was hesitant to blog about this site though due to the nudity and open dialogue about drug use, but then I realized that this is actually a great vehicle to discuss rationale behind telling these types of stories. So, I invite you to read the following Q&A with Darius Devas (Director), Nick Doherty (Managing Editor, TV Online) and Matt Smith (Designer and Developer), then I’d love to hear your thoughts on the site in the comments below.

1. How did this story come about? Why did you feel it was important to share the story of this tribe?

Darius D: What made it so interesting for me was how the tribe had all spontaneously reunited on Facebook in 2009 which sparked the idea to have a reunion. The fact that they had all gone to Goa to escape the west and civilisation and then all these years later, Facebook the ultimate symbol of modern culture was what brought them all back together was just so fascinating and then to be able to realise the project through Facebook, the same thing that brought them together again, made for such an incredible project.

Nick D: Goa Hippy Tribe continues SBS’s R&D into new forms of factual storytelling. Following the online-only documentary Africa to Australia and a couple of multiplatform projects, Immigration Nation and Go Back to Where You Came From, it was really, from the broadcaster’s point of view, an experiment into whether we could build audience for a documentary through social media and then migrate it back to the network. The traditional broadcast model in reverse, really. It is vital that SBS continues trying to reach audiences on whichever platform they prefer.

2. The nude photo on the main interface is startling to say the least – was there discussion around how users might react to this photo? If so, what was the rationale to keep it?

Matt S: I designed the site around the image. But at various points throughout the project we discussed whether it was suitable. Was it right for our audience? Could it be misrepresented or misunderstood? I experimented with other treatments. But for me it was the strongest visual link we had to the idea of the ‘tribe’ – from that time and place, in their element – and that was enough rationale to keep it in.

Darius D: Yeah it was a contentious one! At one point it was decided to remove the image but I fought hard to keep it, as to me it is the iconic photo from those times, there is something so free and casual about them and personally it doesn’t feel sexually loaded, they seem so comfortable to be naked that it’s not even an issue.

Nick D: It being a documentary, and that being a first-hand artefact from the time/project, we felt there was editorial justification. Plus, anything that creates a reaction and centres the user’s attention – given there is usually so much distraction to using a website – is probably positive.

3. Some of the videos are pixelated and poor quality while others are decent – were you shooting with different cameras or did you make this effect in the editing stage, and why?

Darius D: As there was little archival material to work with I brought my trusty old super8 camera with me and shot a bunch of ‘recreated archival’ which was really fun because I love to shoot on super8 its just got such a great aesthetic which was perfectly suited for this project.

4. Tell us about the Facebook Connect option – what percentage of users are logging in to experience the website? How many are sharing, commenting and otherwise interacting with the stories using Facebook?

Matt S: The project has a lot of content. We needed a way for return visitors – the dedicated users – to record their progress through the site. If you’ve connected to the app and visit the site again in the future, you’ll pick up right where you left off. This could have been done with a standard login system, but given the project’s inception was on Facebook it made a lot of sense to use Connect.

At this time, the site has only been up a few days so it’s hard to gauge the success of using Facebook. Having said that, half of our external referrers are coming from Facebook.

5. If you can, please share any other usage statistics such as time spent on site and numbers of pages visited.

Matt S: Again, hard to say how this will play out long term, but we’re seeing good results on our average video view times. Across all videos, half of users are completing the streams they view. Also, the average stream time is about 4 minutes – well above the average view time for internet video.

6. What equipment and software were used both in the field and during the website production phases?

Darius D: It was filmed on a Sony EX1 and edited in Goa on a Macbook Pro using Final Cut.

Matt S: Everything was designed in Photoshop. The site is a standard Flash build which we felt was necessary for the types of interactions and animation we were looking to achieve. On the tech side, it’s built on top of the Gaia Flash Framework, and uses a bunch of libraries: CasaLib, TweenMax, OVP for Akamai video.

7. How long did it take to produce this site and what was the budget?

Nick D: Sign-off at the SBS Commissioning panel to launch of site was something like eighteen months all up. SBS brought cash and in-kind contribution to the project, something like 40-60K which was matched by the other investors. The total budget for this doc (and most of the other interactive docs we have done) has been sub-$150K, though we are able to get a lot of bang for our buck if we are able to keep the web production phase in-house. In addition, we commissioned a further round of content halfway through the project – re-editing some of the text pieces and adding other assets like the short ‘factoids’ – for another 30K.

8. If you could go back and do anything differently, what would it be and why?

Nick D: I would love to have commissioned a variety of additional assets for the project adding another layer of value for the user. Things like wallpapers, more music tracks, magazine extracts. Paraphernalia of the period, basically.

Darius D: I’d go back to 1973, give my dad a super 8 and a hundred rolls of film and tell him to shoot me some decent archival material!!!
Other posts that might interest you:

• SBS launches multimedia site “Dragon Children”
• Behind the scenes: “Soul of Athens: Our dreams are different”
• Move over Dipity! AVE, a new interactive timeline editor to put on your radar

“I spent my spring break in the unlikeliest of places—a sprawling Mexican garbage dump. Ignoring travel warnings and admonitions from friends and family, a team of Carolina Photojournalism students traveled to Mexico City for ten days to tell stories that we felt were missing in media portrayals of the country.

I set out to produce a multimedia documentary on trash pickers, or as they are known in Mexico, pepenadors. Because the topic seemed so remarkable to me, I knew it would be important to find a universal angle to the story. I imagined that a story about a family of several generations living at the dump would humanize a dehumanizing profession.

My partners Aldo and Gerardo, documentary students from Monterrey Tec, worked for about a month to secure our entry to Bordo Xochiaca, the dump outside Mexico City where roughly one thousand pepenadors live and work. They got access by being persistent and befriending the gatekeepers to the site. There they met Sabina Morales Gomez, a 23-year-old mother raising her three young children in the only place they could afford to live.

The dump is a truly toxic environment. An indescribable stench permeates everything. Dust storms whip trash and particulate through the air. The threat of illness is everywhere in pools of fetid water, streams of raw sewage, and roving packs of feral dogs.

Shooting a multimedia story in this atmosphere required stamina. Because I am still honing my “steady arm,” hand-holding my DSLR was not an option for most video shots. This meant that I carted my tripod around with me everywhere, comically sprinting across bogs of soft trash to catch a shot.

Although my Canon 5D Mark II is as unassuming as a video camera can be, there remained the threat of it being stolen or damaged from flying debris. All together, I found my lenses, tripod, flash recorder, and mics to be more of a burden than an advantage. By the end of the shoot I simplified my gear to a single lens and an on-board Sennheiser mic.

A particular source of anxiety was deciding when to take stills or video. I quickly got over the thrill of being able to “do it all” with one little device. When I felt overwhelmed I would choose one form of photography and commit to it for twenty minutes, just working every angle until I was ready to move on.

In total, I spent seven days shooting and about a month in post-production. Halfway through the shoot, my group got a surprising call. Sabina told us that she had a fight with her family and was going to leave the dump. Her plan was to stay with a friend and try to cobble together enough income to rent a room.

I am ashamed to say now that my first instinct was utter disappointment. All I could think about was how much more shooting I still had to do at the dump. It took me a moment, but I did find my head. Not only was Sabina doing what was best for her family by moving them to a safer and healthier place, but also I was lucky enough to be there with her while she went through this remarkable transition.

From a documentary perspective, the situation was ideal. Suddenly the story embodied those magic ingredients of risk, tension, conflict and—most importantly—unfolding action. A transformation was taking place in real time to witness and record. Sabina’s bold decision became a focus and provided a clear structure for the story.

It is common for us documentarians to tell stories of extreme hardship in places that are very different from the ones we ourselves live in. In such situations, I sometimes have serious doubts, and question whether the act of simply telling a story can help to combat suffering.

I do this work because I believe that people have a fundamental need to be seen and understood. That is what documentary aspires to do. And regardless of the challenges, there is great power in it.

As a result of getting to know and care for Sabina’s family, our group wanted to give back in a tangible way. We took up a collection as a token of our appreciation for their generosity in sharing their story.

Currently, my partners in Mexico are repurposing some of the materials we collected to raise awareness about the conditions pepenadors live in. Their next goal is to work with a nonprofit to start a fund for Sabina and her children.

Let me know what you think of the story, and do keep in touch if you are interested in learning about how you can contribute.”

To learn more about Cath, follow her on Twitter and view her portfolio.
Other posts that might interest you:

• UNC launches “Coal: A Love Story” for 2011 Powering a Nation installment

If somebody asked me what should they do to prepare for the role of being a senior producer on the Soul of Athens project I would answer with “be prepared to not sleep for three months.”

If you haven’t heard of the project before you’re probably asking what exactly is this Soul of Athens? The Soul of Athens is a multimedia project that is created, maintained and built by Ohio University students from the ground up.

It’s a constant evolving animal that has had different themes and looks over the past years. For this year’s project, the senior producers decided to look at one theme for all of the stories. We decided to go with the changing American dream, how the dream has changed, how it persists as well as the myths and realities of its unending pursuit. In years past the project would have more than one theme and the producers saw this as a problem, perhaps as if Soul of Athens was going off in many different directions without a set path. Having just one theme helped shape and drive the stories the students were creating in a clear direction.

This was my first year on the project and I was happy to fill the role of being a senior producer. For this role I had to learn to become a team leader, storyboard creator and editor for my team. Along side fellow grad student Mitch Casey we led a team of five content creators and helped edit and push their stories to the next level. I believe this a great way for students to learn how a team environment works and how to help edit a photographers work. It also helped that some of our fellow senior producers were great photographers themselves like Victor Blue, Brad Vest and Andrea Morales. It was also a great experience in learning how far I can push myself without sleep and how to deal with the frustration of team problems.

On the design side of things we decided to try something new for Soul of Athens and the idea of creating an iPad app was introduced. It just recently launched in the iTunes store and we’re very excited of all the attention and downloads it has been getting. The iPad app team was led by Tristan Wyatt who worked side by side with designers coming up with an interactive app that would help the user experience Soul of Athens in a whole new light with interactive info graphs, videos and stories.

The web team created a site that fixed some of the past problems that Soul of Athens had with user experience. In the past people would easily get confused with the site or wouldn’t want to dig too deep into it, this year’s site has a simpler design and is very easy to navigate for the user. The stories stand out in front and the user can take their time and go through each one without feeling rushed or confused.

For this year’s Soul the senior producers came up with the idea that we should have a small number of strong stand out stories. For past Soul projects the number of stories was anywhere from 25-40. For this years project we decided to have 15 stories. This set the bar extremely high for the students to create multimedia projects that would stand out not only with strong visuals, but that told great stories as well.

We originally had over 30 stories that we needed to cut down to 15. This in my opinion was one of the hardest decisions to make for the site this year. It felt that every story that we looked at could live on the web site, but we knew that 50% of the stories were not going to make it. After hours of conversations, arguments and votes the 15 stories were selected for the site.

When the dust finally settled we were left with stories that ranged from veterans who honor their fallen brothers at funerals, a retired veterinarian who is trying to build his own tiger sanctuary in southeast Ohio and a father who dreams of being a great dad, but his drug addiction and problems with he law are getting in the way. These were just a few of the amazing stories that made up Soul of Athens: Our Dreams are Different.

Make sure to view all of these stories at www.soulofathens.com

Matt Adams just finished up his first year as a grad student studying Multimedia Production at Ohio University. He attended Point Park University for undergrad and received his B.A. in Photojournalism in 2007. Matt interned at Pittsburgh Magazine back in 2005 where he was able to work under Richard Kelly who was director of photography at the time.

Matt has been shooting freelance music photography since 2004 and he has been able to work with publications such as Alternative Press, Guitar World, Pittsburgh Magazine and Toronto Life Magazine.

Originally Matt is from Pittsburgh, PA, but now calls Athens, Ohio his home for the time being.
Other posts that might interest you:

• Behind the scenes of “Goa hippy tribe”
• Meet Meograph, and online storytelling tool

I was recently notified about “Love to Leave,” a capstone multimedia website by Syracuse University recent graduate Marlei Martinez. I have highlighted other impressive individual student projects in the past, and I believe this two-year initiative is another great example of what one student can produce. I thought that II readers would also like to learn more about Marlei’s impressive quest to document online dating in the Philippines so I asked her to write a “behind the scenes” look at the project.

Read on to learn more about the project. If you have any questions for her, feel free to leave them in the comments.

“In the Summer of 2010, I traveled to Angeles City, Philippines to document the lives of different Filipina women who use niche dating websites to survive in the third world. While a good amount of work for the project occurred in the Philippines, the majority of the work was spent in the pre-production and post-production stages.

LovetoLeave.com is my Honors thesis that I completed during my senior year at Syracuse University. The Renee Crown Honors Program at SU funded my project which took a total of two years to create.

Love to Leave by Syracuse grad Marlei Martinez

Finding the story subjects

My idea to investigate the world of niche online dating in the Philippines came to me when I was working as a front desk clerk at a hotel in the summer of 2009. One day, I struck up a conversation with Sharon, one of the new housekeepers, and learned that she had moved from the Philippines just a few weeks before.

She spoke in broken English and said that she met her husband on Filipinaheart.com, a dating website that aims to connect international men with Filipina women. She explained that her friends recommended she join the website because they were able to find foreign husbands who would take care of them. Just a few months after signing up and chatting with various men, Sharon’s now-husband visited the Philippines and asked her to marry him. Shortly after, they filed the proper paperwork and moved her to the United States.

The thing that struck me the most about Sharon’s story was that this was not the first time I had heard anecdotes like this. As a military brat who has moved from Air Force base to Air Force base, this was in fact a growing trend that I was noticing throughout the past years. So I decided to take a more in-depth look at why Filipina women join these dating websites – to find love or a way to leave?

Before traveling to the Philippines, I contacted various Filipina women who participated in niche online dating. In the Spring of 2010, I reached out to Filipinaheart.com, which is run by Cupid Media, to gather contact information. Instead of connecting me to a media relations department, the multiple representatives I spoke with informed with that they would not be able to provide me with information due to customer privacy rights.

I then turned to Plan B, which consisted of setting up a profile for myself. Filipinaheart.com is a dating website that only allows heterogeneous contact, so I had to set up a “male” profile in order to make contact with women. I listed myself as “M Martinez,” and began sending messages to dozens of Filipinas living in Angeles City. In my message, I explained that I was in fact a female student journalist working on a school project.

To my surprise, eight women responded and said they’d be willing to talk to me. For the next few months, I emailed back and forth with them, explaining the goals of my project and asking them about their daily lives and why they participate in niche online dating. I also set up a few Skype sessions with some of the women during the months leading up to my trip to make them feel more comfortable with the idea of meeting me. However, by the time I touched down in the Philippines, four of those women ended communication.

Production Hiccups

During the summer of 2010, my friend, Sam Disston, and I packed our bags and traveled for 22.5 hours across twelve time zones before we landed in the Philippines. We brought a Sony V1U, Canon HF10, Nikon D40, Nikon P6000 and tripod with us.

When we arrived, we were overwhelmed by the heat, humidity and air pollution. However, our cameras reacted worse as the lens kept fogging throughout our first day of shooting. By the end of our first day, we discovered that we would have to bring the cameras outside and expose them to the humidity for a half hour before shoots to prevent the lens from fogging up.

The other technology hiccup we faced on the trip was lighting. Many of the huts and shacks we visited did not have outlets nor indoor lighting, so there were a few times where we had to rely on the tiny light attachment to the V1U for interviews, which explains why some of the interviews are a bit grainy.

Other than that, traveling throughout the bustling city with our equipment was actually fairly simple since there were two of us and our larger camera was safely stored in an industrial Pelican case. In addition, while a few of the women who I made prior contact with were too nervous to meet us in person, the women who agreed to speak with me were more than hospitable.

Sam and I had eight shooting days in the Philippines, and after traveling back to Syracuse, New York, I spent the following nine months editing our photographs and video footage as well as designing the website. Seth Gitner, Professor of Newspaper and Online Journalism at the Newhouse School, assisted me with creating the backend of the website after we designed it.

In the end, it took me two years to put this project together from start to finish, and it’s a project that I will continue to follow-up on during the years to come.”

Other posts that might interest you:

• Behind the scenes of “Reframing Mexico”
• Behind the scenes: “Soul of Athens: Our dreams are different”
• Behind the scenes of “Goa hippy tribe”

The main interface of “Africa to Australia”

Many of you may know that I am a big fan of interactive documentaries. So, when Matt Smith of SBS Online approached me about their newest interactive “Africa to Australia,” I knew that I wanted to take you behind the scenes.

Six videos and six photo stories document the stories of African refugees and immigrants living in Australia. Each is presented in a full-browser Flash interface, and deep-linked for easy access. Moreover, all content is presented in seven languages, from English and French to Dinka and Swahili.

I hope you enjoy this interview with multimedia producer Matt Smith and documentary editor John MacFarlane. Personally, I enjoyed learning how they successfully managed a team of 30 producers and how they overcame difficulties that they faced offering multiple languages.

1. Explain the rationale for doing this story – how did the idea come about and who pitched it to whom?

John MacFarlane: The evolution of this project was slightly out of the ordinary. There wasn’t a pitch, but in this case that also meant there wasn’t pressure in the early stages to focus on anything too specific – which can be a luxury.

Africa to Australia actually began as an idea tossed back and forth between SBS and Screen Australia (a national funding body) to find a home for some new and archival footage about African refugees and immigrants.

SBS had commissioned a documentary called Community Cop, about a policeman in Melbourne working with a (mostly young) African refugee community in inner-city Melbourne, and it was decided that we could film additional interviews with the key characters with the intention of creating some kind of online project around that footage. Then the project grew somewhat and we began thinking about presenting a wider spectrum of stories – most Africans in Australia have arrived quite recently, and there are some common threads and themes in their stories, as well as (of course) many unique aspects. We realised we had an opportunity to provide a deeper look into these communities.

2. How long did this project take from idea to launch?

Matt Smith: There was overlap amongst all the various processes. For the content, it’s hard to gauge in man-hours, but it was gathered over a period of 12 months. The website build was stretched out over a period too, but probably accounted for 3 months of work. We released it in two stages. First with only in-language subtitles, then about a fortnight later, a second version entirely translated. Preparing the translations took about two months from brief to delivery.

3. How many people were involved in this project and in what capacity?

Matt Smith: We had around 30 people working on the project in various ways. At the risk of excluding some of the key contributors: Within SBS Online, I designed and built the site, with John-Paul Marin producing and John MacFarlane providing editorial direction. John Connell was tasked with producing the content, where he managed a team of independent content creators. The SBS Language Services team did the translating and was managed by Andrew McCormick.

Rosemary, a story subject in “Africa to Australia”

4. How did you find the story subjects and how long did you spend with each to flesh out each story?

Matt Smith: Our content producer and researcher, John Connell, spent a long time reaching out to community groups across the country to get inspiration for stories and access to the individuals.

Initially there was some understandable caution: in the conservative media at the time African communities were receiving a lot of negative attention (there had been a foiled terrorist plot involving three men of Somali origin). However, when John explained the positive nature of the project they opened up and were a wealth of knowledge. They suggested the individuals who were most inspiring, or with the most interesting stories. Ultimately, it was the communities themselves that guided us towards the content we should be including.

5. Of all of the stories, which is your favorite and why?

John MacFarlane: I would hate to choose just one, but there are a few moments that really stand out for me: I love Lucky and Ramla, the surf-lifesaver sisters, and the way they challenge stereotypes about what a surf-lifesaver is (and the surf lifesaver is about as iconic an Australian thing as exists). They’re also extremely hilarious, and if you listen just to their audio they sound like the two most Australian girls in the world. Which is the point, of course! I also love Mbuyi, the Congolese farmer. He’s so positive and warm, and the way he says “it’s yummy!” when he eats a bit of cassava is so great.

Matt Smith: I really liked Open Door about the Somali taxi driver. The photos are every-day yet incredibly intimate. It’s hard to fathom some of the questions his customers ask him. And whilst his anecdotes are sobering, his outlook is really positive.

6. What was the most difficult part of this project and why?

Matt Smith: One of the trickiest technical and design challenges was working with the multitude of languages the site features. Some, such as Dinka and Amharic, are poorly supported even on modern computers. We had to also ensure the design worked and was still visually appealing in all languages. Some languages took up a lot of room on the screen, whereas others were much more compact and left a lot of empty space. Most languages ran left to right, whereas Arabic was an exception running right to left. Making this work was a juggling act.

7. If you could go back and redo one part of this project, what would it be?

John MacFarlane: I’m not entirely sure if redoing this would improve anything, but the way the content and the design were kept quite separate seemed problematic at times. I’m from the school of interactive design that says deep collaboration is essential, so I would have liked to involve design much earlier in the process. With that said, I love how this turned out, so it’s a minor quibble in this case.

An early design of “Africa to Australia”

8. Explain your reasoning for the full browser interface. What types of designs did you consider before finalizing the user interface?

Matt Smith: The first round of designs included an ‘always on’ interface. But early in the process, as the videos were being created, we decided it would be a disservice to squeeze them into a small player. The material is quite striking and we wanted the user to engage with it as much as possible. So we refined the design in favour of making the interface work in two modes. That is, be invisible when watching content, allowing the user to be immersed.

Then, encourage exploration at key points in videos when reoccurring themes are being discussed or when the user is seeking more information.

9. How have viewers reacted to this project so far? Can you tell us any stats such as pageviews, time spent on site, etc?

John MacFarlane: We’ve seen lots of very positive Tweets and Facebook posts, and feedback about the design and project as a whole has been extremely and universally positive. Promotion of the project is an ongoing endeavour, so the stats aren’t trailing off yet, and we’ve got some print advertising and TV promo spots still on deck which means traffic will still climb. Even without the formal promotional push, the site averages a few hundred visitors per day, and average visit duration is around 5 minutes.

10. Why do you think this type of large-form interactive storytelling is important for this type of a story?

Matt Smith: I think it’s necessary to approach each story as a unique entity with its own needs for presenting online.

In the case of Africa to Australia, if it were approached more traditionally the temptation may be to cut up the material into a documentary-proper at the risk of each of the characters losing their intimacy. On the other hand, placing the individual films in a space such as Youtube, they may get lost in an abundance of content and not necessarily receive the respect they deserve. So I see Africa to Australia as somewhere in between the frenetic short-form online video typically takes, and a more traditional considered long-form documentary.

The intention of showing diverse and digestible stories, but also fitting into an overall document celebrating African migrants is how we approached the project. So in that sense, to create both a resource and an experience, it was something that had to be crafted.
Other posts that might interest you:

• Behind the scenes of “Goa hippy tribe”
• Behind the scenes: “Soul of Athens: Our dreams are different”
• Kauri Multimedia beautifies visual storytelling with “Alma”

It’s the Saturday after a complete redesign of his company’s website, and Brian Storm, executive producer and founder of MediaStorm, does indeed sound exhausted. If you know the unending energy of Storm, you’ll appreciate this admission.

With seven full-time staff and an intern, this small Brooklyn New York based company spent the better part of a year quietly reinventing it’s web-based image. When considering that job was handled primarily by about half the staff, you start to get an idea of how immersive this experience must have been for those involved.

It started at a mid-afternoon meeting in July 2009. MediaStorm project manager Jessica Stuart, interactive designers Tim Klimowicz and Jacky Myint, and an outside consultant Keith Harper were in attendance.

Storm wanted Harper, a graphic designer from New York, involved in the process in part because he wasn’t directly associated with the MediaStorm community. “I wanted someone that didn’t understand our culture and our goals…I really wanted to have to explain what we’re talking about, and Keith really elevated the whole process,” said Storm. Harper and the crew discussed what was not working about the then current site, and what should be included in the new one. The crew used Google Docs as a way to organize and prioritize this information so that it could be doled out and worked on collaboratively.

After some discussion Storm announced his launch date goal for the project. March 1st 2010 was the five-year anniversary of the company’s original website launch, and an appropriate time to reinvent MediaStorm’s image. Despite the anniversary, Storm was admittedly ambivalent about the date.  “I didn’t know if we could hit that, I didn’t care if we could hit that, but let’s try,” said Storm. “We were working to get the right things done in the right way more than trying to hit a specific date.” With that loose goal in mind, the team had seven months to create a complete redesign, and at least one member of the staff was a little skeptical.

“I thought it was pretty funny,” said Jessica Stuart. “It was pretty clear at that point, that it was a really optimistic deadline.”

This brief encounter is illustrative of the working relationship Stuart and Storm have. Stuart, who has been with MediaStorm for three years, and who previously worked for Eddie Adams and the Eddie Adams Workshop, is very often the office reality check. Stuart explains, “I’m usually the first one to say ‘that won’t work’, or that ‘I don’t like that’. And I never mean it maliciously, I just tend to be pretty honest about things. Brian’s amazing and he’s really idealistic about a lot of things, which is fantastic, and he gets super excited about things, and I don’t tend to get very excited about much in life … I don’t appear to be excited about much in life.”

Jessica’s frank demeanor is what made her an invaluable part of the website redesign.”She keeps us grounded,” said Storm. And while she, like Storm, realized the ambitious nature of the March goal, the date gave the team a tangible amount of time to work on the project.

From that initial meeting each staff member was designated to a specific task. Tim Klimowicz was in charge of developing the video player, what Storm describes as the heart of the new site. Jacky Myint would code the new design and make it functional, while Stuart was in charge of reworking and transferring all the data from the old site into the new one. But before any of that could be done, Keith Harper would have to design and negotiate the website’s new layout.

Clarifying the vision

Coming from the outside, Harper spent four months negotiating the design with the MediaStorm team. “It was kind of a courtship,” said Stuart, “we’d all seen his work…and we liked his work prior to that, it was just a matter of making sure he got us and we got him.” Using Photoshop and Storm’s guideline of “the only thing we’re not going to change is the name,”  Harper created wireframe mockups and worked weekly with the team to tweak the new design.

One of the primary challenges was to organize and make explicit exactly what the company offered as a business. “That’s the headline. it’s not actually a redesign, it’s an unveiling of what we actually do,” said Storm. The solution Harper and the team came up with were three prominent category names displayed on the top menu bar. After some deliberation, the team decided “Publication”, “Clients” and “Training” properly described what MediaStorm offered as an institution.

MediaStorm’s previous menu bar

MediaStorm’s current menu bar clarifies its business model by highlighting “Publication”, “Clients”, and “Training”

“Publication” highlights the role of the company as a distribution hub and it’s really where the team’s passion is. “At the heart, that is what this company is built to do. We are built to produce, and publish and distribute important projects that would maybe sit in someone’s shoebox otherwise,” said Storm. Those projects, which have given MediaStorm its reputation, have a prominent position in the landing page’s new video slider. Additionally, clicking the “Publication” tab reveals all the projects in a grid, which is a substantial improvement from the vertically oriented list of the previous site that required a lot of scrolling. Projects can now be organized and viewed by genre from the sidebar, which gives the viewer an idea of the scope of work MediaStorm creates.

A “Contributors” section provides bios of individuals who have collaborated with MediaStorm in some way, and there are additional subsections that allow users to view submission guidelines and licensing opportunities of published projects. The navigation is easy to understand and it clarifies the purpose and scope of the company’s publications.

The “Clients” section of the website brings to light the primary revenue generator of MediaStorm. Previously, client work was posted on their blog, and mention of the company’s availability for production and design work was tucked away in a roll-over menu. The new front page prominently highlights three client projects below the publication slider, and additional information is provided by clicking the “Clients” button in the top menu. The “Clients” section clearly illustrates what services the company offers and who they’ve created work for in the past.

Client projects are now listed on a single page grid under the “Projects” subsection, all of which include the title of the piece, the client name and a rollover description of the project. The new design increases the visibility of client work and Storm believes it will encourage a spike in the amount of commissioned projects the company produces.

“Training” is the last of the three major categories in the new design, and it is representative of MediaStorm’s goal to be a  resource for multimedia education. The front page offers a direct link to their workshop application, as well as two projects from past workshops as an example of the type of work that’s produced. Clicking “Training” in the menu bar provides information on the type of workshops available, when they are available, who has participated in the past and a link to their projects.

Additionally, the ever popular “Resources” page, which is a collection of educational documents and training opportunities, finds a well-suited home within this category.

Translating to code

Once Harper finished the design of the site, he handed over a series of Photoshop files as well as a style guide for reference. It was up to Jacky Myint to translate those images into a functional website. Myint, a graduate of Duke University and the Parsons School of Design, joined MediaStorm in 2009. Myint is, not surprisingly, enthusiastic about the intricacies of code. She remembers writing “Hello World” with HTML for the first time in graduate school, describing the experience as “pretty awesome”. As only someone who remembers such an experience could, Myint prefers to hand code her projects and did so for the new site. Using the free program TextWrangler, Myint used HTML, CSS2, PHP and JQuery, with each language playing a separate role in the site’s design and functionality.

HTML established a framework for the site, while CSS provided the styling and distinct look. PHP was used to pull information from a newly created SQL database, which was designed by an outside contract developer named Jason Burfield (it might surprise some to know that this is the first time MediaStorm has used a content management system to publish and organize their data). Lastly, the JQuery library provided some of the interactive design elements, like the project slider in the footer or the main slider of the mobile version. That mobile site, which looks exactly like the desktop version, is called by a “sniffer” Myint created to determine what type of browser a viewer is using.

One of the biggest challenges for Myint was creating a site that was cross browser compliant. Initially she wanted to use more modern coding languages like CSS3 or HTML5; however, compatibility issues with browsers like Internet Explorer forced her to use older versions of those languages. “Most of them (browsers) are ok except I.E. (Internet Explorer)…that’s the browser I keep cursing,” said Myint.

The benefit of being restricted, however, is that regardless of the platform or browser, Myint has managed to code a website that looks and functions like it should, no matter the users’ access point.

The heart of the site

In addition to wire-framing the site design, Harper was also responsible for creating the look of MediaStorm’s new video player. According to Storm, the first month of design work was on the player, while another six were spent in development. “Why would we go spend six months developing our own player instead of just using Vimeo or YouTube or Brightcove, or some other off the shelf solution? None of those guys actually did what I wanted it to do,” said Storm.

The player has a host of new functions including full-screen capabilities, but certainly the most fascinating is the ability to, and function of, the embed. “One of my key strategies was that people were not going to be watching our projects on our site,” said Storm. What’s included in the player’s embed is nearly all of the functionality of a MediaStorm project page. “My goal with the player was to take all of the stuff we had tacked onto the story page below the fold, and try to roll it into the player,” said Storm.

Whether users choose the larger or smaller player to embed,  they still have access to a complete video playlist,  all of the copy written about the project, and they can share it through email or any number of social networks. Additionally, users can purchase a DVD of the project, view a transcript and perhaps most importantly, embed a project from another embed. MediaStorm has also begun to include some pre-roll advertisements within the embedded players.

Storm felt strongly that he should have some level of control over those embeds. This desire led to one of the more innovative aspects of the new player. He explains, “if you embed our player on your site, I know that you did it, I can turn it off independently because I’m giving you a unique i.d. … that’s a pretty radical step to take from a copyright perspective. We’re saying ‘take our content’, but we still have complete control of it.”

MediaStorm has already taken the opportunity to remove at least one embed. Storm described the situation by saying, “the reason we turned it off was because it was embedded at such a small size that you could only see half the player. So for me it was like, ‘I don’t want people to experience MediaStorm in that way’, so we sent an email to that person and said ‘look, we’re turning this off for this reason’ and they wrote back to us and said ‘I completely understand’.” This ability is certainly powerful, but depending on the embeds popularity, ensuring that each one is on the level may mean many hours of labor. Storm responded to this by saying, “that would be a terrific problem to have.”

Storm is so confident about this new player, that he is making it available for licensing. A business or organization can purchase the rights to use and modify the video player, complete with all the above mentioned functionality. MediaStorm is now in the software business.

Click here to view MediaStorm’s large embed (unable to embed here due to width restrictions)

The individual responsible for developing this player, and for somehow managing to pull off all that functionality was interactive designer Tim Klimowicz. Klimowicz, who has been with MediaStorm since 2007, was trained in graphic design at the School of Visual Arts in New York. The final design of the player was given to Klimowicz in early January, and he spent the next six months coding the project in Adobe Flash using Actionscript 3.

For a guy who claims he’s “not a coder by trade,” the scope of the project was daunting. “I had many, many, many ‘oh shit’ moments,” said Klimowicz. Part of the difficulty of the project was packing all that information into the player, while keeping its file size to a minimum. “It couldn’t be a 1MB file that we’re serving everyone because that’s gonna get crazy,” Klimowicz explains. To make things even more difficult, because the player was to be licensed nearly everything had to be optional. “All the colors in the player are completely customizable, a lot of the sections are customizable, so you can move the about section if you want, you can turn off embedding, you can turn off sharing… the entire thing is customizable,” Klimowicz explained.

The first three months for Klimowicz were spent creating a solid foundation for the player and breaking it apart into its separate components. Klimowicz spent a lot of time learning about and researching the Actionscript he would need for those components through forums like Kirupa.com, and Colin Moock’s book Essential ActionScript 3.0. “That’s really it, just lots of reading, asking lots of questions,” said Klimowicz.

From that curiosity and research, Klimowicz managed to create a flexible, immersive player, which gives MediaStorm a level of control while being well-suited for a web community that values sharing. The impact could be substantial and with the addition of pre-roll ads, one that might open a significant new stream of revenue.

Good thing it’s only 250 KB.

Launch day

The finale for the redesign came down to a Tuesday morning in early June. “It was one of those days going in to the office where you thought ‘this is going to be a really great day’…and then I went in and pushed the button and it was live,” Storm says with a laugh. The button, it turns out, was Jason Burfield, who was responsible for creating the new database. From that database, Burfield enabled the new site to go live and just like that, nearly a years worth of redesign was made public. Each member of the team described their shock at just how simple the transition was, though re-checking each page to make sure links were working and videos were playing kept Stuart, Klimowicz, and Myint busy for much of the day. “It didn’t make sense to us that it would be that easy,” said Klimowicz about the launch.

There was no big celebration, no drinks or tears, but Storm did provide each team member with one of his famous hugs. “He likes to give it out on rare occasions when it’s due…so we all got a man hug, which is nice,” said Klimowicz. Stuart described the situation by saying, “he was hugging us and Tim and Jacky and I are still trying to bang away on the site, and we’re like ‘what, what’? We’re trying to make sure this is working!”

Fortunately everything was, for the most part, functional. Some last minute changes were made, but overall everyone described the launch as smooth. That ease in how the site turned on reflects the simple nature of the new design. While it’s certainly a new vision for MediaStorm, the innovation is in how it’s clarified much of the philosophy that has already come to define the company. MediaStorm creates stories, and they can do it for you, or they can teach you how to do it. If you like what they do, there are easy ways you can share it with someone you know. Keeping things that simple, clear and yet engaging is an extraordinarily difficult task. Evidence of that exists in the hands and minds of the individuals who make up this small Brooklyn-based production studio.

About the author: Currently the Director of Multimedia at the Maine Media Workshops and Maine Media College, Tim McLaughlin is a photographer, multimedia documentarian and educator located in Rockport, ME. Originally from Louisville KY., Tim has his masters of fine arts from the University of Florida and a bachelors from Centre College, but owes a great deal to the two years he spent at Western Kentucky University. Tim has worked with MediaStorm, the Eddie Adams Workshop, the Rocky Mountain News, the Mountain Workshops and most recently shot a film for the Rotterdam Film Festival.