Professional Uses of Multimedia
When I first decided that I wanted a job in media I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I worked with film and video before I turned to sound design. Now I’m working with photography and all I could think of is that I want a job that lets me use everything I’ve learned to tell a story. It wasn’t until I found a New York Times magazine article about the China Sea that I saw that I could use what I’ve learned and not let anything go. The media story Riding the New Silk Road with photography and video by James Hill is another New York Times feature that I really enjoyed.
The Silk Road has connected Asia and Europe for centuries and now is used as a route to transport electronics. The feature looks at one section of the route. This story uses video, photography and an interactive map along the side to show where you video and photos were taken. If the story needed to show movement of the people working they used video and photos to show a moment of time. When there is video like on the train as it is moving they loop the video so there is no distraction.
The presentation and the organization of the feature is easy to look at but if you only saw the multimedia feature I think the viewer would be confused. There is a small link that will take you to the article written on the same subject but that link is almost swallowed by the rich graphics on the page. I think the package of video and photos would have been better if it was combined with the written article. The article alone is just type with a few photos. It is not a short feature and although adding the multimedia feature to the article would make it even longer the multimedia would add to the overall message of that article and the multimedia would have more information included because of that article. I think by separating the two it weakens them in terms of storytelling.
When I first looked at this I was confused because I wanted more than just the captions. I wanted to learn more about the story. Once I found that link I was satisfied and I wonder why it was decided to separate the story from the interactive multimedia. The article makes me think about decisions that have to be made when writing a story and including more than just text or photos.