A Polaroid a Day

Jamie Livingston (1956-1997) documented his life by taking a Polaroid every day for 18 years, including the day he died in 1997.
His project seems to have captured the hearts of tens of thousands of people on the Internet. On May 21, Mental Floss ran a story by Chris Higgens about his discovery of Jamie's website leading to the an overload on the server and bringing the site down. It has since been reborn here.

After Livingston’s death, his friends Hugh Crawford and Betsy Reid put together a public exhibit and website using the photos and called it PHOTO OF THE DAY: 1979-1997, 6,697 Polaroids, dated in sequence. More about the project can be found here. All the photographs were added to a wall for the exhibit and it took up a 7 x 120 foot space.

This is a remarkable record of a man's life that documents not only his everyday moments but his illness and ultimate death.

Cinderella Children

The documentary film Cinderella Children was made to "promote the awareness and sponsorship of war orphans at the Kitgum orphanage in Uganda." The story is based on Australian grandmother Irene Gleeson who in 1991 sold her Sydney Australia beachside home, founded CHILDCARE Kitgum Servants (CKS) and towed a caravan to the war zone of Kitgum in North Uganda, gathered 50 war traumatised children under a mango tree and began to teach and feed them. Now in 2008, 8,000 children are given day care, schooling, medicine, and food in five CKS schools. It's an incredible story. The DVD can be ordered from the site and ships from Australia.

The film was produced by Brisbane Australia filmmaker Matt Clift for Pastor Grant Windlethe of the Christian City Church Westside. What I found really interesting about the film is that the production was a one man show. Matt has shared a lot of information on the equipment he used and the techniques that worked for him in the field with very little resources available and a time limit of only one week. His article is titled One Man Doco Crew in Uganda is available here.

Here is the trailer for Cinderella Children:

Multimedia Links

One of the better links for video help is The Digital Video Information Network. I haven't posted there much but find the members friendly and helpful. The sections can be very specific for camera models and problem solving.

Another on of my favorites is News Videographer. It's a blog format site put together by Angela Grant. The site is "meant to fill the gap in training and provide a robust feedback forum. The main service of this blog is to provide honest critiques of online news videos and related multimedia content. These critiques will be honest and blunt, but they will always be constructive." I always enjoy their latest entries and learn something from each one.

Some more of my favorite videography links include FourDocs, Visual Editors, and Videomaker.

The Move to Multimedia

The Move to Multimedia - Interviews with Industry Leaders.


The Move to Multimedia from Brett Beadle on Vimeo.

Visual Editors

One of the sites I enjoy reading over is Visual Editors. "Visual Editors is the online classroom and meeting hall where student and working journalists from newsrooms around the world come to study the latest reporting, editing and design techniques, story forms, media trends, and interactive strategies. " It's a very helpful site for studying journalism from a videographers perspective.

Multimedia Study

The Multimedia Workshop I attended at the NSCC was very informative. This is a very exciting time to be involved in the journalism field and to see where this is all going. The era of being simply a photojournalist has pretty much ended. It's a multi task job that now requires knowledge of video, audio, the written word, software editing programs, slideshow presentations, etc. Some media outlets are creating not just two minute news clips but ten minute documentaries for their online content and with a great deal of success.

The term 'Mojo Journalist' was also used. It refers to Mobile Journalists that can either be staff or freelance and who use technical tools such as digital cameras, camcorders, and laptops to publish their work on the road.

MediaStorm was also discussed. MediaStorm's principal aim is to "usher in the next generation of multimedia storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for distribution across multiple media." This is somewhere along the lines of where I want to go, creating small media productions for online content.

AJAs Workshop

Tomorrow I'll be attending the Atlantic Journalism Awards Workshop at the Nova Scotia Community College. The first workshop will be The Multimedia Journalist by Chronicle Herald Photographer Jeff Harper. The session will explore the tools and workflow for production of the new and rapidly expanding news medium of combining traditional photography with audio and video to create multimedia items for online news. Should be interesting.

Next up will be a refresher course on libel law to help spot and fix potential legal problems in stories, plus an update on the new defense of ‘responsible journalism’. This will be presented by Dean Jobb, author (Media Law for Journalists, co-author of Digging Deeper), journalist and teacher. Another important and interesting topic. Looks like a good day.

New Blog

I decided to delete my old blog and move on to something new. Change of career paths and goals. I'm going to focus more on multimedia and documentary productions. So this is the first post.