While looking at multimedia projects and searching for the best and worst projects, I stumbled on this piece by the New York Times and immediately wanted to share. “One in 8 Million” was a package project created to combine unique projects created on 54 different people and the lives they live. Each individual has a smaller multimedia package created about their story and their lifetime. Then the stories are packaged together in a sort of slider presentation that links each of the pieces.
I think this piece as a whole drew me in because of my interest in telling everyday stories. I really really love talking about everyday people and the very normal, and day-by-day lives that they live. While this is obviously too large scale to be something that directly inspires our multimedia project, I liked the collection as a starting point for remembering to look at everyday parts of life that we forget to consider as important. Stories like the singing waitress are so casual and “normal” that we forget how cool and unique fascinating they can be.
Looking through simple picture stories I of course hit POYi and CPOY first, if nothing else to kick off ideas and story frames in my head. But after hopping over to a few other sites I quickly found the piece “Go Inside the Magical Life of Europe’s Family Circuses“ on a traveling family circus that I wanted to share with the group.
Just hearing the phrase traveling family circus makes anyone with a visual brain perk up immediately, but for me this story went beyond the expected performance, travel, and family portraits that I expected. The level of intimacy that the photographer was able to capture and share in her images allows the viewer to feel like they are really there, living behind the scenes and between shows with the family. Sure, the stereotypical images necessary for a family circus are present. We see the costumes, the performances and the places they live while on the road. But we also get to see the connections shared before a performance, the changing and the decompressing that happens off stage not as a step towards performing but as a step toward life behind the curtain.
I think that capturing these intimate, personal interactions and moments is the weakest part of my shooting right now and so for me this piece was a good reminder of how beautiful those moments can be with enough time in a project. I guess in this way, some of these images are simply unattainable with a one week project like we start off with, but in other ways I want to push myself to being as close to these as possible and just to start thinking about these moments and images early for this project and longer ones.
IT IS THE END OF APRIL! This semester has flown by and no doubt been one of the fastest thus far. As the final few weeks are being counted down and the summer heat is quickly approaching, it is these final few pieces as a Missourian reporter that I feel most proud of. With two feature pieces in a week after a several cumulative months of work, I was both excited and relieved to have my story about a 4-H sponsored chick hatching program and my collaborative story with Laura Miserez on the 1918 Influenza Pandemic complete and published.
The completion of these longer projects (the flu being a very research-heavy piece) was encouraging to me as a writer to feel more confident both in my ability to find and to pitch stories. Being able to see them through to the end pushed me in a way that I haven’t pushed myself before in the world of writing. While not that different in principle to finding, pitching and covering a story visually, completing this process with a focus on word count rather than frame count made for a beneficial, growth experience.
As we move into the final week, I am looking forward to two more days on general assignment and the completion of another life story about a women I only wish I could have met in person. Here’s to a happy and not (too) stressful end of the semester!
