Category Archives: In the field
Breaking into Comics Journalism
As a child Susie Cagle loved to draw, scribbling little comic books and cartoons here and there. A talent for drawing ran in the family – her father was an editorial cartoonist. But to her, these illustrations were a hobby – she didn’t want to follow in her father’s professional footsteps. She decided that she wanted to be a reporter instead and enrolled at the Columbia Journalism School to help launch her career.
She graduated in 2006 and moved to the Bay Area in hopes of finding some freelance writing gigs. Eventually, she got hired at San Francisco’s Curbed blog a week before the stock market crash of 2008. Two and a half months later, she was laid off and her career ambitions came to a halt again. She decided enough was enough; she had debts to pay and was desperate to find a new way to earn some money. She’d never considered pursuing her drawing hobby professionally, but figured that some of her non-fiction comics might work in a journalistic setting. (more…)
Drones & Journalism
Video and Photo workshops under $1,000 in 2015
Behind the Prizes: Hers to Lose
“When you don’t have money and you don’t have experience, you need to have time.”
Behind the Prizes: Hollow
The impact of the social documentary “Hollow” is undeniable. But when Elaine McMillion Sheldon set out to capture the essence of a small town community in America through film, she had no idea how the final product would look. She only knew that she wanted to highlight the lives of people who came from areas of the country where the population had been decreasing over the last few decades. McDowell County, West Virginia, very near to where Sheldon grew up, is one of those places. (more…)
Behind the Prizes: A Short History of the Highrise
A Short History of the Highrise is an interactive documentary that “explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and the issue of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world.” It was produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and the New York Times, and won First Prize at the 2014 World Press Photo Multimedia awards in the Interactive Documentary category. (more…)
Behind the Prizes: Silent Night
On March 11th, 2012, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales left his army base and allegedly killed 16 innocent civilians in the villages surrounding Kandahar, Afghanistan. While he was criminally tried in America, little has been heard from the villagers who witnessed the gruesome murders firsthand. Lela Ahmadzai, a German video and photojournalist who was born in Kabul, happened to be in Afghanistan when news of the massacre trickled out. She decided to go to Kandahar and record the firsthand accounts of those who saw their families massacred. In her multimedia piece, Silent Night, she uses photo, video and audio to showcase the stories of those directly affected by Bales’ actions. (more…)
BEHIND THE PRIZES – NSA FILES: DECODED
The second prize of the 2014 World Press Photo Multimedia Awards for interactive documentary went to The Guardian’s NSA Files: Decoded. To understand how the documentary took form, we spoke to Gabriel Dance, the lead interactive editor on the project. Dance is currently the managing editor for the Marshall Project, a non-profit investigative journalism startup focusing on crime and punishment in the U.S., previously he was the interactive editor for The Guardian in New York City, and before that he was at The New York Times. (more…)
Behind the Prizes: Swan Song
Rick Gershon and MediaStorm did not set out to make a feature length piece when they went to Houston. Gershon was there to shoot client work for Neighborhood Centers, but then he met the Greer family. Marilyn Greer, the 58-year-old matriarch of the family, had recently been diagnosed with dementia. Gershon recognized the opportunity to turn a shorter client piece into a longer story, Swan Song, which documents the struggle of two young daughters who have to make hard choices in the face of their mother’s debilitating disorder. (more…)
Behind the Prizes: Staff Riding
“Staff Riding” is local slang for a dangerous sport: surfing the trains that wind through the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Photojournalist Marco Casino took last year’s World Press Photo Award’s 1st Prize in Short Feature Multimedia with his film about the young men who ride the outsides of trains, and the toll it sometimes takes on them.
Shooting from the tops of trains and attempting to evade the police (staff riding is illegal), Casino shows the adrenaline-riddled highs and the tragic lows that staff riding brings to the townships in South Africa. Now, he hopes to turn the short into part of a long-term project about the metro train system in Johannesburg. (more…)
Everyday Instagram: “Changing perception and challenging stereotypes.”
Producing A Documentary: The Personal Piece
Cutting a Trailer
It takes a lot of time and money to make a documentary, especially when you are just starting out. It’s one thing to get the filming done but another to get your film into post-production. One of the first things you can do to draw attention to your film is to make a trailer that will start buzz about your film, even while it’s still in production.
We spoke to our former staffer Adam Perez and his fellow CUJ alum Jan Hendrik Hinzel (both class of ’13) about making the trailer that’s helping them fundraise and bring interest to their film Who We Become. (more…)
Illustrating Privacy: behind the scenes with Comics journalism
Michael Keller, a member of the Interactive Multimedia team at Al Jazeera America, has created work with data visualizations, video, graphics and in print. When he decided he was interested in reporting on privacy and Big Data, he turned to a method he hadn’t used before: comics journalism. (more…)
“it’s about our world today, and what we are willing to sacrifice to maintain a lifestyle”
Mélanie Gouby didn’t expect to star in a documentary when she began reporting on the Congo, but the independent journalist from France found herself as a tour guide in the award-winning documentary Virunga.
The film is about Virunga National Park, the oldest and most biodiverse park on the African continent. The story revolves around four main characters, including an ex-child soldier turned park ranger, a caretaker for orphan gorillas, a Belgian conservationist and journalist Mélanie Gouby. As the film’s tagline says, “Virunga is the incredible true story of a group of brave people risking their lives to build a better in a part of Africa the world’s forgotten and a gripping exposé of the realities of life in the Congo.” (more…)