Speaking ay Ithaca College Feb. 23 at 7 p.m.
February 21st, 2010
I’ve been invited back to Ithaca College, my alma mata, to speak about producing and multimedia. I’ll be showing work and taking questions on Tuesday, Feb. 23 at 7 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium.
The talk is free and open to the public. If you’re around, come by and say hello.
For more information see the Ithaca website, here.
MediaStorm DVDs now available on Amazon.com
February 7th, 2010
In addition to the MediaStorm store, DVDs are now available on Amazon.
Get yours here.
‘Getting Good’ on the MediaStorm Blog
January 25th, 2010
I’ve written a short essay for the MediaStorm blog on how to get good.
Here’s the essence:
People tell me they want to produce work like MediaStorm. You can. Yes, we are fortunate to work with many incredibly talented photographers. But the storytelling techniques we use in our work are not revolutionary. They’re the same techniques described by Aristotle in his Poetics, 2000 years ago. What’s different is that we work our stories. We watch and re-watch literally dozens of times, replacing soundbites, removing the inauthentic, rearranging, restructuring, often for weeks at a time. Sometimes it feels endless but in the end, it works.
And it can for you, too.
Read the rest of the article here.
The Collaborative Habit by Twyla Tharp
December 31st, 2009
I just finished Twyla Tharp’s The Collaborative Habit, the follow-up to her successful 2005 book, The Creative Habit.
Here are some of my favorite passages:
“A great partnership is a lab where change happens every day.”
“In any collaboration, no one likes to let colleagues down. Crisis focuses energy. When it really matters, people rise to the occasion.”
“All artists have signatures. Most guard them closely. And again and again, I’ve found that really smart and talented people don’t hoard the secrets of their success – they share them. It ain’t as if you could use their methods and duplicate their results. Excellence is about so much more than craft.”
“The more you ask, the more you get back. The more you challenge an audience, the moe challenging you can be to yourself.”
And finally, my favorite:
“In the end, all collaborations are love stories.”
Go buy the book.
Thomson MediaStorm, Reuters Foundation, and Red Cross and Produce Surviving the Tsunami: Stories of Hope
December 25th, 2009
I produced the stories section for Surviving the Tsunami: Stories of Hope.
From the MediaStorm blog:
MediaStorm along with Thomson Reuters Foundation and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) announce Surviving the Tsunami: Stories of Hope. The project marks the fifth anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami.Combining imagery by Reuters photojournalists with eyewitness testimony and interactive graphics, the documentary reveals the strength of the human spirit in the face of catastrophe. These are stories of compassion and hope.
See the project here: http://tsunami.trust.org
10 Final Cut Keystrokes I Use Every Day
December 20th, 2009
Here are some of the bread-and-butter shortcut keys I use most frequently:
Command-Shift-A Deselect all.
Contorl-B Enables/Disables a clip. This is a great one to use when trying to compare clips. Stack one on top of the other and use Control-B to turn your alternative on and off.
Control – and Control = Raises or lowers the audio levels 1db, respectively. Make sure to either select your clip or place the playhead over it first.
F Loads the clip under the playhead in to the Viewer.
J, K, L These are the transport keys. They move you through the timeline. J is backwards, K stops, and L is forward. Pressing J or L twice in quick succession doubles the speed. Also, holding J and K together moves backwards in slow-motion while K and L moves forward in slow-motion.
Keypad ‘del’ The keypad delete key performs a ripple delete, collapsing the space left after removing a clip. The result is the same as using shift-delete but simpler.
X Marks an In and an Out point on the clip beneath the playhead.
Option-V Paste attributes. First, select the clip whose attributes you want to copy (command-C). Then, paste on to another clip using option-V. Great for pasting size and level attributes between clips.
TTTT or Shift-T Changes the cursor to overlapping arrows. Touch any clip and all clips forward will be selected. Great for moving around large chunks of an edit.
+ and [number] Moves the selected clip forward – to the right – by an increment of the entered number. - and [number] moves the selected clip backwards, or to the left.
For more Final Cut keystrokes, check out my twitter feed @fcpkeystokes where I post a new shortcut every day.
Replacing Footage With Pixel Accuracy in After Effects or FCP
December 13th, 2009
Say you need to replace low-res footage with a new, high-res version while maintaining pixel accuracy.
First, create a new layer. Stack the new footage of top of the old.
In Final Cut, right-click on the top layer and choose Composite Mode>Difference. In After Effects, use the layer’s drop-down Mode menu.
Your footage will take on an inverted and somewhat psychedelic appearance. But here’s the great part: when the two versions are perfectly aligned, they will cancel each other out and your Viewer will become black.
Credit to Chad Perkin’s and his excellent After Effects CS4 Beyond the Basics on lynda.com.
MediaStorm and CFR.org Win Emmy for Crisis Guide: The Global Economy
December 13th, 2009
Crisis Guide: The Global Economy, for which I produced the multimedia overview, was honored with an Emmy Award for New Approaches to Business & Financial Reporting.
Pictured from left to right are: Jacky Myint, Michael Moran, Brian Storm, Eric Maierson, Jeremy Sherlock, Lee Hudson Teslik. Image by bryan-brown.com
Changes Coming
December 12th, 2009
I’m about to update my blog with a new, more spacious wordpress template.
I’m not sure how long the house cleaning will take so please bear with me.
Thanks.
Profile Piece on InnovativeInteractivity.com
December 11th, 2009
Tracy Boyer at innovativeInteractivity.com was kind enough to interview me as part of her innovative individuals series.
From the article:
Question: How do you drive innovation in your work?
Answer: I want to be a better storyteller. I want to be a better editor. I just want to get better. I never want to feel like I’m doing the same thing I did last time.
My background is in film so I watch plenty of movies. And as anyone who knows me will tell you, I spend lots of time watching things on the Internet, too. I like to think about what others have done, particularly in other fields, and how I can incorporate that into my own work. In the end, though, it always comes back to the basics. How do I create a greater meaning from the combination of two specific images? On my to-do list is producing a story that is complete in just four shots. I like limitations, as they force me to think in new directions.
What I like so much about my job at MediaStorm is that there’s always an openness to try new things, to produce in a way that best fits the story at hand. We strive to find the essence. Brian is fond of the quote, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time” which illustrates the difficulty in achieving simplicity.
Plus, I read a lot. If I’m working on a story about a particular subject, I’ll read as much as I can. I want to surround myself with material about a topic. Editing is an act of empathy, and the best way to be empathetic is to understand.
Read the rest of the article here.