Moving picture, text, still photography, sound, further reading – all in a carefully designed wrapper that signals itself to a particular audience: some interesting examples have popped up in the last week.
I owe these two to Steve Dearden, of The Writing Squad. One is a piece of journalism from the New York Times, describing in film, stills, sound and text the journalist’s visit to a hulk sitting on a Filipino atoll, with a skeleton crew, making a statement of territorial claim. Chinese fishing boats steam slowly to and fro a few hundred metres away. The piece is graphic, atmospheric, clear and telling, particularly in these days when B-52 bombers are testing Chinese claims over islands just a little northwards in the sea between China and Japan.
The second is a more self-consciously filmic piece about the parallel lives of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, by National Geographic . Although it is more complex and a bit arty, it does convey in an unusual way the telling contrast in the journey of the two men towards a single point in history.
Both use a scroll as the means of working through the storyline, making a connection in my mind with very ancient ways of narrative publishing.
The opportunities for a new creative wave as we explore these mixed media pieces are immense, in journalism, storytelling and education.