Putting the story together...

In about a month’s time, we have to hand in our final project – in whatever form we think is appropriate for our projects (most of us will either choose the form of a book, exhibition or multimedia piece). And with this deadline fast approaching, I guess it becomes clear to us (a fact we knew all along!) that photography is as much about taking pictures as it is about finding the right form to present the images, and, once found: it is about execution! I wrote in an earlier blog that I had found the appropriate form for my project (a multimedia slideshow) relatively early on in the final term. However, this is where the hard work starts, or to be precise: this is where a number of important design and editing choices are made. What is more, my hunch is that eventually this will determine to a large part whether a project is merely a solid piece that gets polite applause on December 3rd (the opening night of our final degree show) or whether a project really taps its full potential.

Since none of us is a book designer, curator or multimedia artist… we dabble along in these disciplines… (we still get help from industry specialists who come to the college and teach the basics). Unfortunately, none of us is in a position to assemble a team of book designers, multimedia specialists or printers around us to execute our ideas on how to present our project (Steidl Ville and the multimedia design factory of Magnum in Motion are far away and out of reach). And yet we have the ambition to create a first rate piece that can compete with the state of the art of what is out there and a piece that we can be proud of when we stand there on December 3rd and people (and our friends) are visiting the degree show…

The recent three part blog entry on the Magnum website gives an interesting insight into how a multimedia piece by Alex Majoli came into being. The last part dwells on the technical difficulties and obstacles that the multimedia specialists had to overcome to bring about the Alex Majoli piece. Somewhat comforting that the experts are struggling with similar problems (e.g. bandwidth versus quality) that I am dealing with and over which I am pulling my hair out…