Right now the copyright issue is out the way you can watch the video guilt-free
Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has been a landscape of bloodshed and chaos. Yet in the northern region of Kurdistan, people now live stable lives. Iraqi Kurdistan takes us into daily life there, and celebrates the beauty of peace. See the project at http://mediastorm.com/publication/iraqi-kurdistan
I think the reason this video sticks in my mind so well is the techniques used in it, in particular the quick succession of images to produce and almost "stop-motion" effect, the rate of the images is very clever and I'm sure you noticed that the music was perfectly timed with the image rate so that the strongest image paused for slightly longer as the beat of the music paused, which for me at least really gave a strong impact. If you dont know how long the image is going to be on the screen then the audience will absorb all the info as quickly as possible before it vanishes, and if an image is to linger on-screen for slightly longer then this is what will stick in their mind, as well as giving extra time for the audience to view the image.
You can do this simply by changing and modifying the rate at which the images appear and for how long. An image that goes too quickly leaves little impression on the audience (and that surely defeats the whole point of photojournalism) and one that lingers for too long will bore the audience and will lose their attention.*
However visually impressive (and it is, I found it a complete joy to watch and I still do everytime I revisit Kashi's work) it did leave me with little impression or information about the Kurds who from my understanding have had an incredibly interesting and tragic history, there are hints of this here and there but I have to really struggle to understand or pinpoint any of it. Not that I wish to criticise a master such as Kashi (whose work and career I'm envious of) but it seems to be very much a video that shows a group of people who we "kind of" know had some trouble in the past and are now getting on with life, and I know from the introduction/prologue that its what Kashi was going for. I just feel that I've come away from this video not really understanding much more about the kurds than I did already which is a shame, I feel it could have been stronger if it adressed some of these issues, whats happened before? why did it happen? how are they moving on? what does the future hold? why is northern Iraq/Kurdistan so "stable" compared with central and southern iraq? is it because of the kurds? are the kurds better off in Iraq than in Turkey where they are actively involved in a war with the outlawed PKK organisation the prime target of the turkish government? I could speculate about this for a long time, but I came away with more questions than I went in with, I was visually stunned by the dynamism of it all, but I still had unanswered questions.
In fairness I don't think this was Kashi's fault, he had around 11minutes of multimedia (the final product is around 11mins long) and 7 weeks to create this project, he was also creating this for National geographic magazine and their website. I can only assume the picture editor (who seems to love Kashi) at the National geographic identified the fact that their demographic is unlikely to want to know these vastly political questions and answers, perhaps they do, but I would guess that they would get this information from other news sources. Instead it is likely the readers of National geographic prefer to be visually stunned and "wowed" rather than fed complex geo-political facts figures and opinions hence the lack of audio narrative in this video. In that respect kashi has suceeded, I need to identify my audience and give them what they want (well in the format they want, the content is completely up to me obviously)in order to connect with them. I do feel I need to be more informative and drive home an actual message (whatever the message eventually evolves into being.)
*I do think that attention spans are something which is vital which I need to research, I am going to go out on a limb and predict that younger people who grew up with the internet at least in their later childhood (I'm one of those) will have a shorter attention span due to years of conditioning (the google instant search is the eptimome of this) whereas those who are not party to the "web generation" are likely to pay attention for longer. I will seriously consider this during the run up to the final stages and obviously research this theory in full.
Next time I will be looking at Jessica Dimmock's (of the vii agency) work on the squatters in New York in her video "the 9th floor"
0 comments:
Post a Comment