Zero to 30 in a day... So this is my first multimedia piece. I have owned a digital recorder for a couple of months and kept looking at it tentatively, wanting to use it, but not really knowing how. I finally just threw it in the bag and decided I would figure it out when the time came. I started recording sound when I could, working out how things worked. After spending couple of days recording and photographing I decided that it was time to try and put something together. I fired up Final Cut Express and taught myself what I could as I assembled this piece. This is what I taught myself in a single day. Thanks to youtube tutorials some simple advice from a fellow photographer, and a full days worth of work this is what I came up with. I now feel like I just got my learners permit, and now it is time to learn how to drive this new vehicle. I'm not ready to jump onto the multimedia highway just yet, I still have "a lot" to learn but I'm a fast learner and have an eye on the entrance ramp...
Ok, I know I'm a bit of a late comer to multimedia and have been a little resistant to it in the past, but I realize the power it has in the art of communication. After all isn't that what all this is about, communicating; a message, an idea, a thought, a story... Storytelling, has been around for all of human existence, and this is just the next step. I still don't believe it has the lasting impact that a still image has. I do believe that it has the power of the moment and that is what we are operating on in our day to day life. I still do not foresee a collection of iconic multimedia pieces sitting on a shelf that you take down and view for inspiration like you would with still images in a book. I wonder when or if people will recall iconic video/multimedia pieces burned into our memory like a still images are. So I will never abandoned my first love, the still image, and I think they are as important today, if not more important. With so many people diving into the new medium I worry about the image archive we may be leaving for coming generations. I hope they are as rich and diverse as what past generations have left us.
With all that said, I can see that multimedia is another tool in my storytelling bag. Being an avid NPR listener I have always recognized the power of people telling their own stories and have always had an interest in that aspect of multimedia. I love to talk to people and learn about the stories that make up their lives, so I look at this as an extension of that conversation.
