Video Storytelling at the Toronto Star
Posted by Curt Franklin on 13 February, 2008
The assignment was fairly simple: find two videos at any one of several newspaper web sites, then compare and comment upon them. I looked at some of our options, but was impressed by the very rich (and easy to find) options at The Toronto Star.
The first video I chose at covered the opening of a snowboarding venue in downtown Toronto.
You expect plenty of action in a video about snowboarding, and there is a lot here, with different angles and points of view. The snowboarding action is interspersed with interviews of snowboarders, and the very static setting of the interviews plays nicely against the movement of the snowboarders.
Does Urban Rail Park tell a story? I’m not sure it does, in the classically-constructed sense. It does, however, report nicely on a new venue in the city.
The next video I chose covers the process by which an animated character was created.
How Laurie Maher became MMe. Tutli-Putli
This is a very deliberate video that does tell a story of an actresses process for creating a character — from emotion to eyes to costume. The music behind much of the video increased the deliberate mood of the piece, and enhanced the connection between the video and the film. This is a much slower-moving video visually, concentrating on two characters, those of the actress and her animated creation. It was interesting to see a recurring artifact in the video screen behind the actresses head during some of the interviews: it’s almost impossible to synch the video refresh rate of a video camera and a monitor, and the moving shadow we see is the result. It doesn’t distract greatly, though, and the video we see with the actress is worth the bother.
Now, the very first thing I looked at on the Star site didn’t really qualify for this assignment, but it was very powerful, nonetheless.
Airsick: An Industrial Devolution
Airsick is the work of Lucas Oleniuk, a Toronto Star photographer who, we’re told, took 20,000 images in a span of 20 days. The images were used to make a stop-action video. The music behind the images and narration through titles give the video a Koyaanisqatsi feeling that’s very powerful. It is astounding to see what can be accomplished with a camera, a computer, and the commitment to a vision. It’s not like either of the other two video presentations, and doesn’t tell a well-formed story, but the overall effect is quite powerful and completely unambiguous.
