Great Advice

Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor for The New York Times, told the Flying Short Course audience about the fundamental building blocks of multimedia storytelling: still images, and audio. “Audio is the low-hanging fruit of multimedia,” DeVigal said. “It’s the easiest, cheapest thing you can add on to photographs to start building multimedia slideshows and to learn.” [...]

Andrew DeVigal, multimedia editor for The New York Times, told the Flying Short Course audience about the fundamental building blocks of multimedia storytelling: still images, and audio. “Audio is the low-hanging fruit of multimedia,” DeVigal said. “It’s the easiest, cheapest thing you can add on to photographs to start building multimedia slideshows and to learn.” DeVigal talked about just how adding audio to still photographs improved the quality of storytelling, and about how the key words for teams producing multimedia stories are “communication” and “collaboration.”"The key is to pick the right story, one that makes the best audio story,” DeVigal said. “Ask yourself these questions: Are there strong characters? Is there a strong narrative? Is it artistic? Is there emotion? Are you taking a specific angle to tell the story from, rather than being an overview? Are the subjects ‘good talkers’? Sometimes the audio can be the driving force, the spine of the story, that’s independent from the images.”

DeVigal point out that resources for learning how to do multimedia are available on the Web, including at www.newsu.org.

“Start small!” he said. “And use the ethics with audio that you use in photography. Use only the audio that you gathered during the actual reporting process.”