Sunday Reading
Two-fer
Thomas Lake and Molly Moorhead with A chase, an outcry, then shots in the dark.
Michael Kruse with The boys from Coots cabin.
NOTE: I was deeply impressed by Edmund Fountain's slideshow, which ran online with Kruse's story. To be truthful, I think most of these suck. I rarely watch the entire slideshow. But there was something about this one that brought me in and held my attention. I asked Edmund to explain how he did it.
Generally when I record sound for online I do a combination of formal interviews and ambient sound.
With this story formal interviews were problematic, because I did not have the heart to stick a mic in some kid's face and say "tell me all of the details of your brother/mother/father's death." Many of these kids were experiencing very intense grief. I didn't feel it was my place to add to that and potentially undo the work of their counselors.... If I was upsetting all of the campers then the staff would have had cause to throw me out or limit my time with the cabin.
The campers all shared their stories with their counselors and with each other, so I opted to record that stuff in between making photographs. I also recorded sounds of them doing a bunch of other activities... audio that highlights them being kids. I thought the key to making the audio work was showing the extremes of emotion they were experiencing: On one hand they were energetic kids who wanted to have fun and play games etc. On the other they all had intense emotional baggage.
I think the finished product succeeds in part because I didn't go with the typical "My name is......" type of thing that is traditionally done on newspaper websites. Maybe it is just me, but this seems more genuine.
As a result of recording sound AND making images, I missed lots of both. There were numerous occasions where I would be recording and something visually interesting would happen, but I would miss the picture because I was holding the microphone. Sometimes the reverse would happen and I would miss good sound because I was shooting. With stories like this, I find that situations repeat themselves. If I missed a photograph once, I would make a mental note of it so I would recognize when something similar might occur again.
Technically, everything was put together in a program called Soundslides, which is one of the industry standards for stuff like this. All of the audio was edited in Apple's GarageBand, which is by far the easiest audio-editing program I have ever used.