Project Title:1,000 Flipcams in Newark: Art Meets Journalism
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:$500,000
Expected amount of time to complete project:1
Total cost of project including all sources of funding:$500,000
Describe your project:We will give 1,000 HD flipcams to 1,000 people in Newark, New Jersey. We will teach them to shoot and edit video to record what their lives and their community is like.
We will build a large video wall, consisting of 100 separate video panels, 10x10. The videos that our 1,000 videographers shoot will be projected through the 100 panel video wall.
The video wall will be exhibited at museums in Newark and across New Jersey.
The video content will also be shared with The Newark Star Ledger for their website, and broadcast on the FiOS network in New Jersey. Our primary interest here, however is in the video wall.
In the 1950s, Edward Steichen opened The Family of Man photo exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art in NY. It was the moment in which photography and photo journalism crossed from 'craft' to an art form in its own right. We wish to make the same transition now for video. Hence, our primary focus for the output is in the video panels.
The video will all run concurrently, but the audio will be cut so that your eye is directed across the panels. When one stands in front of the wall, they should have the feeling of being 'in' Newark.
As opposed to conventional linear news or documentary film making, what we are creating here is a kind of 'impressionist ' video. As impressionism in painting is designed to convey both emotion as well as information, now impressionism in video journalism conveys far more than linear film making. The viewer should be bathed in the video and 'feel' the sense of Newark as a community, as well as seeing and hearing the multimple stories being told.
Our world of online and blogs is a kind of 'bath' of disparate information as opposed to one report. The video wall/flipcam project brings this concept into sharp relief.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?Coverage of the local community until now has been in the hands of local news operations that spoke 'to' the community. The wall allows the community to speak to itself. More than 'news' per se, this is also an art form in which the community both captures and reflects its own sensibilities and the stories that are important to it.
The wall will become in a greater sense a complete portrait of the community - living, vibrant and multi faceted. The city of Newark is more than one documentary film or one nightly news report. It is a tapestry of people and stories. The wall is a new way of both acquiring stories and material, as well as a completely new way of packaging and reporting those stories to the community and the world.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)We are merging the worlds of art, journalism and the ubiquity of video. This month 8.9 billion videos were viewed on Youtube, so there is no question that the technology has percolated down to just about everyone, but the way that we package and deliver this content to viewers has not changed since 1958. Linear television programming does not work for a world of massively dispersed video creators. We are in this project not only 'democratizing' the medium, but we are creating an entirely new way of both viewing video and perceiving ourselves.
As photojournalism and writing earlier transited from craft to art and in doing so were greatly enhanced, so too we now bring video into this realm. There may be video art, but it is not this.
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?For the past twenty years I have been on the cutting edge of the 'video revolution'. I have trained more than 15,000 people to shoot video in a wide variety of ventures. I have designed and built hyperlocal television and online stations and even national networks. I understand video and how regular people interact with video better than anyone in the world.
I have constructed VJ-driven and digital video community and news projects with a wide variety of end users, from The BBC, where I converted both their national network to this way of work as well as building a chain of hyperlocal community news channels in Birmingham using 25% 'citizen journalist' content.
I designed and built Current TV with Al Gore, which is probably the biggest citizen journalism project in the world. I also founded and own in partnership with The Travel Channel, The Travel Channel Academy (www.travelchannelacademy.com), an on-going video training course open to anyone. I have built and just launched New York Video School, (www.nyvs.com), an online video training website.
In so far as Newark, I worked as a journalist and producer for WNET/13 in Newark for 5 years, and more recently worked with The Newark Star Ledger, the newspaper, to take them into video, including designing Ledger Live, and daily web-based webcast of daily news and community events in Newark.
I also produce a daily news show for Verizon's FiOS1 based in Northern New Jersey.
I have trained people all over the world to use video, from Eritrea to Japan to Sri Lanka to the USA.
