Creative Collision Blog

Creative Collision Blog Cross-disciplinary Creativity

 


 

Behind Creative Collision


 

 

Fall

Creative journalism.

All too often we hear about the slow but sure fall of the printed news media in the 21st century. While this is debatable as a phenomenon, digital media is readily growing into 'traditional' media. Traditional media has reinvented itself so much that the two are inseparable and the gnarled boughs of printed media is worked in with the temporality of social media, the internet and multimedia.


Today I saw a superbly made multimedia project by +The New York Times  reporting a story that really went to the heart of the story. Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek by John Branch reads like a novel at times in its composure and thorough research into its subject. Using current web design to integrate the multimedia components really helped with understanding the story which is epic in scale and tragedy. Fly-throughs of the mountain, simulations, videos and an assortment of bite sized supplements to the story really lend support to this feature.

The reporting for this article on the Feb. 19 avalanche at Tunnel Creek was done over six months. It involved interviews with every survivor, the families of the deceased, first responders at Tunnel Creek, officials at Stevens Pass and snow-science experts. It also included the examination of reports by the police, the medical examiner and the Stevens Pass Ski Patrol, as well as 40 calls to 911 made in the aftermath of the avalanche. The Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research provided a computer-generated simulation of the avalanche, based on data accumulated from the Stevens Pass accident report and witness accounts. Additional sources are: LIDAR data from King County GIS Center; Iowa Environmental Mesonet, Iowa State University; Mark Moore, U.S. Forest Service; National Avalanche Center.
As well as being a rare effort to report content that the likes of social media couldn't access, this project has an unusually long timeline. Keeping in mind that traditional media hardly ever breaks the news as news any more (that is if you utilise the hyperconnectivity of internet/social media), this is really breaking the box a bit - does traditional media, and its newer form on the digital platforms, allow this slow-cooked information to become a key part of its arsenal in the digital, fast-paced world?

A friend has an interesting observation. After reading the first line he immediately had the impression that it was a piece of fiction writing. Although the drama and writing is captivating, you wonder whether or not it is dramatised beyond belief. If only they put an acknowledgement of the real event and its seriousness before the drama kicked it. As you read on, each of the people's photos show up on the side, a nice touch that links it back to personal reality.

It could be said that only big media reputations could pull such a thing off. The sheer force of the name and the resources in the background offer a unique position to explore issues that deserve more than the double spread feature. And they look like they're milking this experimental format - an e-book is also available for purchase. It seems this media giant is treading a thin line, but which line is it?

Onwards

Just noticed that my blogging count for this year is right on the number of posts last year: 73. So I thought, onwards and upwards, lets keep it up and keep pushing the limits! As you can see with the archive, last year wasn't even as many as 2010, when I had 77 posts. It's that thing which many a creative person gets to - the creative block/writers block etc. When you don't feel like it (and it isn't strictly essential) why do it?

Eventually I end up breaking the blogging drought (like this one at the beginning of this month about the Mentawai people). Today I want to talk about something I watched yesterday: Skyfall. In many ways it is in the same situation as I. At a milestone (50 years) and choosing to continue, onwards and pushing the boundaries that define the franchise.

Skyfall Bond 007 review creative

You either think it's incredibly lame or really cool but I thought Skyfall was a screenwriters' break from the formula. As a person who has watched all the Bond movies (dad is really into the Bond franchise) except Quantum of Solace, there are few that actually go beyond the usual 007 scenario to actually interrogate who Bond actually is.

In one of the films (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) Bond gets married then his wife gets killed almost instantly - one of the few times that actually delved into Bond as a person, not the womaniser, adventure craver that he often is. Brutal and breaking, did it show how little chance that Bond can be a regular person?

Most of Skyfall was a perplexing mixture of a truly psychological villain and a setting all too familiar but at the same time foreign to the Bond franchise - London and the UK. The brief escapades to Turkey and Shanghai alluded to the usual rush but then literally quietened down to the recesses of Scotland. Forging the past of James Bond and whittling out the relationship between M and 007 would have been a real work of creative wit.

Add the tumultuous situation of the political pressure at M's seat of power and then you have the real deal. It had hints of the subtle jiving of JK Rowling's Harry Potter at the British government and, in general, of institution. That is, if you choose to read it that way.

Without spoiling anything, I reckon Skyfall is a game changer for the franchise. This is the 50 year mark and with an extremely different world of criminality as a subtext, Bond will have to reinvent himself to make it work. They ended this chapter of James Bond with great poetic effect and double take moments that made you think over. Goodness, they even broke out a poem right in the midst of crisis.

I thoroughly enjoyed this indescribably different take on 007.
4.5 stars
Feel free to let me know what you thought of it/this rather high rating in the comments.

Station

A delightful piece of proactive space-making took the opportunity of a empty bus stop in Brooklyn, Wellington. During refurbishment the council had removed the seating in the rather homey brick station. They didn't seem to return.

An anonymous local stepped up to the task and made it into a pleasant waiting space with a touch of the domestic.



Thanks AMidnightVoyage for the heads up on Twitter. For more pics and a bit of commentary, visit the original posting.

Record


A tweet from Mt Eden Dubstep recently caught my attention:
@MtEdenOfficial: We never had anything except the bare minimum equipment since we started... finally getting up to industry standards feels good
Despite not having a huge amount of equipment for a genre of music that requires quite a bit of specialised equipment to make, Mt Eden has done so well in the local and now global dubstep scene. As they move into their first studio in NYC (from their humble 'bedroom studio'), we'll see how their style of music develops.

Many big name bands started out of garage studios with limited equipment but it should never be the limitation on creativity. Big bands such as Linkin Park started with grungy garage demo tapes before eventually expanding the empire. Now they have a fantastic studio which I believe has also changed their style of music as they experiment to their heart's content. For one, audio editing has removed the grit of a lot of today's music.

How much does a studio environment affect the creative process and outputs? Is it fair for a creative practitioner to blame a lack of tools and resources? However we go about it, it's the creative thinking and approach to one's art that really counts.

China1

Found in my draft posts, this was one of many posts about my China travels that I was wanting to post. However the email posting didn't quite work as planned and ended up as a draft! A bit belated, and there will be more China pics to come later on.


As some of you might know, at the moment I'm travelling China in search of my family's roots. Today I visited various sights around Zengcheng in Guangdong, China. The best sight was the famous waterfall called Baishuizhai, climbing all the way to roughly the top, it was a easy hike with some stunning, if a bit fabricated, moments. Most strikingly, we were told that the waterfall only runs so strongly during periods of no rain because of two reservoirs of water at the top, released when naturally its flow wouldn't be so dramatic.


Another beautiful sight was an old dam called Dafengmen, with picturesque mountains and a milky green body of water. The structure itself was stunning with really crafted details. The mass of it all really worked with nature - it reminded me of the formalistic Spanish contemporary architecture (think Raphael Moneo).

Eventually I'll get around to editing and picking out some good photos, possibly when I'm back in NZ. Unfortunately I can't even access Blogger here on the other side of the Great Firewall and will have to make by via email posting. I don't even know if it works, so... somebody let me know!
My journey on the bus every morning and evening for the last few years travels along Symonds Street towards the city and I've always been looking out for how the streetscape changes around me. There are always details I've missed, new discoveries and general observations about how our urban environment evolves.


One thing I didn't notice recently is the wiping out of some really skilful street art near the end of the Symonds Street shops. A mere alley leading up to a (disgusting, blighted) Wilson carpark, I used to enjoy how this wall changed as each spray painted layer recomposed the colourful artwork.

Now it is painted grey and in retaliation, a street artist has created a smaller work over the blankly painted wall. "Grey is better than art... said nobody ever!" sits just below the red 24-hour surveillance sign with NO GRAFFITI. It's hard to make a call on such an issue, a controversially fine line between art and vandalism, graffiti and tagging, inspiring surfaces and boring surfaces, safe and unsafe spaces. I for one will miss the art there.

What do you think about this blank state change against a piece of street art? What do you remember about this piece?

Thanks to Wocolate for bringing this to my attention on Twitter and taking the photo.

Mentawai

Time to end this blogging drought! Having been to China, it was a great cultural overload even for me. And without a way to access Blogger, Facebook or Twitter due to the Great Firewall, I've felt pretty oppressed. I am still taking my time processing the many photos I took of my China trip + ancestral village, so those will come in due course.

On a side step, I saw this fascinating video of Joey Lawrence trekking through the Mentawai with waaaay too much equipment to photograph the remnants of this rare and rich way of life (ignore how this is a huge advertisement - I swear I could have done just as well with my cranky old Sony DSLR).


"Hello people from the entire world! Come to the islands of Mentawai quickly. Right now, the Mentawai are still alive. I am still alive. But when I die, you will not see my culture any more."
Cultures like the Mentawai are dying out. A series of photographs show the old grandfather (I presume) with their grandchild, the elder in the traditional garb and the younger donning common western clothes. There must be a handful of cultures that still keep so true to how they have existed for centuries. It is this same handful of cultures that slips out of one's grasp like sand from the palm of one's hand.

One can only hope that the hauntingly moving chants and traditions are carried onto those with the Donald Duck T-shirt and muscle tees. Maybe.

Throughout China I've seen an enormous disregard for historic artefacts - there's just so much of it and the pressures of the current age quite easily stamp them out. Often is the sight where an old stone abode crumbles to the weather to be replaced by a really ugly new and much taller building. But that is for another blog.