How’s that for timing? Last Thursday I feature the underwater storytelling of Tony Wu, on Friday I make a case that we should embrace the opportunities of learning multimedia on the job, and then today I hear from Wu. “I’ve been offline for a while,” he writes. “I was in the midst of editing this.”
“This” lead me to Wu’s “Adventures with Craig” blog post, which features his latest video, “Captain Craig,” a project which required Wu to head into uncharted waters with Final Cut Pro. “This is the first time I’ve edited anything with Final Cut Pro and Motion,” Wu notes in his post, and asks us cut him some slack regarding aspects of his video that might need improvement.
Cut some slack? Huh??? The piece is great – successful in terms of what might be considered “traditional multimedia journalism,” but which also focuses on the more “cinematic experience” that Ian Shive told me about.
Dangerous, Uncharted, Satisfying Waters
My sense is that Wu is not getting paid for this project, but it doesn’t really matter. “On the job” doesn’t have to mean “getting paid by a client” — especially when we take the job at hand seriously, and approach it with professionalism, as Wu certainly has.
Last week Wu told me that, three years into his multimedia learning curve, taking on Final Cut Pro has been a real bear (or shark?) of a task. But Wu dove into the depths of FCP nonetheless, and has emerged (hopefully not too shell shocked [get the corny pun?]), clearly having improved his underwater, multimedia storytelling abilities.
The key to Wu’s success is that he remained focused on telling a story he is passionate about, and which he is eager to share with a wide audience through Web publication.
In Wu’s movie, Captain Craig de Wit explains that he first ventured into the uncharted waters of the Eastern Fields of Papua New Guinea in 1989 to satisfy his long-time curiosity.
“It’s a long way out to sea,” DeWit says, “It’s in a restricted area. You can’t get there very easily. Dangerous waters. Uncharted. . .In fact, the first time we went out there we didn’t even have a GPS system, so we had to do dead reckoning.”
Dangerous, uncharted waters? Sounds like what many of us, are facing as we move forward with multimedia/video. But as Wu’s latest multimedia piece proves, combining media intelligently can clearly result in a sum that is much greater than the parts.