MediaStorm Videos Focus on Street & Circus Acts

MediaStorm has posted the results of its fifth weeklong Advanced Multimedia Reporting Workshop, held last month in New York.

Six pros formed two teams to hone their skills by creating high-quality stories incorporating audio, video, still photography, and editing -- under the tutelage and supervision of MediaStorm's seasoned producers.

Both videos are highly recommended viewing -- as well as the behind-the-scenes video that introduces you to the videojournalists-in-training.

* Family Kocktail, by Deanne Fitzmaurice, Stan Alcorn and Doug Grant. (6:50)

Kryssy Kocktail was a loner who dreamed of running away from her troubled family to join the circus. Now she eats fire, lays on a bed of nails and sits on an electric chair as a performer in the Coney Island Circus Sideshow in Brooklyn, NY. In realizing one dream, she discovers another: to be a part of a family.

* The Art of Attraction, by Paolo Black, Melissa Pracht and Scott Lituchy. (11:45)

The New York Post called acrobatic street-artist twins Tic and Tac "The Best Buskers in New York City." At seven, twins Kareem and Tyheem Barnes were playing hooky from school and break-dancing on trains for $50 a day each. Tic and Tac catapult themselves into New York's iconic home of street-artists, Washington Square Park, where they pull crowds and big money with their neck-crushing acrobatics.

* Behind the Scenes, by Maisie Crow. (9:05)

MediaStorm intern Maisie Crow takes us behind the scenes of the MediaStorm Advanced Multimedia Reporting Workshop, to see six participants join the MediaStorm team to conceive, report, and produce two multimedia stories over the course of a week... The six participants included a Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer, the head of visual communications at a major international corporation, editors at NGOs, a university photographer, and a brand consultant.

The next MediaStorm workshop will be held in New York, Feb. 20-26, 2010. Tuition is $3,500. Application deadline is Dec. 14.

Hard Times: On the Road with Travis Fox

No sooner do we discourse on the improbability of finding a newspaper staffer who single-handedly possesses all the necessary skills for creating superb multimedia stories -- reporting, interviewing, writing, shooting, editing -- than we feature a noteworthy travel video blog, Hard Times, updated daily by the Washington Post's Travis Fox, the one-man-band of videojournalism. 

Sure, plenty of newspaper photographers have picked up a videocam,  fiddled with editing  software, and produced

competent pieces on their own. But Fox is that rara avis who excels in all arenas, and consistently produces sparkling award-winning packages.  He won the first national Emmy ever awarded for 'non-television' (i.e. Web) News & Documentary programming. As you can see from some of his stellar work showcased on KobreGuide, Fox has circled the globe in pursuit of great stories, from Coney Island to Darfur. 

As we speak, Fox is on the road again. He's driving from L.A. to D.C. to create a series of text and video grassroots snapshots of the U.S. economy and how it's impacting the imminent election. While many political journalists are rewriting press handouts and gathering quotes at staged events, Fox is wending his way through small towns and big cities, talking to real Americans of all stripes, for a ground-level appraisal of the state of our nation. 

He's augmenting his video reports with original contemporary still photographs that he juxtaposes with classic images by Depression-era masters, and the parallel stories they tell: 

Blythe is on the California and Arizona border, an oasis in the middle of the desert. In 1936 Dorothea Lange found a family stuck here during their travels from Oklahoma to more fertile lands in California (top photo). Today Blythe is a pit stop on I-10 halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix. But people still get stuck here. Edward "Bubba" McCouskey has been stranded for eight days. Broke and sleeping on the streets, he's trying to get a lift back to his native Texas after a hitchhiking trip to California (bottom photo).

Plus ça change...