Harry Shearer's Katrina Documentary

In our recent item about documentary filmmakers who become Hollywood moviemakers, we speculated that someday the trend might reverse itself -- and, as though on cue, we were reminded that Spike Lee's sprawling If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise premiered last week on HBO. It's his second four-hour documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, following 2006’s Peabody Award–winning When the Levees Broke.

This month the airwaves have been deluged with fifth-anniversary Katrina documentaries, ranging in tone from retrospective to investigative. On Monday, for one night only, Harry Shearer's own post-Katrina expose, The Big Uneasy, will screen in theaters nationwide.

Shearer is a man of many talents -- satirist, radio host, novelist, journalist, fine artist, and more. You've heard him as the voice of many Simpsons characters over the past 20 years, and have seen him perform in a comedic film genre he helped pioneer -- the mockumentary (Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration).

But there's nothing funny about The Big Uneasy, which features Shearer interviewing New Orleans residents and officials to reveal that "some of the same flawed methods responsible for the levee failure during Katrina are being used to rebuild the system expected to protect the new New Orleans from future peril."

The Big Uneasy is laced with computer imagery that takes you inside the structures that failed so catastrophically, and boasts never–before–seen video of the moments when New Orleans began to flood and the painstaking investigations that followed. The Big Uneasy marks the beginning of the end of five years of ignorance about what happened to one of our nation’s most treasured cities — and serves as a stark reminder that the same agency that failed to protect New Orleans still exists in other cities across America.

Look for theaters near you, and show times, here.

Looking Back with Archival Images

USA Today invested time and resources into assembling a noteworthy multimedia package, showcased on KobreGuide this week, that looks at the rebuilding of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina five years ago.

Anniversaries of major events and catastrophes offer news organizations an opportunity to both look backward, and to examine present-day circumstances. The juxtapositions and lessons can be illuminating. Audiences love historical reviews, especially when accompanied by visual artifacts. For video purposes, it's obviously impossible to travel back in time to shoot footage, so that's when photographic archives prove especially valuable.

Here's how two other newspapers, with fewer staff and resources at their disposal, cleverly incorporated video in recent anniversary-themed stories.

To travel back 15 years, Tulsa World staffers offered their own on-camera perspectives, accompanied by archival images, and TV newscasts, of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building where 168 people were killed.



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Spokane's Spokesman-Review reached back a full century to revisit the Big Burn of 1910, which obliterated entire towns: "Three million acres burned. At least 85 people killed." In a narrated voiceover, incorporating archival images, a staffer "looks back at the forest fires of 1910 in Idaho and Montana, the largest in U.S. history."



News organizations should think about how they can create compelling video stories of major historic events by using invaluable photojournalism images from yesteryear.

Momenta Workshops in India, New Orleans

Momenta Workshops is offering scholarships and discounts for students and professionals for its Project India photojournalism expedition, Jan. 17-30, 2010.

We will be working with small local nonprofits in rural India about 5 hours north of Dehli. We have an amazing line up of locations, including a leprosy clinic, a rural health care facility, a home for the elderly and much more.

More info here.

Project New Orleans is slated for April 7-11, 2010: "We will be arriving during the French Quarter Festival and working with that nonprofit and many others on this incredibly fun, incredibly gratifying workshop." Learn more here.

Other planned 2010 destinations: Burma, the Greek Islands, Paris and various U.S. cities.

Our workshops specialize in helping not only beginning storytellers but also professionals on an upward trajectory. We aim to keep connecting journalists and media experts from around the world to create a network with common interests. In a sense, we fill the void current media institutions cannot by getting photographers to go out into the field to hone their skills, perfect their craft and carry on the mission of journalistic integrity. At the same time, we are building a new media marketplace that will continue to pay dividends to the communications community for some time to come.

Check for updates at MomentaWorkshops.com .

TV Marvels at Newspaper Video

TV is looking over its shoulder as the quality of newspaper-produced video is starting to gain on it, judging from this TVWeek.com report: "Video Gives Print Media New Game: Newspapers Are Still Learning, But Recent Honors Prove They’re Getting the Hang of It."

It smartly points out the essential differences between videos produced by the respective media.

Some excerpts, which cite examples found on KobreGuide.com:

Talk about respect. That’s what the Detroit Free Press got when it won the News and Documentary Emmy for “40 Years of ‘Respect,’” its video news feature on the history of Aretha Franklin’s iconic song and what it means to the people of Detroit.

The piece beat entries from PBS’ “Frontline” and Web sites for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the category of arts, lifestyle and culture.

The win was emblematic of newspapers’ recent emergence as awards contenders, competing on the same prestigious playing field where traditional broadcast news organizations have been competing for decades. Yet most newspapers have been using video on their Web sites for just the past few years.

“We start with the premise that we’re storytellers, with strong visuals and a compelling story to begin with,” said Nancy Andrews, managing editor for digital media at the Free Press . “We had to learn new skills, but we were also students of the craft.”

Like the Free Press, the Washington Post’s Web site is an awards heavyweight, garnering a multitude of national and local Emmy, Edward R. Murrow and Peabody Award wins and nominations in the past few years. But unlike the Detroit newspaper, whose multimedia team is integrated into the newsroom and varies according to editorial needs, the Post’s video output is generated by an online division separate and distinct from the traditional print newsroom.

“We really wanted to create a narrative voice for our video that was different than that on the broadcast nightly news,” said Tom Kennedy, the managing editor for multimedia at WashingtonPost.com , who previously was the photo director of National Geographic .

The site prides itself on pieces that have more in common with independent filmmaking and documentaries than with traditional, reporter-driven broadcast journalism, pieces like its award-winning coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a look at the causes of childhood obesity, and “Being a Black Man,” a Peabody Award-winning series of videos produced by Ben de la Cruz in 2006.

“We aim for subject-driven narrative, with interactions and dialogue that propel the arc of the narrative and create the throughline of story, and have it told in a natural, fly-on-the-wall way,” Mr. Kennedy said.