Patrick Farrell won 2009's Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography and was part of the staff that won a Pulitzer in 1993 for its coverage of Hurricane Andrew. He also spoke to our Business Practices class via Skype earlier this semester. I find his still images very moving and wanted to see how he handled video.
His first project on Haiti wouldn't load. His other project - on trash children in Honduras is the piece that I ended up reviewing.
The piece starts out with the title card and ambient - a lot of chattering in Spanish and the sound of big trucks. The title card is up for about 6 seconds - a little long. Then we proceed to see pictures of children climbing around the dump, wading through trash. The ambient continues but dies down some when the doctor begins speaking, telling up of the children's plight. I don't know how to spell his name because Farrell didn't include any identifier information in the slideshow. As the doctor began speaking, plaintive piano music began to swell and played while he was speaking. This use of music made it really feel like a UNICEF add. That and images like this.
Right around 2 minutes I was ready for the presentation of be over and it wasn't even halfway done. The doctor had been speaking for quite a while, explaining things, but the only picture I'd seen of his or that was obviously of their organization was right at the beginning when he began talking. The doctor spoke about them helping the kids, but I hadn't seen anything yet that showed them helping kids.
The presentation featured lots of 'pathetic children' images, with close-ups of soulful eyes, again making me feel like it was a commercial for an aid organization. There was some nice ambient from the school that went on for quite a while and matched the images.
Then we switched back to follow a 5-year-old little boy whose name I missed (again no name information) and watched as he gathered trash and ate food he came across, illustrating what the doctor was talking about earlier.
The entire presentation was about 4:40 minutes long - too long. I probably would have quit before that if I wasn't evaluating it for class.
I was left wishing for some type of denouement to sum up what I was seeing.
As far as the presentation itself, it popped up in its own window and was expandable to full-screen, which I liked. There was also a control bar so I could control what I looked at - which I also liked. I did not like the plaintive piano music throughout because it felt less journalistic and more like a 'Help the Children' commercial, so there was some editorial comment there. Most of the images were very nice but felt redundant after a while.
No comments:
Post a Comment