I shouldn’t be alive - Iraq chaos
When tomorrow morning’s paper gets slapped on your desk you know you’ve been in the office just a tad too long. And when your sleep is constantly intruded by images of war and repetitive monologues, then you know you’ve been dealing with one issue far too long.
Editing a 1:35 hour audio interview, which is an extremely detailed account of how a guys leg was blown off in Iraq, to make a 8 minute multimedia photo story out of it, proved to be quite a challenge. Not only was the editing process highly time consuming, but the actual content, the detailed explanations, of what was happening over there became haunting figures in my life.
It was however worth all the effort and patience, as it was as always a pleasure and an honour to have been working alongside an amazing photographer like Alon Skuy.
Alon approached me a while back and told me about this story, about a South African chap, Rory Mackenzie, who went to the British army, lost his leg there in a bomb explosion, came back to SA for a break, and wants to go back to Iraq…this meant gaining insight into a topic which has been kept quite distant to the public.
The first step of this lengthy process was to extract the audio, to present it in a logical order, explaining the event. The audio had to be edited about 7 times before coming close to 10 minutes. It was painful having to cut and chop away on an interview which grasps your full attention for the entire 1:35h duration, and where every sentence is an eye-opener…
It was vital for Alon and me to have the same idea and angle about the story, in order to begin the story-boarding process, which happened in correlation to the audio editing process. By looking at the video and photographic footage available, we were able to pinpoint which parts of the interview would be suitable and of course powerful: the aim was to enlighten, also to shock, and of course to make the viewer think critical about the issues.
The most difficult part of finding a way to add visuals where Rory explains the actual account. we had no direct footage of when the incident happened and had to creativley find an alternative. So we used video footage shot by Rory during one of his patrols and added it with some ‘black space’…
After a week of editing, of swapping and changing pictures, videos, and ideas, we finally finished the package, and both of us are happy with the result. The defining moment was adding music to the packaged story, which just added another dimension of effectiveness.
The story, or rather the interview, does entail some foul language, and sensitive viewers might find some of the images disturbing, so be warned, but don’t be put off either, as you won’t often get the chance to hear first hand what it feels like to get a limb blown off your body…
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 11:35 am and is filed under multimedia, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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