Photographe Paul Galipeau Ottawa Canada | lechampiondumonde.com

Six movies I just watched.

My school was on a week-long holiday so I hung around to watching some movies. Does anyone else feel productive when they watch movies?

Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2006)

War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001)

Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)

Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002)

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

I had been meaning to watch most of these for years now so I’m happy I finally got to it! These along with that Chase Jarvis video I wrote about and I think I’m ready to read a book or something.

How to make a Soundslide

AKA, how I make a Soundslide.

OK, so I am only on the second one I’ve ever made so maybe I’m no expert but I would be embarrassed if I didn’t intuitively know a thing or two about how this stuff works.

In my first project, I had some trouble with the images and the audio syncing up. Turns out my 32-bit mp3 was too much for poor little Soundslides to handle, so remember, folks(!), when you export your audio, 16-bit audio makes the world go ’round.

Now that that’s settled, here’s a bit of insight on how a beginner (me) produces something using Soundslides. First, you need Soundslides, which you can download for free or buy for $40 (Plus edition for $70). Then, you need a still camera. Got one? Good. Next, you need an audio recorder. This could be anything…you could even record onto a styrofoam cup if you want to go through the trouble of transferring it to a digital format. In these first projects, I’m using a MiniDV camera and an external mic. Pros adhering to the industry standard might understandably prefer the M-Audio MicroTrack II. To be honest though, I’m a little surprised that we aren’t hearing more about installing Podzilla on iPods and using its high-quality recording capabilities. I know this requires a bit of effort as it works best on the obsolete 3G iPod, which I now regret selling after getting a 5G iPod video that doesn’t seem to be keen on properly recording audio in Podzilla. In anycase, using a MiniDV camera might not be the prettiest solution but it does the trick.

After recording your audio (interviews, sound effects, ambient noise, music, etc…), take your recording device and dump the content onto your computer. If you are using a MicroTrack or a 3G iPod, you can just drag but if you’re using MiniDV or MiniDisc, you’ll probably have to record it in real time. I’ll focus on how I do this with the MiniDV camera.

First, plug the right firewire cord (4-pin to 6-pin!) into your camera and your computer, then open up iMovie and create a new project. From here, I could just import both audio and video to iMovie but I think this takes up a lot of unnecessary hard drive space and involves a lot of rendering time. Instead, I use iMovie to control the camera as I record using a nice program called Audio Hijack Pro ($32) in System Audio mode. From there, I clean up the audio in Audacity (free!) and finally, lay the audio out in Garage Band.

When you’re doing this audio work, remember to go at it with a plan about how you want to order the corresponding images or else you might find yourself going back on it later. Lets say you get everything right though! Now’s for the fun part. Open Soundslides and create a new one.

Tell the program which folder your selection of images lives and where your audio file lives. You should try and keep everything in a centralized folder so things don’t get too lost. From there, the program will populate the audio and every image in your folder. Since it will take every image in the folder, keep in mind that if you have 200 images in the folder but you really only plan on using 50 of them, you’ll save yourself lots of time by moving or copying these 50 images into a separate folder. Personally, I like to do this by adding stars and labels to my favorite images in Adobe Bridge.

When everything’s imported properly, you’re free to order the images however you like, choose transitions, captions and a bunch of other stuff. When it’s all done, you can Export it and the final product is saved to a folder called something like “save_for_web.

Interviewing is something I’ve got very little experience in but what I’ve learned so far is that you should try and get your subject to avoid answering questions about him or herself with “I” and that when answering questions about others, your subject should refer to these people by name or title rather than use “he”, “she” or “they”.

So how does it look? Take a look at my first project about my Latvian friend. Rolling Stones, please don’t sue. I think we’re even after you shot a music video outside my apartment at 2am.

La jetée (1962, Chris Marker) as a Soundslide

This influential film has inspired many artists, film and video makers to explore the possibilities of still photography in a more cinematic mode. For better or worse, it even laid the groundwork for 12 Monkeys (1995, Terry Gilliam). Originally narrated in French, the 26-minute film exists in many languages so to facilitate the lowest common denominator, here is part 1/3 of the English version (which I have never seen).

If you want more, the film in its entirety can be found on Google Video. On June 26 of this year, Criterion Collection released it along with Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983) that, if you are so inclined, can be purchased at finer DVD retailers everywhere.

Now, where am I going with this? As much as I enjoy experimental cinema, sci-fi is rarely my bag. La Jetée, however, is pretty significant when we think of how print and photojournalists today are more frequently combining audio and still images into a single device meant to go deeper into a story.

As with many (but not all) things, Magnum has been doing well in this area with the In Motion section of its site. The In Motion podcast is probably among my faves.

Soundslides has been getting a lot of attention over the last year or so. If you’re interested in what I’ve been talking about so far but haven’t heard of this $40 program ($70 for the enhanced version), you should think about downloading the demo and giving it a try. Basically, what it does is give you a (relatively) simple apparatus to combine a folder of images and a single mp3 file that you can output as a pretty looking Flash file with its own play/pause button and optional volume control.

It’s actually quite remarkable. If you want, you can read more about the impact it has had on photojournalism and get more examples of what people have done with it by reading the article “Soundslides and the rise of the audio slideshow“.