You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Multimedia’ category.
To get a real sense of how much Wall Street culture changed, I went out to the Museum of American Finance, located on 48 Wall St.
Here, exhibits show the evolution of Wall Street, from a rowdy market where paper share certificates changed hands as street urchins ran buy and sell orders from investors to their brokers, to the more orderly tech-mess we see on TV today. There are separate sections on each of the capital markets, showing how bonds, stocks, and commodities developed, what a pork belly actually looks like, and the way a treasury bond evolved. The exhibit on trading technology goes all the way back to using career pidgeons and telegraph tape to broadcast market news and update stock prices, to the introduction of FM receivers and the Bloomberg machine for electronic trading. But, hey, this is multimedia – so rather than me telling you, check out the slideshow.
Since my unsuccessful Wednesday, when a ludicrous amount of time was poured into two frustrating pieces of software and no palpable product could be squeezed out at the end, I decided to experiment a little further with iMovie, before I attempt to re-do my slide show.
I’ve armed myself with the Nikon D40, which I barely know how to use, but that’s irrelevant. The idea is to practice. And so, I’ve been pointing it at everything around me hoping something will stick. Having got together a decent amount of pictures… (about 600 so far)… I’ve decided to practice putting together an iMovie slide show with the ones least likely to end up in the final product. Unfortunately for my subjects, the photos in question are of my friends.
But hey! I’m using them for educational purposes! Firstly I’ve learned how to prevent iMovie from applying the Ken Burns crop effect (previously called the “drunken sailor zoom”). I figured out how to standardize the length of all clips, and I fiddled with the options to add background music and opening and closing credits to the slide show. I also figured out how to upload the thing directly to YouTube. Most importantly I learned how to save the project I’m working on!!! So, while the subject matter of my little experiment may not be all that Wall Street, my skill set is definitely getting better.
Check it out:
Two years ago, the idea that a bank was behind a terrorist act, a political assassination, or just payrolling the occasional oppressive third-world dictator regime was a completely plausible conspiracy theory. It was probably still plausible in October last year, before Meredith Whitney of Oppenheimer & Co got to the clock tower and rang the alarm bell as loudly as she could.
But if back then some people believed in the Goldman conspiracy, the one about how Goldman Sachs rules the world, twelve months on this seems pretty silly. Ok, it had a brief resurgence about five weeks ago, when Paulson tapped another Goldman Sachs alumn to man the TARP funds… but then everyone looked at what’s been happening to Goldman’s shareprice and took it down a notch.
This is why the trailer to an upcoming feature film, The International, feels ironically late to the party.
The basic set up is that the world’s largest bank, the International Bank of Business and Credit, or HSBC IBBC, is behind a veritable gumbo of bad deeds from buying chinese missiles to assassinating politicians, and Clive Owen is going to foil its latest and baddest plan. Owen plays the buff but foppish investigator turned financial vigilante. Fellow Aussie Naomi Watts looks like some kind of financial secretary who puts her kids in danger to help out the righteous Brit crime-fighter, and the rest of the cast is filled out with European theatre stars never heard of on this side of the Atlantic.
Judging from the trailer, the script has a nice grip on the whole “evil i-bank” zietgeist… But again, would have worked last year… now, not so much.
A year ago, Wall Street was the place of greed and riches, where the brightest and the dodgiest congregated to make money out of thin air, leaving the rest to wonder what behind the curtains made the alchemy possible. Now we know. And if back then some of us lost sleep over the black magic mojo of Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, we can now sleep fast knowing they are not so clever after all. No secret power coup for you if you fumble with the world credit markets. Tisk-tisk.
While it takes only around eight weeks to shoot a film, a screenplay can be stuck in re-writes for years. Perhaps that was the tragic fate of The International, which is yet to hit movie screens but is already old news.
And the beat goes on.
In Friday’s class we discussed the evolution of online advertising, which developed from banners, to pop up windows, and now to a full blown video that either drops down or scrolls across to the center of the screen and plays out its proselytizing message while you manically search for “x” to click close.
Since our discussion focused on a Gucci ad seen on New York Magazine’s website, it made me ponder the challenge of branding luxury amid an economic crisis. It is often said that luxury goods are recession proof, which means people don’t stop buying them, and they don’t stop advertising while the economy locks itself into a death spiral. The quandary is how to continue promoting your decadent brand amid nation wide layoffs without seeming vulgar.
It seems to me that Gucci, with its advertising campaign for the “heart tattoo” line of bags, strikes the perfect balance. The ad features spunky singer Rihanna, riding a suspended hula-hoop with a Gucci bag slung across her body. The singer has both high fashion appeal, as per the Gucci threads, and low fashion appeal, as per her multiple tattoos. But hey, they’re all over the damn bag too, and the whole thing makes her an even more approachable, adorable spokesperson. Proceeds from the merchandise go towards helping Unicef, but in the ad the charity’s logo is small, and to the side – a tasteful nod to Gucci’s corporate social responsibility. After all, we don’t really want to associate Gucci with do-gooding, and the video is here to plug the product.
But somehow, this mix of likeability and philanthropy gives the ostentatious branding exercise a “get out of jail free” card. Gucci, which once promoted itself by tastefully branding a model’s pubic area, is now trying to ennoble conspicuous consumption amid the financial crisis. It’s saying, we’re generous, we care, and we do it in style. And frankly, even a cynic like me can almost, almost, forgive Gucci for slathering its aspiration wear on billboards and multimedia videos like a child painting Nutella on the kitchen cabinetry.
If only this lesson could transfer to Wall Street. Imagine if banks rolled out promotional campaigns that played up the philanthropy, the charity, the general do-gooding they do. Advertising would flood the airwaves detailing how checking with Chase feeds starving Afganis or how your trading account at Goldman helps actively support cerebral palsy research. Instead of bonus watching, editorials would harp on whether TARP funds helped bring clean water to Indian orphans, and congressional inquiries would snipe “We understand you gave 6 out of those 25 billion of tax payer money to feed the who? The poor? You want the American tax payers to feed the poor?”
Well… maybe not. But it was a nice thought…
So I am two months into this multimedia mess, and it’s time to tally up the good things, and make a plan for the final leg of the race.
What I’ve learnt so far:
Final Cut is overwhelming, but manageable. Towards 3 a.m. it becomes almost fun, and as you head into the early morning you’re enjoying the experience despite the progressive loss of productivity. It’s a surprise that I’ve missed telling stories in a visual format, especially the creative aspect of it. After my undergrad I thought I was done with that side of things, so I’m shocked to find I have more to say, and that I’m enjoying working with a camera again.
Knowing how to use a handycam is apparently a skill I can put on my resume. I don’t know what it is about video equipment that scares people away, but hey, it’s making me just that little bit more employable, so yey!
What I’ve done so far:
I have one video up on YouTube. But my prof. gave me some editing feedback that requires me to take it down and tweak it for an hour or two.
I owe two more videos, a podcast and a slideshow…
The Plan Forward:
My second video, a profile of Liquidnet founder Seth Merrin, is taped. It needs to be logged and edited, which is a less overwhelming task since my last experience with Final Cut was fairly pleasant.
Liquidnet is a “darkpool” or “crossing network” – which means nothing to anyone outside of finance… in fact, it doesn’t mean anything to a lot of people inside the magical world of finance either. So my immediate task lies in coming up with a way of giving the whole thing context. My solution is to film another video that explains the terms, and has some fun with the material. This requires time and actors, neither of which I have right now… but I do know some budding journalists, so perhaps all is not lost.
The idea is simple: act out what happens at an exchange, the process via which an order reaches the market, the information problem, and how a darkpool resolves these issues.
I’m not sure if I’ll end up with two separate videos or one longer video, we’ll just have to see.
This leaves a third video, for which I have some vague ideas. One idea to pursue is “Wall St decadence – a thing of the past” – this would be about interviewing the reps from the Tiffany’s shop on Wall St, and the BMW dealership, and one of the up-market clothes shops. The video would explore the sudden shift in Wall St culture, from excess and indulgence to frugality. These retailers thrived on bankers’ penchant for luxury items, and like all symbiotic organisms, now that the banking industry is struggling, so are the retailers.
My other idea is to do a video on “Wall St Conspiracies”. It seems there is no limit to either money or power on Wall St, and both attract speculation and scrutiny from the outside. But certain Wall St institutions have the air of secret societies, shrouded in non-disclosue agreements and a culture of distrust, they appear all-pervasive and out of control. The reach and power of these institutions, and the people who run them, inspire fear on Main St. So what are the conspiracy theories really, where have then taken root, and what are the firms in question doing to soften their public image? This has a lot of potential to be exciting and controversial, but will have a lot of access issues attached to it.
The podcast will get done as soon as I am over my flu. The basic premise of the podcast was to tell a story solely through audio. I feel like my imagination left the building for this assignment, however, because Wall St culture and “audio” is not a marriage I could see happening. To make it work, I decided to tap the ultimate resource: NYC, and ask the people of our great city what they thought about the bankers’ role in the credit crisis.
Asking New Yorkers whether the bankers got their just desserts – fun! But creative it’s not. While my mind makes an easy leap to film, and thus video journalism, radio is a foreign land I’d rather not visit, so it feels like I didn’t even pack a bag.
Finally, there is the slide show… telling a story through images with an audio track narrative layered over it. I have an idea that i’ve been sitting on for a while now… but I’m waiting till we have the lecture on slide shows before I launch into development.
So, I know that multimedia journalism reaches beyond flash animated maps… But this was just WAY too cool not to mention.
The Economist newspaper, holy grail of financial journalism, bible to business leaders across the world, insert a superlative of your choice here, has produced THIS AWESOME INTERACTIVE MAP.
The question is simple: if the entire world could vote participate in the US Presidential election, how would different countries vote?
To figure out the answer, The Economist opened the online polling booths to its readers, letting them select their country of origin and cast a vote. The world map is updated every three hours. This means that if your country start going from Pro Obama to Leaning McCain you can rally your friends to stem the tide. It also means that I’ve been checking back every hour, just in case, making sure dear old Oz is still blue…
On a more serious note, this social experiment may not accurately reflect the opinions of the entire world… but it does say something about the political preferences of The Economist’s readership. (Interesting means of cloaking reader research in interactive poll features, huh? Told you it was brilliant!)
Interactive features are supposed to be a fun, interesting vehicle for data or number heavy stories, but some publications do this substantially better than others. In the Q&A posted earlier, Zubin Jelveh raised an interesting point about creating good interactive features for the web when he said, you need to work with a designer.
Aesthetics is shallow, but then again so am I, and when I came across this interactive map on the Financial Times website I was substantially underwhelmed. The idea is simple – a map of the world that lets you see what each country is doing to stem the credit hemorrhage by clicking on them, and a sidebar menu letting you focus or expand the information you see.
But simple doesn’t have to mean bad. Unfortunately this reminds me of a fifth grade social science project: the map looks like they cut it out with blunted scissors from a faded copy of the world atlas, and the whole thing may as well be coated in a layer of cornflour glue for all the excitement it generates. The problem can be partially ascribed to the fact that there aren’t enough moving parts to interact with. But a bigger issue is the color scheme. The waning blue that fades away in the background, the messily bold font, the way the sidebar dominates the graphic… it looks so tired and anemic.
While my entire graphic design knowledge base pivots on a copy of Making and Breaking The Grid, I’m surprised something as grand as the FT would overlook visual balance and color choice in designing a story that’s supposed to drive site traffic.
By contrast, this interactive from The New York Times, though equally simple, makes the Consumer Price Index look better than the stained glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle. Here, colors are assigned meaning, and the designers opted for curved intersecting lines to add visual interest to what otherwise could have been a very boring pie-graph. Zubin had praised NYT’s coding specialists for doing interactive features well, but for something so simple and straightforward as a charticle these guys demonstrate a firm grip on intelligent design.
For my first web video, I profiled Harry’s – the iconic Wall Street bar.
The last four weeks saw record volatility and market losses as the credit crunch finally hit Main Street, wiping off trillions of dollars in retirement savings as the Dow sunk below 9000 for the first time in five years.
Amid the mayhem, Harry’s is a safe haven.
A relic from the 1970′s, when you could still make a living on Wall Street without a college degree, Harry’s still draws a crowd. The bar was busting on the Tuesday Lehman filed for Chapter 11. It was busy the night Capitol Hill voted down the bailout. And as the street readies itself for a turbulent path ahead, I don’t doubt there will be many nights that brokers crowd in to Harry’s.
Part of the great Guerilla News experiment involves teaching journalism students to use all kinds of multimedia software. But with three videos required by the syllabus, Final Cut Pro is the cornerstone of this undertaking.
Luckily, I had a near death experience with Apple iMovie in my undergrad film/theatre major.
Like all survivors of iMovie editing, when looking at Final Cut Pro I recognize the Ford engine inside the Jaguar. The latter is just a shinier, more complex version of the rudimentary Apple iMovie that kept me jailed in an editing lab for a week during Oktoberfest 2003.
And while I wished our professor team could give us detailed lessons in the software, you can’t teach editing without the students having some practical experience. After explaining the basics of uploading video clips and how to cut and paste things on a time line, our teachers smiled their menacing “see you next week unless you jump off the Brooklyn bridge” smiles and waved goodbye.
Unfortunately Final Cut, like most artistic software, suffers from impenetrable nomenclature. (I’m talking about you here, Adobe Creative Suite).
Why, for example, is there a ‘pen tool’ in the editing tool bar?
Yes, pen tool. So named because it does not let you write or draw on the image you’re working with. Its function, as I discovered two weeks later, has nothing in common with, well, anything you’d use a pen for in real life.
So why call it ‘pen tool’ and make it look like a pen? The same reason investment bankers call them “collateralized debt obligations” and make them look like AAA rated bonds.
The funny thing with editing is that when you emerge on the other side, it doesn’t seem all that difficult. In fact, as the hour hand inched towards 3 a.m., my sleep deprived brain entered a state of child-like wonder and exhilaration. I employed the scientific poke method to answer questions like “how to cut the word ‘um’ out of the time line, every time?” (blood, sweat, tears, and frequent use of Apple+Z combination) or “is it possible to fit more words on a screen than the screen has space for?” (scroll the text).
The tragic side is that you never feel like you’re finished. You can keep going over and over it for ever, clipping and pruning like a horticulturalist at Versailles.
Hopefully, though, I will give up on perfection and upload my video here by tonight.
As a writer, I love the process. As a capitalist, I am enthralled by the prospect of being paid for work I enjoy doing. But whether it’s my Soviet childhood of black and white television, the absence of video games and not having a home PC until the 1990′s, or it’s a general skepticism of the internet’s ability to deliver on its promises – I just don’t see how blogging can bring home the bacon.
Obviously, some people make a whole lot of mullah sharing their world views. In fact, this story on Slate.com examines Technorati’s State Of The Blogosphere report to figure out how bloggers make money. The basic business model is the same as all online media – attract, retain and grow your audience, and train them to click on the ads.
For me, the problem with this “sit, Ubu, sit” business model lies in carrying it across to finance-related blogging. While Perez Hilton hits a cord with the embarrassingly large slice of population that care about where and with whom Lindsay Lohan frolics, things work a little differently in the world of grown ups.
Of course portfolio managers and economists have lives away from The Street, but this is a private world that thus far isn’t hounded by photogs. Nor do most people know what Kravis, Kohlberg or Roberts actually look like, let alone care how they take their Starbucks.
Don’t get me wrong, many a trader or Wall St veteran would indulge in a moment of schadenfreude if a blog served up snarky accounts of Zoe Cruz’s clueless exploits at the Bergdorf make-up counter. But apart from driving traffic, and feeding a vindictive and poisonous culture, what would that information add to the market place of ideas? And, personally, I didn’t sit through my share of MBA finance classes to willingly lobotomze myself on the altar of blog traffic.
This leaves me thinking that an intelligent financial blog is a mythical creature that can only exist if the author has industry acumen, can deliver market scoops or is willing to share their unique and very profitable investment strategies.
Lets start with the last one first. The whole premise of hedge funds, research analysts and portfolio managers is that people pay them to deliver information and investment decisions that put your portfolio ahead of the market. Putting this information online for all to see, with no guarantee that readers will click through the ads and pay you doesn’t seem like a smart economic model. And at the end of the day, if you could make a squillion dollars with a strategy nobody else has come up with, why oh why would you share it with the world?
The problem with delivering market scoops, on the other hand, puts the blogger in competition with major news agencies. Now, I am known to be ballsy, but versing a well financed global behemoth is like bringing a knife to a gun fight – my mother taught me better than that.
Finally, there is the professional blog reflecting years of business experience or academic research – the problem with this, is that I am not an expert and nor are most journalists starting out in the sphere. So what can I possibly add, apart from wide eyed naivete?
There are, of course, fairly successful business and economic focused blogs out there. Most of the ones I read, however, are backed by professional news organizations or are written by academics and retired Wall St vets. In both cases, the writer’s bread and butter isn’t solely tied to site traffic, and the traffic itself gets a huge boost from the flagship banner.
So, while the notion of making money through blogging and multimedia can keep all those cultural and political commentary writers warm and fuzzy, I just don’t see how it can work for finance.
