Geoffrey Hiller has long been one of my favourite multimedia story tellers. Since I started sneaking multimedia into my newspaper production classes about five years ago, his piece Burma has been one of the handful that I show as examples of what the web makes possible.
Geoffrey combines strong photography, well-told stories, atmospheric music and obvious passion for the stories he tells. The fact he’s been creating these self-assigned stories since the early years of this century make him, if not a pioneer, at least one of the forerunners of today’s pack of talented multimedia storytellers.
He has a new piece up, a three-minute sound-and-photo piece on the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian independence. His photos are overlain with narration by Kwaku Mensah, lamenting the difference between the promise of Africa and the reality. It’s a great example of how an aspect of a story can be simply yet deeply told, and another piece of multimedia my students can expect to see and, I hope, learn from.
It’s another reminder, too, that in the face of all the emphasis newspapers are putting on video, the audio slideshow still remains a potent and, to my mind, largely underexploited storytelling form.
TAGS: GEOFFREY HILLER, GHANA, MULTIMEDIA, STORYTELLING
That Ghana piece was beautiful. The astonishing photos alone would have been worth the trip, but the narration really tells the story. Thanks for pointing the way to Hiller’s site.