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Q. Your story is a collection of nine women each with a different story to tell. One of them was a bonded labourer, the others cover issues of disability, untouchability, environmental disaster, social stigma, gender discrimination and more. How did you find these stories?
A. The idea came from the Australian Ambassador to Nepal who wanted to fund a documentary about the success of women entrepreneurs in rural Nepal, something she had been involved in supporting. I worked with two very good local journalists, Looni & Pramod, to come up with a different way of documenting the women and we won the pitch. The characters were found by Looni, who called tens if not hundreds of women to try and find the best characters.
Q. Why did you choose Storyplanet as your platform for the story?
A. I have known of Storyplanet for over a year but never quite had the right project for it. When planning for the output for this project I spent a day playing with as many different formats as i could and decided Storyplanet was the best fit.
Q. You use a combo of text, images and video in your story. Especially the videos are very powerful emotionally. How did you prioritize the different media types and the interaction between them?
A. I work as a multimedia journalist using text, video and photography for my daily stories so it’s a format I am used to, but I usually work on short form stories so I enjoyed doing something a little bigger here. For this project we decided to use text to give the broader context for the issue that we were dealing with in a short feature story and video to let the character have a voice. Photography is used to give a sense of place, as most of the audience we expected not to know the region. There is also a short infographic at the start that contextualises the theme for the whole book.
Q. What kind of equipment did you use in the field (camera, lighting, microphone etc)?
A. Very simple, as I shot the first four stories and the other two continued to shoot the rest so we had to keep it consistent and Pramod (the other cameraman did not have much of his own gear). So a Canon 600D, a 16 – 35 mm and a 70 – 200mm lens, a Zoom H1 sound recorder plus a tieclip mic, tripod and a slider. That was about it for video and stills.
Q. What kind of editing software did you use to prepare the content for Storyplanet?
A. Finalcut X and photoshop – that was about it. We edited all the videos, text and photographs in ten very stressful days in Kathmandu.
Q. How many people were involved in the production of the story? How did you work together?
A. There was three people on the creative team, myself, Looni and Pramod. Pramod assisted me in the first four stories as a cameraman and then did the shooting himself on the rest of the stories. Looni did all the interviews. We also had Kevin Tse from the Australian Embassy who helped with logistics and wrote the text for the stories. In post, we worked with a local musician for the music, an artist for the artwork and some translators as some of the women spoke local dialects.
Q. How much time did you spend on the story totally and on using Storyplanet?
A. It took around 20 days to shoot (10 of which I was not there for) and 10 days to edit, then about a further three or four days to put all the layouts etc together. We were pretty set by the time I started with Storyplanet, so it only took a day to lay it out. It’s a very easy to use software once you get your head around the basics.
Q. What kind of future do you see for stories like these?
A. This depends what you mean by stories like these. Our plan was to produce packages of media for nine short stories, that is text, photographs and video which can then me adapted in many different ways. The Storyplanet is only one manifestation of the project. As we speak there is a screening in Kathmandu in a big theatre of the films, and there will be more around Nepal. Some print publications are running the stories as text and photographs. We have a youtube channel, facebook page, vimeo page.
Some media are picking up just one story and featuring it with their own reporting, others are taking the whole package and embedding the Storyplanet story. AusAID and UNDP are both featuring the individual stories over time on their websites with more details about the program. There will also be an iBook coming out tomorrow. So we are trying to distribute the stories in many different ways to try to and make them as adaptable as possible.
I think there is a good future in this kind of flexible story telling as it meets the fractured market needs. Storyplanet is an important part of that mix.