Behind the Scenes

Behind the scenes of “One Week in Iraq”

In this edition of “Behind the Scenes,” Bauer Media radio producer Adam Westbrook discusses his recent project, “One Week in Iraq.”

Commenting about the project Westbrook said, “The whole process has been a real learning curve for me, and I’ve had to teach myself a whole new raft of skills from slideshow production to css.”

“The first thing about One Week In Iraq is that it happened very suddenly. The phone rang from the British Army’s press office and five days later I was on a Hercules flying into Baghdad. It was barely enough time to pack, let alone conceive and plan an extensive multimedia project.

The second thing about One Week In Iraq is that it evolved as an off-shoot from the primary purpose I was there: to report on the work of British troops for radio alone. But you don’t get to go to Iraq very often, and I realized I had to take as much equipment as possible and cover it in as many ways as possible.

Kit wise I traveled with a second-hand Panasonic NVDX100 camera, which I’d bought for about $250 as part of an experiment to kit myself out for less than $600. My radio station also equipped me with the latest Marantz audio recorder; absolutely fantastic purely because it’s just a bit bigger than an iPod and therefore extremely easy to carry around.

On the ground, several challenges emerged. Although the military had quite a detailed itinerary for me, it wasn’t of course produced with stories in mind. So I was constantly (and I mean constantly!) watching, shooting, recording, and writing while trying to pick out the stories. As the week progressed, a nice video piece about patrolling the streets emerged, as did a strange story about Iraq as a tourist destination.

The biggest challenge was trying to juggle all these stories, in all their platforms. I had to produce at least five radio pieces, a long radio interview, an audio slideshow and all the films I had conceived. Each platform has it’s own demands. The radio pieces want great actuality and gripping interviews. The video is led by pictures and sequences – and the words you’ll write to them. Video, rightly or wrongly, took up most of my time.

Back home, I captured and edited using Adobe Premiere Elements, the cheaper version of its popular Pro editing software. For the reduction in cost, you have to suffer more crashes, but other than that, there was nothing I couldn’t do in the Elements software, not possible on Apple’s popular Final Cut. The final result included three videos and an audio slideshow. I also produced an opening “slate” for each film, inspired by David Dunkley-Gyimah’s writing on the cinematic potential of video journalism, with a small homage to “The Wire” in the quotes which launch each film.

The most striking thing when you first visit the site didn’t really emerge until quite late: the interactive collage. It’s the result of an excellent (and free) product produced at vuvox.com. It allows you to create movable and interactive collages, with photographs, audio, video and countless “hotpoints” – which let the visitor click their way though your experience. It is a new way of story telling, and a highly flexible one too.

In fact, almost everything on the site was produced through free or open source products. All the videos are hosted on Vimeo, the photo gallery is hosted by Photobucket. The audio is hosted at SoundCloud, and the site itself is a free WordPress upload. I think this proves the sheer potential for even the low budget multimedia producer as the whole thing from start to finish cost me $40 for the domain name.

“One Week In Iraq” is my first multimedia product and it’s been a real learning curve. From getting to grips with covering for several platforms, to learning how to build a collage; I even taught myself CSS. But at the end of this, I have to ask the difficult question: has attempting to cover the story in so many ways watered down the quality of the final product? If I’m honest I would say yes. In attempting to cover so much, I’ve ended up not covering that much; what’s really missing is a central character and a gripping plot, which sucks you in and spits you out: those ancient elements of storytelling which never change, even if the technology does.”

Other posts that might interest you:

• Behind the scenes of Honduras and the Hidden Hunger
• Behind the scenes of “Facing Deportation”
• Behind the scenes of Roanoke.com’s "Running on empty"

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