Multimedia journalism

Multimedia Must-See: “Ian Fisher – American Soldier”

Get ready to spend a good amount of time with Denver Post’s latest piece, “Ian Fisher – American Soldier.” The producers spent more than two years documenting the enlistment, deployment, and arrival home of Colorado native Ian Fisher. You can tell that a talented group of journalists worked around the clock on this intimate portrayal, and nicely timed it to launch on the eighth anniversary of 9/11.

I have to applaud Craig Walker for the beautiful photography and videography in the series. With 10 video chapters and eight photo galleries total, I can’t imagine how much raw footage he had to produce. Kudos also to Meghan Lyden and Tim Rasmussen for the site production and multimedia editing. With 15 producers in all, I applaud the time commitment and dedication that the Denver Post allotted this story.

I feel like I still have so much more to look through and I have already spent the good part of my Sunday morning on the site. Wow, isn’t that a true testament of a powerful multimedia package? While the print stories ran in the paper this weekend, I will have to make sure to bookmark the site and return September 21st and 22nd once they post them within the multimedia package.

I really appreciate the design of the package and flawless UI. The use of pictures as paneled windows to organize the content was a nice touch. The “extra” section was chalk-full of excellent resources, and I especially enjoyed the interactive map of U.S. bases.

Within each video, I would have liked to know how long each video was with some sort of timer, but I really liked the icon in the upper right to let me flip the video and navigate the video menu that way rather than clicking out and back.

My minor suggestion for improvement would be to take out the splash intro screen where it says “Enter Project.” I always believe that you should immediately present the user with a screen full of content, rather than forcing them to click an “enter” or “start” button. This is especially true in the case of this project, where the menu screen is especially well designed and would also serve as a great opening screen.

NOTE: To quickly browse photos from the series, check out their “Captured Photo Collection,” where they posted more than 80 photos from the 27 months spent documenting Ian’s story. They are breath-taking to say the least …

Other posts that might interest you:

• When it comes to multimedia, design is everything
• Top 50 multimedia sites of 2009
• El Mundo plans ahead with launch of 2016 Olympics package

© 13 September 2009 Innovative Interactivity.