Innovative Individuals

Innovative Individuals: Poul Madsen

This post is also available in Spanish

I admire a number of extremely talented multimedia producers, and one of those happens to be Danish photographer Poul Madsen. I first learned of his work and his company Bombay Flying Club back in 2008 when New York Times’ multimedia editor Andrew DeVigal posted an interview with him on Interactive Narratives. Ever since, I have closely watched their work and enjoyed corresponding with him about our shared passion. By just reading through his Q&A, it is evident that Poul is both a leader and game changer, and for that I am happy to acknowledge him as this week’s “Innovative Individual.”

Q) How do you drive innovation in your work?

A) The way things are going right now it’s actually really difficult to do innovative stuff every time we do a new story. New media technology is getting more and more advanced – just working professionally in Flash nowadays requires a very skilled programmer or a whole team of programmers and graphic designers. And we just can’t keep up with that for several reasons, the most important one being limited budgets.

Very few clients in Europe are willing to pay for professional multimedia and at the end of the day most medias are not too interested in flash based graphics with user interactivity and stuff flying around on the screen. Most of the times they just want a linear story – preferably in video format – that will fit right into their player. But the market for multimedia is virtually non-existent in Denmark.

Media companies here are conservative to the bone and budgets are very low. Besides that, major newspapers here are only willing to do stuff with their own photographers (staff) and that’s it. They don’t want to pay for freelance multimedia so bottom line is that we don’t work for them. We have actually had some major clients last year that we ended up not working for because they didn’t want to pay decently.

I would say that our approach to multimedia right now is about advanced storytelling. We started teaching international workshops last year and we spend a lot of time with the students teaching them how to build up storylines. Even a very basic story with bad imagery can be powerful and draw crowds if it is told the right way.

In October 2009 we went to Sweden to teach a three-day Nordic workshop with students from the schools of journalism in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. A team of Norwegian students did a story that was picked up by New York Times Lens Blog – not because of it’s soundscape, not because of it’s images and certainly not because of it’s basic video elements – but because the story was told the right way.

The lesson learned here is that no one will watch your multimedia if you don’t present it in an interesting way. The amount of Soundslides and basic multimedia stories that are out there are growing by the minute and people – including myself – do not have the patience to watch these stories. Most of them are simply just too boring to watch.

Right before Christmas we did a pretty big multimedia project for a big Dutch paper called De Volkskrant. The budget was really big so it allowed us to hire one of the best flash programmers and graphic designers in Denmark. We all sat down with two Dutch photo editors and spent many hours discussing how to build up a site in full screen flash. The Dutch editors wanted a feature that could showcase the daily image flow that runs through their photo desk, so we had to come up with a design that could show the viewer 6500 images. Needless to say we couldn’t have done this without hiring a professional programmer. It was a very good experience for us and that project was very innovative I think. Within the first two weeks the site had about 70.000 unique visitors I think. That’s a lot in Europe.

My own approach to innovative multimedia has to be this: if you can think it and visualize it then you can do it. It’s all about budgets and working together with the right people. The new Apple Tablet will change things. One year from now we will see multimedia and user interactivity we didn’t think was possible just a few years back.

Q) What piece in your portfolio are you most proud of and why?

A) Actually I am probably most proud of my feature from Romania called Bucharest Below Ground. And for several reasons. First, I think we managed to photograph and record the story in an extremely short amount of time. As far as I can remember everything was shot in 4-5 hours over two afternoons. The budget for story was about 700USD I think.

Secondly, I spent two months afterward programming a flash script from scratch that could showcase the story in full screen in a web browser. This was in April 2008 and that was before the new Flash Player had been announced. At that time I hadn’t seen any other full screen web documentary on the web so I felt a little bit like a pioneer and multimedia innovator. Today it just feels so old school, but I am really proud of it.

In general I am just proud of working together with some of the best people in the business. They’re freelance photographers and storytellers who do multimedia by heart and not for the sake of money or fame. We tell stories that need to be told.

Q) Please provide a brief educational and professional history.

A) 2002-2006 Danish School of Journalism, BA in photojournalism
2004-2005 Intern photographer, The Indian Express in Mumbai, India
2006-2008 Staff photographer – Danish daily Nyhedsavisen, the paper closed down in 2008 due to recession
2008.2009 Full time freelance photojournalist and multimedia producer in Bombay Flying Club

I started Bombay Flying Club in 2005 while I was in India. I did a short film documentary about an open court system in rural India and found a new passion for storytelling and visual journalism. In 2006 I started to work with Henrik Kastenskov and then in early 2009 Brent Foster came along and joined the team. We are currently looking into adopting new team members.

Q) Where do you believe multimedia fits into today’s society and how will that role change over time?

A) It’s difficult to say. I think new media technology like Apple’s Tablet will change the way that we use the internet and thus change the way that we tell stories to an online audience. It’s not only photojournalism but Hollywood too that will have to adapt to these new media platforms. I am not a tech freak myself, in fact I don’t know much about how my new Imac works – I just love to tell stories and to shoot.

At the end of the day I think it will become increasingly difficult for independent photographers to get by and to survive. I think we will see teams of skilled individuals working together in the future producing in depth and quality (photo)journalism. Mediastorm already does this and they’re like the only ones who are working consistently on an organized, higher level.

One of my friends Bjarke Myrthu – Danish journalist and former executive editor with Magnum in Motion – is a true new media innovator and I believe in what he’s doing. I think Bjarke eventually will change things in this business with his Storyplanet project. I admire the guy a lot and I am very excited to see what he’s up to this year.

Another important thing that will change multimedia over this next period of time are the HD-DSLRs that allow still photographers to shoot high quality video when on assignment. We will see a lot of “breaking news” stories in much better quality and that way we will see photojournalism become much more “versatile”. Tim Hetherington‘s new film called Restrepo is an example of how versatile photojournalism has become. It’s a film yes … but it’s also a multimedia piece on the website. It’s in depth journalism and extremely high quality. These guys who do stories like this will survive because they fill in the gap between professional filmmaking and photojournalism. I believe that this – in some way – can be classified as multimedia, too.

Q) What is one thing on your “To-Do” list?

A) I am currently working on a new story in Denmark about a national topic but it it will be produced in English too because it is of international interest. I am working on the story with Henrik and I can’t really tell too much about it yet. It is self financed and it’s a project that we have to work on in between other assignments. But I am very excited about the project!

Right now I am working on an English edition of a new story from Ethiopia about an NGO and their work with street children. It’s a project that I shot with Brent Foster in November and the Danish version has been finished for some time now.

I hope that 2010 will be the year where BFC gets one more member and the year where we start work for some bigger international clients and NGOs.

---

Want to nominate a deserving colleague, friend or inspirational figure to be highlighted in this series? Confidential nominations can be emailed to tracynboyer@gmail.com on an ongoing basis. Self nominations are also welcome. A person will be featured every Friday, so look for the next “innovative individual” Friday, February 5th!

Other posts that might interest you:

• Innovative Individuals: Henrik Kastenskov
• Innovative Individuals: Brent Foster
• Innovative Individuals: Maisie Crow

© 2010 Innovative Interactivity (II).
Download II's Security Policy (PDF)