Well, this is certainly an interesting take on the “first person shooter” type war video game. An Australia-based company called Defiant Development has created a video game called Warco: The News Game where the goal is to capture images and videos of scenes of war and then edit them into a story.
Another unique angle is that the game’s main Warco, i.e. “war correspondent” character, Jesse DeMarco, is a woman. (Pretty unusual for a war-based video game.)
WARCO lets players shoot and record what they see ‘through the lens’ – framing shots, panning and zooming, grabbing powerful images of combatants and civilians caught up in war. They’ve got AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades – you’ve got a flak jacket, a video camera, and a burning desire to get the story. Every game space is embedded with multiple objectives and story leads for journalist Jesse DeMarco to find – a scoop if she’s smart, mortal danger if she drops her guard. Record dramatic images of war, save them in-game, then edit the results into a compelling frontline TV news story. Beam the results to global audiences on the web.
From the screen shots and trailer for Warco (see below) it seems the correspondent is a video journalist, not a still photographer.
We’re wondering though what PDN readers think of the concept of making a photojournalist the focus of a war-based video game. Good idea? Bad idea? Can’t wait to get your hands on the game?
Commuters and shoppers passing through New York’s Union Square on Tuesday were presented with information on the fight against malnutrition in an unusual way: At an outdoor exhibit of photographs displayed around a field hospital set up by Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The photos, as wells as videos shown on monitors inside the hospital tents, were created by photographers with VII Photo Agency as part of Starved for Attention, the global multimedia and online campaign created in association with MSF.
MSF doctors and nurses gave tours of the hospital and describe their work in the field; VII photographers Jessica Dimmock and Ron Haviv were on hand to answer questions about their photo projects. Union Square was the first stop on an exhibition tour that includes Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.
None of the photos in the exhibit, taken in Burkina Faso, India, Bangladesh, Congo and elsewhere, show the now familiar images of starving children with bloated bellies, Haviv notes. (more…)
This video clip titled “Jump Rope” kicked off Week 20 of the photo series “CC52: A Year of Personal Work by Craig Cutler.” The video features Open Class amateur boxer and two-time Golden Gloves champion Chordale Booker. (We previously featured Week 4: Marshmallows, which can be viewed again at http://bit.ly/lkFg3c.
Format: RED ONE Mysterium-X Camera; 100mm-300mm zoom lens. Shot at f5.6 & f8, 2K resolution, 100 fps.
Fine-art photographer Michael Levin says he first came across filmmaker Brad Kremer’s video work in late 2010 and was immediately engaged. “His video “Hayaku” is like a poem told through time-lapse photography. I felt moved along by the kinetic energy in the piece and he had me hooked,” says Levin, who needed some video footage shot in Japan for a separate project. He contacted Kremer with a basic pitch. The resulting video shown here reveals Levin’s personal experience of witnessing Japan as he worked in different locations. “I wanted to show the process, the journey, the adventure in a way that would give the viewer an emotional connection to Michael and his photography,” Kremer explains.
Video-sharing site Vimeo announced this morning it has added a professional version of its service aimed at photographers and other small businesses.
Called Vimeo PRO, the service costs $199 for the year and will allow photographers to create galleries of their videos using templates and themes.
The video galleries will be hosted by Vimeo but photographers can post them directly to their own websites and use their own branding and logos. Vimeo PRO will be entirely separate from the general Vimeo.com community.
The $199 annual flate fee gives you 50GB of storage and 250,000 video plays. You can also buy more storage in 50GB increments for $199 and additional plays in increments of 100,000 for $199.
Vimeo PRO will be available on Vimeo’s site today, starting at 1pm EST.
Photographer and director Jason Lindsey, along with photographer jon holloway, shot “Pray For The Soul Of Thomas Gage” in Ireland as a way of exploring, says Lindsey, “the storytelling aspects of filmmaking.” It was a selection at the Freaky Creak Film Festival in Fairmont, Illinois, late last year. Lindsey and holloway recently shot a music video on location in New Mexico and Colorado for the Austin-based band “The Trishas” who hired them after viewing this clip.
Photographer Brian Kuhlmann directed this video, Geneva, (shot by Ryan Van Ert using a Canon 5D Mark II) while shooting the cover of Chicago Magazine’s June Special Travel Issue. Kuhlmann says the jump cuts in the video follow the music line (music by Vincent Gallo). “We thought it was a great time to shoot a video because of the talent, props and location that we already had access to,” Kuhlmann says. “I rented an underwater housing and we just played.”
The following video by photographers/filmmakers Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton of Four Corners Media profiles four young women who participated in the 2011 Egyptian revolution: a student, a cancer researcher, an art curator and a journalist advocate. Garen and Carleton are currently working on a longer documentary titled If, a coming-of-age story about young women and their experiences during the revolution. (If, which Garen and Carleton hope to debut this Fall, will include some scenes and characters from this video. (Garen and Carleton have also launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.com to continue filming in Egypt as their characters stories unfold.)
The Tiziano Project of Los Angeles, which supports online storytelling by citizen journalists in conflict, post conflict and underreported regions of the globe, has won a $200,000 Knight News Challenge grant to improve its award-winning 360 Kurdistan web site. The Tiziano Project was one of 16 winners splitting $4.7 million in grants from the Knight News Challenge, which supports new uses of web-based journalism. The Knight Foundation announced the winners on June 22.
The mission of 360 Kurdistan is to offer “a robust and complete understanding of life, culture and news in present-day Kurdistan.” Its site currently features slide shows and videos by several Iraqi journalists and Western mentors, including executive director and photographer Jon Vidar. The 360 Kurdistan team will use its Knight News Challenge grant to improve its web site using HTML5, and increase the sharing of its content on tablet and mobile devices. According to the Knight Foundation announcement, “The project will also build an interactive map to serve as a hub for projects developing similar sites in their communities and enable direct communication between these communities and their audiences.”
This multimedia piece by wildlife photojournalist Tim Laman about the highly adapted mating rituals of Birds of Paradise and Bowerbirds, both of which live in the New Guinea region, was a hit when it premiered at the recent LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, VA. Laman, who is also a field biologist, is currently nearing completion on a major, cross-platform project about Birds of Paradise. To see more of his work visit timlaman.com.
Well, this is certainly an interesting take on the “first person shooter” type war video game. An Australia-based company called Defiant Development has created a video game called Warco: The News Game where the goal is to capture images and videos of scenes of war and then edit them into a story.
