Markham Nolan | Literary Mercenary

(A.K.A. The Feature No-One Wanted)

Meet Barry Canton. Barry works in a dull-looking warehouse on the Boston shipyards. It’s beside a large dry dock where they raise cruise liners from the water to scrape off barnacles and repaint their undersides. On the opposite side of the dry dock is a tatty warehouse built by the US military. Its lifts are strong enough to take Humm-Vees to the fifth floor, but all it houses nowadays are artists and artisans, who unwittingly look across the dock at part of America’s energy revolution. Unassuming Barry from Sutton is part of a group of dockland geeks who could revolutionise fuel production for the coming century.

Barry, his wife, their lecturer and a few fellow college classmates left MIT two years ago to start their own business, Ginkgo Bioworks, named after a rare plant classed as a living fossil. At the time there were plenty of research businesses going belly-up, and broke scientists were offloading lots of usable but unsaleable equipment. So Barry and his team did some scientific skip-diving, grabbing equipment for free or for cheap and fixing what need to be fixed to equip their lab. They fitted out their premises largely with orphaned machines, carted out the back door of college labs, and quietly went to work.

Two years later, things are a little different. US Vice-President Joe Biden has just cut a $6million cheque made out to Barry, his team and their collaborators to develop a new fuel from genetically-modified bacteria. That’s some good recycling.

Their work is, publicly, much-maligned stuff. The Ginkgo team deal in Franken-science, DNA-tinkering, injecting genetic material into a nasty little bacteria that most people treat with heavy doses of bleach spray. The modified E-Coli organisms that Ginkgo produce do not do what regular bacteria do. They emit fragrances, flavourings, and now a fuel that you can pour straight into the petrol tank of your car. Barry’s team are making a bacteria that ‘eats’ Carbon Dioxide and ‘poops’ a clean, lead-free, sulphur-free petrol.  And they have plans for much more. Their collaborators are working on bacteria that make foodstuffs. Bacteria that produce malaria drugs. Bacteria that kill cancer cells.

Of course, you’ve never heard anything about this Dublin-born scientist because, despite pitching the story widely to Irish newspapers, no-one wanted, or had the budget this feature. But it’s a story worth telling. So here it is, as it could have been, below the fold.

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YOU ARE:  A small NGO or non-profit organisation. Maybe you’re based in Dublin and work in the community here, or maybe you focus on sustainable development projects in Africa or elsewhere and partner with organisations in the field. You have a track record of getting things done and have proven success on the ground. You’re looking to produce some online audiovisual material that will tell your story but you don’t know where to start.

You need someone who can take your ideas, build them, polish them and produce something stirring that you can easily embed on your website and disperse online. And you want them to do it for free, because you have no money.

HE IS: Someone who’s looking to further build his own multimedia portfolio, a journalist who has a history of storytelling ability, and started his journalism career in photography before pursuing print. He’s someone who’s got a qualification in development studies and will understand your point of view.

He’s only recently turned to multimedia, but he’s been taking photos for more than 13 years, and so he’s got a good eye for framing a shot. And as he’s been turning out podcasts, he’s au fait with audio. He’s just looking for some good, interesting stories on which to put it all to use.

Does it sound like we have a match? Well then, we should meet.

For the next two weeks, I’ll take submissions from NGOs or community groups that want their story told in a new and creative way to help them promote themselves, cheer an achievement or particular success, or to thank someone that’s made a difference. And on June 24, I’ll sit down with the submissions and pick two, one Dublin-based and one that works overseas.

For those two organisations, I’m offering a once-off freebie, a film or audio slideshow of up to five minutes in length that I’ll produce in HD quality and give to your organisation to use as you see fit, for ZERO COST. We’ll collaborate on the storyboard and work together with a mix of whatever materials you might already have and new ones I’ll create. I’ll include your graphics to the best of my ability and to your spec. I’ll put every creative faculty I have at your disposal (within reason) in order to make something that will really stand out for you and your organisation, and in the interests of sustainability, I’ll show you exactly how I did it so that you can replicate it yourselves in the future and we’ll learn together. I’ll blog and tweet the process to give the project extra legs and promote it as widely as I can.

Interested?

Here’s what I want from you:

One creative story idea from your organisation.

That’s it. Just your best idea. Hit me with some background details, some suggestions on filming/photography locations, and how you think it might work. Email me at markham [dot] nolan [at] gmail [dot] com

I’ll pick the two winners based on feasibility, how interesting they sound, and we’ll take it from there.

I solicited some advice via Twitter a few days back on what radio producers look for when it comes to audio file types and the like. Conn O’Muineacháin of Edgecast media was kind enough to spend about ten minutes chatting to me on the phone about the radio milieu and was hugely helpful, and complimentary. Benjamin Chesterton of Duckrabbit was another.

I’ve mentioned the Duckrabbit crowd before. They do some great value multimedia training and produce some lovely material. Largely thanks to them, and other similar groups I’ve found through them, I’m really digging audio slideshows and video at the moment. Check out, for example, Slowcoast, and go meet Hans the Cyclist.

Benjamin sent three emphatic tweets about radio production (The most emphatic saying: NEVER MP3 .. NEVER EVER EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!”) This one made the most immediate difference to my own output so far:

I’ll be doing a lot more of this stuff, and what’s clear is that while the photos have to be good, the audio just has to be crisp and clear. I’m not gonna go into detail about the ins and outs of this recording below, but I love how the full richness of my grandfather’s voice comes across. It takes over the whole thing.  (I recorded it in .wav, Benjamin)

I’ve been putting together more and more podcasts recently, and I’ve found inspiration for that from the RadioLab podcasts from New York’s WNYC. Theirs are without compare the most exquisitely edited podcasts and radio documentaries out there. If you haven’t listened to them, seek them out on iTunes. After that,  if you want to know a little more about how they layer up their podcasts, look in particular for one entitled ‘Making the Hippo Dance‘. It’s awesome.

In the video below, I sought out some nice ambient noise to warm things up. My first love is pictures and so audio slideshows rather than plain audio will always make more sense to me.  And although I tried hard with pictures, Granda’s voice just takes this over. I blame Benjamin.

In total I spent an hour with Granda, nothing more. When I arrived, he was half an hour from finishing up in the garden, so I had to be quick with the camera. I’d been up in his house a while back and seen the light in his potting shed when the idea struck me to put this together. Granda’s Garden is his sanctuary. It’s what keeps him looking about ten years younger than he is. His lawn is like a thick, rich carpet. When you walk on it you want to just kick off your shoes and feel the satiny green scuff between your toes.

So here it is, anyway, Granda’s Garden. Enjoy.

Granda’s Garden from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

A while back I posted a short online poll to guage Irish journalists’ perceptions of the NUJ.
My motivation for doing so was my own ambivalence towards the organisation, stemming from not having had much to do with them, having witnessed their toothlessness in the face of tough management, and having had some disagreements with them right at the start. (They sent me to the ADM in Scarborough as a student delegate, which was an eye-opener)
That said, I pay my dues and carry the card. I take advantage of the discounts, too, and I’ll be going along to the Freelance Forum next Monday too, which sounds like it will be worthwhile.

The responses I got were interesting.

The survey was taken by an even split of freelancers and staffers, and the first batch of questions dealt with their contact and attitudes to the NUJ.
44% said they had never had cause to contact the NUJ during their membership.
42% said they had found the NUJ to be less than ‘moderately’ helpful.
84% said they were moderately helpful at best, leaving 16% of respondents with a more positive than not perception of the NUJ.
27% of respondents said the NUJ were no help at all.
A quarter of respondents said that they saw no value at all in NUJ membership, with 30% saying it was ‘moderately’ valuable, and 11% saying it was ‘supremely’ valuable.
When asked how representative the organisation was of them, 36% said it was not representative at all.

On the money side of things:
There was an even split of those paying/not paying by direct debit.
67% said they paid their NUJ sub out of a sense of obligation or a feeling that it represented ‘insurance’ if something were to go bad.
60% were wholly unaware of NUJ member discounts; another 33% had never availed of them.
Of those that had (just 7%), the Apple store was the most used discount.

14% said they would absolutely consider cancelling their membership having take the survey. (Remember, 25% said they saw no value whatsoever in NUJ membership)
29% said that taking the survey had made them think about cancelling their membership but that they would probably keep it nonetheless, which is the category I’d fall into, but I didn’t take the survey.
43% said that the survey had not affected their feelings either way.

What was even more interesting were the responses I got outside of the survey. I had people email and tweet me about their NUJ dealings, with a lot of people saying that they paid the NUJ sub but didn’t know why they did it. They just couldn’t bring themselves to cancel the direct debit.

The survey was far from exhaustive, had a small sample and was a mere exercise in curiosity, and is still online for anyone who wants to chip in their responses.

My ‘custom message’ on Gmail of late has been ‘multimediocre’, the thinking being that a lot of the time, if you’re trying to be a jack of all trades, you end up being a master of none. The same goes for trying to produce material across several different media.

I reckon I’m getting to grips with it. I’m no master, though. That’s for sure.

I’ll tell you the story behind the filming some other time, but for now, enjoy this intro piece I edited together last night for Mark Pollock, Mick Liddy and the rest of Team Daft, challengers for this year’s Round Ireland Yacht Race.

Over on the Afloat.ie site, I’ve been trying to step things up with multimedia contributions, and yesterday marked a turning point with my podcasts taking a turn for higher quality – some nicer intro sounds, a better microphone connection, and a bit more thought going into how the sections of audio match up (click to hear).

[audio:http://expad.ie/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/AfloatYouthNats.mp3]

This links in with my experiments with the micro-blogging service posterous, I’ve been helping motivational speaker and all-round impressive bloke Mark Pollock begin to experiment with podcasting through our ongoing relationship as he prepares for the Round Ireland race. Posterous has been handy for Mark, as it enables him to update his Facebook, Twitter and Blog all in one go via a simple email without having to navigate all those sites individually, a laborious process when you’re using an audio system to ‘read’ the pages for you.

With Mark, who’s blind, podcasting also makes a lot of practical sense. Up to now, he could record audio memos on his phone, email them via posterous, and they’d be automatically posted onwards. It took a bit of tweaking to have them sit into the WordPress blog, but otherwise it’s worked fine.

Yesterday things took a step further. Mark now has an audio-enabled iPhone.

I thought he was mad abandoning a phone with tactile keys for a touchscreen with only visual references. But it works really well. Click through to read more.

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If you’re a journalist like me, there’s a good chance that a few quid disappears from your account monthly, heading for Liberty Hall, in the form of an NUJ Membership payment. In these NAMAesque times, every penny counts, and union membership must be worth its money.

So I’m asking the question – what do Irish journalists reckon about NUJ memberhip – is it value for money?

One editor I worked with snorted at anyone who joined the NUJ. He had been a long-standing member, he said, and asked them for legal advice once, the only time he approached them. They completely failed him and he cancelled his sub. He was also of the view that NUJ rates, if adhered to rigidly, would preclude him from rewarding better journalists for doing more valuable work. And NUJ membership certainly didn’t help journalists I worked with who were let go, other than offer a bit of solidarity, á la People’s Front of Judaea.

But I’m a card-carrier, and curious to see how many other journalists reckon that card is worth the money.

So if you can spare 90 seconds, please go and fill out my survey, NUJ – Value for Money, and feel free to pass on the link to anyone you think might be willing to contribute.

http://tinyurl.com/nujvalue

I’ll post results here once I have them.

One of the many freelance hats I wear is as web editor for Afloat Magazine’s online portal, Afloat.ie.

Right now, one of the biggest stories in sailing is the news that Ireland will host the finish of the Volvo Ocean Race.

When Knut Frostad, CEO of the race, came to Ireland to announce that news, I got 20 minutes with him to ask him about his plans. The video is pasted above. What’s interesting today is that Auckland has, overnight, been announced as the final stopover port for the race. If you scroll through the video to around the 2.15 point, Knut talks about the possibility of sending the boats on a lap of Ireland (or possible Britain and Ireland) en route from Lorient to Galway. And he says that he’ll announce details like that once the stopover ports have all been announced. Which means: anytime after today.

Fingers crossed.

Video shot with Kodak Zi8 Camera on a tripod and a new lapel mic

Eolai from Markham Nolan on Vimeo.

Necessity is the mother of invention. The short video you see above is the result of keeping an open mind in a situation that didn’t exactly turn out as planned.

Thanks to Liam for allowing me into his studio again. I love his work and it’s a real privilege to get to sit with creative people like him while they do what they do. I’m experimenting with audio slideshows, video and other multimedia at the moment, and he agreed a while ago to be a guinea pig. It was a busy time for him too, as he was preparing for the Irish Blog Awards where he’ll be exhibiting.

Thanks also to the Redneck Manifesto for allowing me use their music for backing.

Some words on the production of the video over the fold. [Read more →]

Back when I was a humble backpacker, scribbling my way through South America, I earned some empanada money by writing for Christian Aid’s Pressureworks website.

Two months ago, a few thousand thermal-clad tourists were trapped at Aguas Calientes (translation: Hot waters – yes, they were stuck in hot water) due to landslids around Macchu Picchu. The tourists had to be airlifted out of the town, as the train line was out of action as a result.

The same company runs the train to and from Macchu Picchu, the access to the site itself and the biggest hotel at the site, which is, of course, Peru’s biggest tourist attraction by some distance. That company is the Orient Express Company. Nice little monopoly if you can get it.

While I was over there I wrote about how said train company cancelled a train to Aguas Calientes on the day we happened to be there. The locals of a neighbouring town planned to use the train to take their protest to Macchu Picchu that day. Their protest concerned a road project that was halted inexplicably, which would have linked their town to Macchu Picchu. Doing so would have allowed the town compete with Aguas Calientes as an alternate route on the Inca trail, and would have broken the monopoly of the Orient Express company on travel to and from Peru’s biggest tourist draw. But rather than have noisy protest about their monopoly on their doorstep, they used their monopoly to stop the protest from getting to their doorstep. Convenient.

The only way out of Santa Teresa and across the river when we were there was a precarious bucket-on-a-high-wire affair. Or, in the case of landslide, by helicopter. It would be glib to say this was karma in action, when the livelihoods of so many in the valleys around Macchu Picchu rely on the tourist dollar.

The article is here (in jpeg format, until I can OCR the sucker). The pic is my own, by the way. Just to prove that I was there to witness the fact that there were people waiting to get on that train that never came.