Bombay Flying Club’s Streetlights: a last for Flash?
Written by Adam WestbrookMultimedia producers the Bombay Flying Club have just published their latest piece, shot in Ethiopia.
At 11 minutes, Streetlight is a little on the long side for most armchair viewers, and the Flying Club’s trademark use of rich black and white photographs, while stunning, perhaps steals something from the overall piece. Their use of audio is wonderful, and they do what all audio slideshow producers should do (but rarely do) and match their pictures to their sound.
In Streetlights we hear a game of table tennis in mid flow – and that’s what the picture then shows us.
What’s interesting is a line buried at the bottom of the Bombay Flying Club’s post announcing the new story:
Streetlight is presented in full screen Flash and it requires a decent broad band connection in order to run smoothly. A low res version has been made for the NGO partnerships in Ethiopia.
This might be the last Flash documentary produced by BFC. In the future we will be working closely together with professional programmers in order to keep pushing the limits for online visual storytelling.
It is good to see multimedia producers looking beyond Flash for their work. While easy to use, Apple’s refusal to include it in some of its big products recently limits its potential. Meanwhile Javascript, J-query and eventually HTML5 promise the ability to create stunning interactive graphics with little or no big installations.
Discussion (10 Comments)
Flash had a use back in the early days of the web, but it’s starting to look dated. From the performance issues to the glaring security ones (and trust me, there are so many it’s worrying), it’s good the new kids on the block are being looked at.
Personally I think HTML5’s approach will change how video/audio is shown on the web. It doesn’t take a nerd to work out this snippet of code is much easier than trying to use flash:
var video = document.getElementById("video");
Play
Pause
<< Rewind
What’s pretty cool is that if you do decide to create multimedia this way, it works on all modern devices and not just the ones capable of playing flash.
Flash had a use back in the early days of the web, but it’s starting to look dated. From the performance issues to the glaring security ones (and trust me, there are so many it’s worrying), it’s good the new kids on the block are being looked at.
Personally I think HTML5’s approach will change how video/audio is shown on the web. It doesn’t take a nerd to work out this snippet of code is much easier than trying to use flash:
var video = document.getElementById(“video”);
Play
Pause
<< Rewind
What’s pretty cool is that if you do decide to create multimedia this way, it works on all modern devices and not just the ones capable of playing flash.
Ok my code example isn’t working, bah!
Thanks for this Adam,
To be honest I was pretty disappointed with the Wasteland Video by BFC (it didn’t really look to me like there was much depth to the relationship between the people in the video and the producers) but I think this is a stunning piece of work that I’d really like to pay tribute to.
I lived in Ethiopia. It is country close to my heart. You guys captured it beautifully and with such respect.
THANK YOU
Adam,
some good points raised there.
Ref: Length – I personally think 11 minutes is far too long, I tend to lose interest around the 3 minute mark, even some of the best pieces i’ve been known to so easily click the ‘back’ button.
I suppose, it’s a thin line between telling the story and waffling!
Also, a great point ref matching the audio to the pics – this too can be overdone (?)
Finally, just as I was about to start taking flash and AS3 serious HTML5 and it’s client side buddies begin to show themselves (not forgetting we are still years off a final implementation of HTML5)…
…anyway, these are the technicalities – I better go and find out what streetlight is all about 😉
Regards,
Matt Kirwan
http://www.mediagatherers.com/
I couldn’t get to the end of it. I probably watched about 7 mins and thought it was quite strong, but it just lost me. I really wanted to be absorbed to the end but I agree with Matt – that kind of length is a very big ask of an audience. And I’m probably not the typical/target viewer….won’t some of them have shorter attention spans for multimedia?
Hi – thanks for very good and important comments!
I agree with most of what is being said above. But it’s also important to understand that a story like this one is a commissioned piece of work.
Is the piece too long? YES… it is way too long. But then again this story was never intended for a general audience. The story (this is written on our blog the day we launched the site) was produced for an NGO for fundraising purposes and for information within the organization. We were asked to include certain elements in the story and to show how Christianity has a huge influence on their daily work. Personally I myself would never have enough patience to watch a piece like this. There are loads of stories online – also stories produced by Mediastorm – that I have never had enough patience to watch. At the end of the day
we were hired to do a specific story and we did it according to the NGO’s wishes and demand. The NGO is very happy with the piece. So we’re happy too.
This was definitely our last piece in Flash produced entirely by ourselves. From now on we will only do bigger Flashbades projects with professional programmers.
We in BFC are currently working on a new big ( and independent!) story and we will be working on it on/off during 2010.
Thanks for watching and posting good and relevant comments.
Kind regards
Poul Madsen / BFC
Poul,
thanks for your comments.
We shouldn’t try and please everyone should we?
Part of the struggle for us all is how to educate clients that ‘less is more’. Its a battle that mostly we lose because people tend to have such strong ideas about what they want.
Maybe this is too long? I don’t care, you opened a window on a world I love and for that I am grateful to you.
Benjamin
The work is great. About Flash: it might be dated but it is not finished yet. As of early 2010, it is a good way to display interactive stories without the need to have a lot of knowledge about code. I wonder why it hasn’t been used more by independent multimedia producers/storytellers (most of them using it only as a one click video player, which is multimedia but not necessarily interactive). It would be great if there were non-proprietary alternatives to Flash, but I think we are not there “yet”. BFC said they’re going to be working with professional programmers from now on, but for those who can’t afford that Flash will still have good use, at least in the next couple years.