Conceived and directed by Tronic, “White Out” features Jenna Jameson as a mallet-wielding, white clad, arcade-obsessed femme-fatale in this spot for Adicolor, a line of trainers from Adidas. “White Out” was a huge viral success on both YouTube and ifilm.
He’s a man of many media — radio, television, video, imagery, design, podcasts, blogs. You name it, David Dunkley Gyimah will probably be using it in one of his inspiring documentaries, or on his Web site, or even in a ‘blec’ (a ‘web lecture’ for the uninitiated). Apple technology helps this “one-man hurricane” break down the boundaries between art and journalism, between production and post-production, and between the present and the future.
David Dunkley Gyimah doesn’t know when to stop. So he doesn’t stop. The man seems to be everywhere at once, and everything is interesting to him. He’s an original thinker fulfilling a range of professional roles, from freelance Channel 4 producer, to visionary videojournalist, to creator of award-winning online magazine viewmagazine.tv, to senior lecturer in digital journalism at the University of Westminster.
Gyimah is a professional rule-breaker. Not in a malicious way, you understand. It’s just that every rule he comes across tends to get broken at some stage. This self styled “convergence creator” has grasped the opportunity presented by new media to help turn videojournalism into an art form. In this case, the artist is ultra-mobile, solitary and armed with just a video camera, a Mac and the guts to go it alone against the big boys.
Gyimah has worked in the media for 20 years, starting out in radio before becoming one of the first videojournalists in the UK. “Times have changed a great deal since then”, he explains. “When I started out at [videojournalism enterprise] Channel One, we had great big cameras and had to take everything back to the edit suite for cutting”.
“The YouTube generation are deconstructing television as we know it; thanks to companies like Apple, they’ve got access to the tools and are just getting on and doing things. They can see that if it’s good enough, people will watch it.”
Now Gyimah typically uses a flip-screen Sony DVCAM for shooting. He records direct to a 500GB LaCie portable hard drive, then downloads on the spot to his PowerBook G4 to begin the edit. He can add effects there and then or, for more serious processing, he runs footage through his desktop system, a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 with five 500GB external LaCie drives.
“My Mac goes everywhere with me”, says Gyimah. “The fact that I have everything on it, from Final Cut Studio and After Effects to Photoshop and Dreamweaver, reflects the way I work. You never know what might work as a film, what might go online, or what might function as an image... for me there are no grey areas between them”.
This principle is key, not only to Gyimah’s working practice, but to his entire outlook. “People often think the established ways of telling stories are the best but I look at, for example, photo-journalists and filmmakers and at how they use composition or cinematography to enhance their work, and I think, ‘why not bring that to videojournalism?’”.
This blurring of boundaries between conventional journalism and something more creative (achieved to great effect in Gyimah’s recent film about a group of experienced newspaper journalists he turned into video journalists, which won him the International Jury (Independent) award at the Berlin Video Journalism Festival) is supported by the technology Gyimah uses. He says: “One of the chief reasons I’m attracted to the Mac is because it facilitates this aspect of my work — to either go for a straight cut or to get a bit more creative. The technology allows me to push and push and push”.
Gyimah has worked with Apple products since 1992 and bought his first Mac in 1999. He says: “The real turnaround came for me around 2000 when I was working on our interactive documentary, The Family, with a colleague, and I thought, ‘this stuff really works’. Since then, almost every film I’ve done has been made on a Mac. It’s about creativity, availability, affordability and compatibility”.
Gyimah started out cutting video with Adobe Premiere but switched to Final Cut Studio. He says: “The interface is more intuitive and you have lots of different options for getting to the same goal — for example, cutting from the timeline or cutting in the window. I can build-up preferences and find the right way of working for me. It’s about ease of use but also what the software can do”.
Evoking thoughts of his highly creative Web promos and documentary shoot of Lennox Lewis preparing for his world title fight with Mike Tyson, Gyimah says of the Mac: “It almost has the elegance of a boxer — graceful but power, power, power”.
Gyimah is a blue-sky thinker, endlessly reflecting on the direction various media might take and how such developments might affect our daily lives. He says: “One of my pet subjects is quin — short for quintuple — publishing... if a videojournalist takes footage of an event, they’ve effectively got a blog, a podcast, multimedia, a video and images. From video, I can pull out five elements. Although they’re different mediums, they’re all ones and zeros really”. This is the principle behind, for example, his interactive magazine, viewmagazine.tv.
Other bits of futurology nurtured by Gyimah include video hyperlinking whereby viewers can click on a moving image to call up a related clip, (in the same way that hypertext lets users click on a word in one document and transfer to another); the “Outernet”, a sort of outward-facing Internet for public spaces; and the interactive Web lecture, otherwise known as the ‘blec’.
“One of the chief reasons I’m attracted to the Mac is because it facilitates this aspect of my work — to either go for a straight cut or to get a bit more creative. The technology allows me to push and push and push.”
Gyimah also harbours strong opinions about the future of the broadcast industry. He says: “The YouTube generation are deconstructing television as we know it; thanks to companies like Apple, they’ve got access to the tools and are just getting on and doing things. They can see that if it’s good enough, people will watch it. There are no rules out there and if there are, they break them anyway”.
