MediaStorm Website Publishes Audio, Video and Images

Media Storm (www.mediastorm.org) is an excellent site that allows talented writers, photographers, and videographers to share their work. This is a high quality site that displays quality and quite interesting work.

When this article was written, January 7th, 2006, Media Storm offered six compelling stories. They were:
> Never Coming Home
> Heaven, Earth, Tequila
> Friends For Life
> New York Reacts
> Close Up, and
> 1776

Never Coming Home
"Never Coming Home" is a seven minute presentation by Zac Barr, Andrew Lichtenstein, and Tim Klimowicz. This project is a set of interviews with families that have lost loved ones in Iraq. The story is told with photographs and the voices of the families.

This is a nice presentation. Too often, people talk about the war in political or macho terms, but forget that there are families, friends, and lovers for each soldier killed in Iraq.

Heaven, Earth, Tequila
"Heaven, Earth, Tequila" is a 3 ½ minute photo documentary about the people and culture of the Mexican state, Jalisco. The story is told through the beautiful black and white, monochrome, and color photographs of Douglas Menuez. The photographs are accompanied by some beautiful guitar music.

Friends for Life
Growing old is natural. As a writer and a photographer I find this process quite interesting. I see history in everyone. Within each person is a story that contains love, sadness, accomplishments, and failures.

Everyone deals with growing old. We help our parents and relatives as they grow older. Some enjoy the golden years with great health while others suffer though illness.

"Friends for Life" tells the story of Arden Peters, 90, and Warren De Witt, 76. This vignette about growing old is part of the one-hour film "Aging in America: The Years Ahead" by Ed Kashi and Julie Winokun.

This 8 ½ minute story is told through photographs, video, and audio. It is a heart-warming story about a friendship created from a common daily event - having breakfast at WalMart.

New York Reacts
"New York Reacts"by Ray Farkas provides insight into the opinions and emotions of New Yorkers two days after the tragic events of September 11th. This 8 ½ minute video offers a variety of questions, opinions, and emotions.

Close Up
The beauty of photography is that each photographer sees the world differently. Two photographers will photograph the same subject differently. Every photographer finds unique subjects to photograph or unique ways to photograph a subject.

"Close Up" is a 3 ½ minute photo slide show of faces photographed by Martin Schoeller. Some faces you'll recognize and others you won't. Some faces are quite interesting. Use the Index link to identify the faces that you don't recognize.

1976
"1976" is an interesting video about the ghettos, farmlands, and lifestyles of Cuba. This 2 ½ minute video, by RJD2 and leftchannel, uses some innovative techniques to tell this story. This project and its title was influenced by the song "1976" by RJD2.

Site Structure
Each presentation includes some or all of the following 8 useful links:
> The About link provides a synopsis for each project.
> The Email link lets you inform your friends about a presentation.
> The Index link provides an index of the photographs in a presentation.
> The Transcript link provides a transcript of a project.
> The Links link displays information about the artists and sites with related information concerning the topic of the
presentation.
> The Credits link provides production information.
> The Feedback link allows you to share your opinions about a presentation, and
> The Buy link allows you to purchase media from the artists.

Submitting Work
MediaStorm accepts submissions. View the work on this site before submitting your own projects. This site only accepts work of high quality. With that said, what does Media Storm expect? In their own words,

"Multimedia Stories That Speak To The Human Condition

MediaStorm's online publication is an eclectic showcase for state-of-the-art multimedia storytelling with ongoing updates. Our goal is to tell the story of today's world in a truly in-depth manner, giving a voice to not only the narrators but also the subjects. The projects we are looking for run the gamut of in-depth documentary to personal essays to purely artistic. From heartwarming to heartbreaking, these are timeless and intimate tales.

MediaStorm will support projects of a diverse nature and of varying scale including:
> Epic feature productions which utilize several media elements such as writing, photography, audio and video.
> Concise projects for a weekly online blog that showcases images with audio, abbreviated stories and film shorts.