What Mike Did This Summer

While he has moved on to greater challenges, Mike Schmidt left OASIS with the formidable legacy of his final project with another group. Job-napped by Rich Beckman of the School of Journalism, he was taken to Chile for the summer and came back with this unbelievable "what I did on summer vacation" report.

Be sure to click on all the stories and narratives within this site. It is one of the most beautifully crafted and educational sites I've seen in a long time. Enjoy!

Visit the Chiloe Website!

multimediaCHILOE
Article by Michael Schmidt

For the record… I never thought I’d be able to go. But there I was…. watching the sun rise over the Andes, high above our plane, drinking my last cup of real coffee (they all drink instant down there), and I knew I wasn’t dreaming.

Rich Beckman gets to do this every summer, but he’s a multimedia professor, professional wildlife photographer, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication Visual Communications Department Head. It’s brilliant really. Gather up the best students from the Photography, Design, and Multimedia tracts in the VisCom Department throw in a few hundred pounds of pro digital photography equipment, digital video gear, pro audio recording equipment, a batallion of Apple laptops, and a bunch of power adapters. Combine equally awesome students and faculty from a partner international journalism school. Then, unleash all on an interesting location to create a high-end multimedia journalism documentary website. Previous projects have taken on Patagonia in Chile and South Africa 10 years after the dissolution of apartheid, among others. This year Rich, UNC Photography Professor Pat Davidson, and José “Paco” Francisco Zegers (professor of Journalism at the University of the Andes in Santiago, Chile) set their sights on Chiloé Island off the coast of Chile.

Where do I come in? For me, it was professional development. I manage the Beasley Multimedia Center in the basement of Graham Memorial (stop by sometime, there’s a nice coffee shop upstairs). This was a great chance for me to learn more about what I do in the multimedia lab. Working with students and faculty, digital audio, video and photo gear, multimedia applications and computers, plus all the odds and ends of multimedia… is my thing.

You wouldn’t believe how much work goes into one of these projects. For me, the project started 6 weeks before liftoff. The Design and Programming team (which I was part of) got busy working on mock ups, testing animations, researching topics, and discussing big design and structure issues for the site early on. By the time we left Chapel Hill, we had a pretty good idea of how users were going to navigate through the site, as well as the rough workings of three separate info graphics modules that would be integrated into the site along with the photo/audio/video stories.

Now, we knew about the 10 hour flight… but the length of the bus ride from Santiago to Chiloé Island wasn’t so clear from the beginning and ended up being 17 hours long! Which was the perfect opportunity for to meet and greet our new Chilean amigos. So after what seemed like days and days of traveling, the Chiloean leg of the project began. I sat with our faculty members for a long morning discussing all of the possible story assignments and that afternoon we held audio and video production seminars for the students. The photographers worked with Pat as well as Phaedra Singelis, photo editor at the Washington Post online and a volunteer coach on the project. We built teams of students to work on each story. Each American photographer was paired up with a Chilean Audio Reporter (which solved the language problems nicely) and we had three Video teams of Chileans paired with an experienced Video Coach from the US. Once settled in, we sent them off to begin their stories while the programming and design team set up shop in the hotels breakfast room.

The pace of life was different than my usual day to day… we were served breakfast in the hotel at 9:30am and by 10:30 we’d have the dishes cleared and start setting up the laptops. By 11am we had the local wireless network setup (not to the internet, just for sharing files between machines) and we’d be off working on the design and programming projects for the day. Around 3 we’d start talking about lunch, which was invariably a 2 hour commitment (not much fast food in this off-the-beaten-path town). By 5 we were back at work in the breakfast room. Around sunset the photographers and video teams would start returning from their field assignments. The design team kept at it until 9 or 10 when we’d head out for dinner. Then, once fed, we’d squeeze in a few more hours back at the laptops, often followed by an end of the day cerveza with the Chileans. Finally, off to bed to do it all again the next day.

Two weeks of this and we got back on the bus to return to Santigo for Post-Production. Here we set up shop at the Journalism department in the University of the Andes and moved into our host familes homes. One of the UNC students and I lived with a wonderful family, the Rioja’s, who fed and took care of us during our stay. We spent the days editing all of the video, photos and audio we captured in Chiloé, as well as continuing to further develop and implement our ideas for the web site. It was really an immense amount of work, and everybody chipped in to get it all done. Chileans with good English skills were recruited for all the Translation work, and the UAndes Faculty kicked in to proof read the mountain of content we’d produced.

Four weeks after we set foot in Chile, we were ready to present the project to the world at a special international journalism seminar held at the University of the Andes. As we sat in the dark, half asleep from the long nights work, Rich explained the project to the audience and presented the photo and video pieces we’d created. Finally we were actually done. We had worked ourselves to the bone, learned about a different culture, and made some wonderful new friends.