So, what happened?
Nicolás Alcalde, from my second presidential project, and I met at the paper at 7, and arrived at the bus stop at 7.30. We began to search for someone going from there to the end of the future metro. We found an individual to follow fairly quickly – a middle aged woman. However, upon reaching the second leg of the travel, the woman informed us that she was actually going to see family in the other direction, and later proceeding onto the proscribed destination.
At this point our option was to find someone else or return to the beginning. We decided to find someone else as returning to the beginning would leave us at the short end of rush hour. We found a woman traveling from nearly where we began, to past our proscribed final stop. She was amiable and the bus was full, full, full. I photographed her and decided that she could be a subject, if we needed, although she did not fit the image I imagined. She’s not exactly from the area of the first stop, and prefers the bus to the metro, plus she didn’t have time for an interview. We took her number and I think of her as a reserve.
I decide to go out again. This time, I am going with Paula Tala, an infographic artist and designer from La Tercera. Any graphic artist worth their salt will tell you that they should see and experience the route/object that they are creating a graphic about. Paula is going to be creating the graphical elements for this project. I wanted, she wanted, Jorge wanted, that she accompany me.
This time I got permission from the metro although contingent on this permission was that we could not shoot before nine. We went to the metro at 8.30 to confirm the station manager knew we were allowed to shoot. We didn’t want to start following someone only to be stopped upon reaching the metro, and then be forced to start again.
Confirmation of this permission took an hour, and we reached the starting bus stop at 10. No one was going where we wanted them to. No one. We waited for an hour, asking roughly 30 people (everyone who came to the stop.) And then, we decided to just take the route ourselves and capture what we find.
An earlier concern was that the video would be too distracting for someone to watch and pay attention to the graphics. I’d been thinking of going the super visual route anyway. On this second trip, I tried to pay attention to what one notices while riding a train, what one looks at. I stuck to mostly photo, using my video camera only to capture ambient. Video in vehicles is tough stuff (without an awesome suction cup like this bad boy, which figured heavily in my Powering a Nation “Down the Lines,” and I didn’t see how I’d go about using it in the public transport.) I decided to shoot lots of timelapses. These samples here aren’t perfected, but that will come later. I just wish final cut had an onion skin option.
I investigated and planned, discovered that in the field my earlier plans didn’t work so well, all the while thinking that I needed something incredibly visual. I feel like I’ve found an accidental success. We’ll see how it all turns out, and I’m still on the hunt for someone who can talk about his or her experience, but I think this flipbook video experience might be best for working with the quantity of information I want to convey.
These sequences here are just mockups. I will be making the actual flipbooks with Final Cut If you are wondering what I used to do these above, first I did a quick raw process to jpeg. I named the photos in a sequence, then when to quicktime, where I opened an image sequence (it’s in the file menu). You have a choice of frames per second. I used 2 fps for the girls and 6 fps for the others. An important thing to remember is that quicktime is used to dealing with square pixels, whereas video are rectangular. Thus, it gets elongated in quicktime, and to counter this, I exported at the true dimensions (3/2). Basically, this is the inverse of what you need to do to convert a freeze frame from a video into a pure still. You can see Tracy Boyer’s instructions here.
