POYi Reflection

Machine Man won the first place for Long-Form Multimedia Story. It is more of a photo essay on "modernity and global development", as the filmmakers stated.

The judges had some great discussion in this category about the narrative layering and cinematic/ journalist quality in multimedia pieces, chaptering big piece as in A Chance in Hell or A Darkness Visible/how it can work or not and the visual quality of the pieces. I could agree on most of their ideas, except for the first place winner.

Machine Man is definitely a great piece on some grand topic. On the other hand, for some reason, the filmmakers used this lensbaby and its strange distorting effect in this piece, which I still can't understand why. I don't see anything added to the story by the usage of this visual effect. And it definitely affected my pinion of the piece. I really liked the second place, A Chance in Hell and the third place, Half-Lives, winners. They were beautifully shot and very well put together.

I had mixed feelings about A Darkness Visible. I was already familiar with photographer's that specific work that he has been shooting for a really long time. They are amazing images. But I don't know if they work that well as a multimedia piece. It feels like there was a vast amount of work that was really good as still images and they wanted to see how they would look in a multimedia work.