The Future of Video is More Than Reality TV

A bunch of grapes...

I have been giving a great deal of thought to the confluence of video and magazines.

As the iPad gains dominance, and as more and more magazines and newspapers migrate to the iPad, I have begun to wonder about the nature of how they will present their content.

The early applications, not surprisingly, look just like the print magazines, except they are on a screen.

This is not surprising.

People almost always stick to that with which they are most comfortable.

Take a look at The Daily, Murdoch's Tablet Only magazine.

(note that the second button after 'news' is 'gossip' - was this a fore-warning about the very nature of the man?)

In any event, take a good look at The Daily.

It's pretty much text.

Where it has video news, it's a kind of bad local TV video.

Time Magazine does the same thing.

A lot of 'anchors' and 'talking heads' reading news stories.

This is nothing new.

When television came along, no one knew what to do with it either, so they dragged some TV cameras into their radio studios and presto, you got TV.

Which for most of its history has looked a lot like radio, but on TV.

Now that print is migrating to iPads, we have a moment in which to not replicate TV on iPads, but rather to start to think about an entirely new and different application of video.

For the past week we have been on the Ile de Re, off the Atlantic Coast of France, and I have been doing a lot of still photography. It's a beautiful place.  I have been shooting with a Hasselblad H4D, which is really more of a studio camera - it gets 40mpls of resolution. 

The Hasselblad is used a lot for fashion photography, and the history of still photography and fashion photography for magazines like Vogue are well intertwined.  Most of the great still photographers of the 1940s and 50s also shot for the great fashion magazines.

Richard Avedon is a classic example of a powerful photographer who changed the nature of fashion photography and made it a high art, as much as photojournalism.

The question that now occurs to me is if it is possible to do the reverse with video.

That is, to take video and begin to apply it as a tool for online fashion magazines who wish to transcend stills.

There is not question that major fashion magazines spend a fortune on fashion photography, and so do their advertisers.

Pick up any copy of Vogue or Cosmopolitan or Elle.

All of them are going to need and want a similar kind of video.

Not a fashion TV show.

Not a 'Who's America's Next Top Model', but rather something that enhances and accentuates the product the way Avedon and others did in stills.

I am drawn to Francisco Aliwalas' (an NYVS instructor!) reel.

Take a look at the power and sensuality of his shooting.

To me, this is the essence of the kind of cross-over I am talking about.