“Online journalism as it could be” is the motto that hits you when you enter the website of Bombay Flying Club. And surely enough this collective was formed to push the boundaries of photojournalism and online storytelling to get further than simple slideshows and static functionality. In this Skype interview co-founder Poul Madsen talks about their ideas and how they execute them.

PROJECTS MENTIONED IN THE VIDEO:
Bucharest Below Ground: http://www.bombayfc.com/bucharest_uk/

TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO:

Talk a bit about Bombay Flying Club, how did it emerge?
Bombay Flying Club is a collective of freelance photographers who like to do interactive narratives for the web. We started out in 2005 because I was in India at that time working at a paper, and I had the opportunity to do some documentary film making. And at the same time I saw this new trend in photo journalism…I saw some photographers who started to use Flash (Adobe Flash) in their stories, and I was very captivated by that. So at that time Flash was still a new tool, and very few people knew how to work with it, so I decided to spend some time trying to learn the basics of coding and programming. So today we are three photographers who work together, and we do international stories for an international audience I would say. Because we don’t really have a base…we are two danish photographers and one canadian photographer, so we just go where the story is, and then we stitch it together. We don’t need to sit in an office. So this also makes us kind of versatile compared to established companies.

How do you define multimedia and interactivity?
There’s been a tendency in multimedia, especially for new photographers, to just take 30 or 40 images and put them together in a quick slideshow with some basic audio..and I don’t really consider that, you know, multimedia. I think real multimedia resembles a film documentary in a way, and then you have the option to put several layers on to your story – and that can be graphics or video features or different kinds of modules that you can kind of build into your story, so you get this very layered story. There is the possibility of engaging the user actively in a story, and you can do that by using..it could be Flash..it could be some other application that allows you to let the user go actively into the story and make some choices and decisions on where to take your story.

Talk about one of your projects that exemplifies what you do?
If I should pick one story I would probably take the one called “Bucharest Below Ground” about street kids in Romania…that was a vital story for me, because first of all it was very difficult to shoot the story. It was shot in only two days basically -I was working with a radio journalist on that story. But the main challenge was to do the whole Flash and the programming. At that time I was working as a staff photographer at a paper in Denmark, and in between my assignments I could sit down and program and try to code..and I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, but I didn’t really know how to do it, and so in the end I think I spend two months on the Flash. It could probably have been made in two days if you were a professional programmer. I just wanted to do more. But right after that things took off and Flash changed and it became much more difficult to work with, and then I kind of changed my focus into storytelling – and this is my main focus now. So, I believe that is really the most important aspect in multimedia.

Is it difficult to do what you do?
I think it’s much easier to start in multimedia today because the cameras have changed a lot…it’s only been two years we have had these cameras that can shoot video in full HD…and right now we can do stuff that quality wise is good enough to show on TV and even in cinemas..you know, on small cameras…so this is why we see this explosion of stories that are coming out right now. But it’s still difficult to find stories that are really, really unique.