Charles Apple

Making some real progress in our class work

This morning — Day 10 of my stay here in Cape Town, South Africa — started even darker and bleak than yesterday.

When my alarm clock went off at 5:30 a.m. — about 11:30 p.m. Monday EDT back home — there was a steady rain outside my 11th-floor window here at the Westin Grand.

By 7 a.m., the rain had stopped but the skies over Signal Hill still threatened to let go at any moment:

Early morning commuters scurried around puddles and shivered beneath the cold Cape Doctor wind.

By 8:30, though, the sun was beginning to peek out and the temperature was already up to 58 degrees. They’re expecting a high here today of 64 degrees.

While we’re taking our morning look outside my window, please allow me to point out this one feature:

Now, that’s an off-ramp! It’s been sitting out here since my arrival, obviously. I hadn’t noticed it until my colleague mentioned it on Saturday.

Also road-related: We returned to the Westin last night only to park beside this fascinating automobile that resembles the Batmobile:

That, of course, is a Lamborghini Gallardo. I’ve never seen one in person.

It’s powered by a ten-cylinder engine and has a top speed of about 192 miles per hour. The sticker price: Right around $200,000.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with an urge to buy some Hot Wheels.

(For my South African friends: Hot Wheels are small, metal toy cars. Very popular in the States for young boys… and older boys who like to play with them at their desk while on the phone. They’re very cheap — less than a dollar, or about R8.)

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PROBLEMS WITH FACEBOOK

Several of you back in the U.S. have sent me messages or links via Facebook. I can’t successfully log into Facebook at the newspaper or in the hotel. And I’m having trouble following the links you’re sending me. So if you want to get in touch with me — especially if it’s something for the blog — please e-mail me: chuckapple [at] cox.net

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SUCCESS IN THE CLASSROOM

Our classes are going very well. We spent last week on a series of slideshow lectures on various topics of interest to the six news artists attending our sessions. The folks here are very talented and eager, but not well-versed in the basics of modern visual journalism.

Therefore, I’ve been stressing ways of emphasizing content, how to maximize visual impact and the importance of using color in more subtle ways. I’ve shown them ways of being more proactive with ideas and graphic solutions and was delighted when one of the students created a quick graphic one afternoon that made it into the paper on Friday.

I’m coaching the artists to become idea factories and to collaborate with editors and reporters. Most of all, though, I’m showing them they don’t necessarily have to give their editors what they ask for. Figure out what the editors really need and give them that, instead.

Last week, we held lecture/slideshows in the mornings and stayed loose for informal discussions, question-and-answer sessions and one-on-one coaching. This week, I’m showing the class more examples of specific things they want to see more of, teaching them advanced techniques for brainstorming, researching and selling graphic ideas and having them work on their own ideas and assignments.

Anton loves sports graphics. Here, he’s working on a rugby piece but he’s also built one about a local coach that will run soon:

His editor loved the relatively simple graphic and asked Anton to beef it up. He and I worked together yesterday to organize and simplify it.

I’ve discovered that Anton loves puns. We’ve been bouncing puns and wordplay off of each other all week. I’m glad to find South Africans can tell awful jokes just as well as Americans.

Elsolet specializes in business graphics:

I’ve been spending a lot of time with her, simplifying the house style and showing her how to take the lead in suggesting graphic solutions to the heavy demands readers make of their business pages.

Hanlie is a talented illustrator with interests in politics and history. Here, she’s illustrating a story about how politics are affecting the appointment of officials in the South African judicial system:

She completed the illustration Tuesday and it ran on today’s Forum page — basically, our equivalent of the Op-Ed page:

Here’s what the entire page looks like:

Hanlie seems displeased with how dark the image printed and the way certain textural details didn’t come out in the final illustration. I don’t see how it could have worked much better, though. It’s a striking image and it has powerful impact on the page.

I’ve been working with her on ways to interact with her editors and the designers who assemble the pages on which she appears.

Jaco is the heavy-duty infographics specialist of the bunch. He produced the nice rugby graphic I posted Saturday morning. He’s soaked up a lot of my larger or more interesting graphics samples and asked for more.

Sensing a fine sense of detail and responsiblity, I asked Jaco to be our style chairman — to put together a collection of the types of routine infographics the folks here see most often and pull together a set of rules to help bring them into line. Essentially, a graphics style guide.

Morné was the artist who struck our first blow last week by putting together a District 9 movie graphic and — to his surprise — successfully selling it to two of the company’s dailies.

Emboldened by his success, Morné is proposing a number of pieces related to his favorite subjects, entertainment.

And finally, Salomé is exercising her journalistic muscles, digging up material for a number of pieces aimed at consumers and readers hungry for new things to do.

She asked me to show her the Virignian-Pilot’s old How Do I? pages from a few years back. I suspect she’ll be doing some really cool stuff very soon.

Today, we’ll press on with styles, making graphics more clear, research techniques and how to survive in a newsroom in which they’re the only ones without a reporting or journalism background. They’re only now discovering how hungry their editors and supervisors are for good, meaty visual ideas.

Artists are journalists too, y’know. A different kind of journalist from the old-school word journalist. But a journalist.

And that can be quite liberating if you’ve never really thought of yourself that way.

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EXPEDITION TO SOUTH AFRICA

You’re reading chapter 14 of my journey to Cape Town, South Africa. Previous installments:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 3:17 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Travelogue, Trip to South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Making some real progress in our class work

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