Josh Flynn

I looked at one of the sites mentioned on the NPPA: Best of Photojournalism 2008 for this week’s post. I looked at the photos and watched one of the videos in the story from the Roanoke Times about the Hellgate 100K (roughly 62 miles), an ultra-running competition that takes participants anywhere from 11 to 18 hours to complete. That is simply insane to think that people can run that far and for that amount of time and not collapse!

I am unable to give specific links to each part, because it’s all part of an interactive design that uses non-page based browsing, so just go HERE and take a look around if you are interested.

I really like the way they present this story in three parts. The first part that focuses on the lifestyle, and has two videos featuring Rebekah Trittipoe, a 50-year-old woman that competes in the race and talks about her experiences with Hellgate and the struggles she had to overcome. It is a good introduction to the race and really humanizes it, making it more about the people and their determination more than just a bunch of people running for an insane amount of time.

The second part focuses on the course itself, including an interactive map with panoramas and descriptions of the different stops along the way. It helps the audience to get a better grasp on the immense distance of the race and visualize what the participants are up against.

The third part tells the story of the race through photographs with captions, and is backed up by periodic videos featuring Trittipoe and her progress as well as the other runners and just some general shots of what happened. The photos are definitely a good story telling mechanism, and the captions are informative and had a lot of nice shots with people in action and they were aesthetically well taken photographs as well.

Overall it is an impressive project about something I never even knew existed and they used the multimedia here in an extremely effective way, and used the story of Trittipoe to give a human perspective was a good approach to a story that could have turned out mediocre if done without the nice media package.

Hellgate, interactive map, NPPA, Reaction, Tritttipoe