My audioslideshow project Kauas on pitkä matka was published today at Suomenkuvalehti.fi and will be available tomorrow on the magazine’s iPad version as well. The story is about these two girls who live far up there in Lapland and have to travel some 80 kilometers to school every day – and back. It also goes a little further by describing their relationship on their northern surroundings.

The project was and of course still is a very dear to me. It’s not the first longer project I’ve started working on, but it’s certainly the first one I’ve managed to see through to the end properly. The audioslideshow is part of my bachelor’s thesis at the university of Tampere, and I’m very pleased that something so advanced and ambitious is included in the curriculum. Audioslideshow as a medium is fascinating since the making process can turn out to be very very complex.. There’s so many things to consider: like rules of video and photoreportage thrown together and you can’t really tell where one ends and another begins.

However, the final product is pretty simple, straightforward and powerful. Rather than pushing photographers to take photos AND video, one should consider this as a pretty good alternative for the internet and all the other new gadgets. All the material for them is generated through normal workroutines. Tatu, who’s an enthusiastic new-generation-storyteller, and who posted the first audioslideshow here on Parta&Linssit, was of a lot of inspiration and help.

About making this project, it was a long and hard road full of learning and hours of driving through and out Lapland, but I enjoyed every bit of it. It was refreshing to know, that I didn’t have to take loads of awesome photos or fully convince the girls on the first time I’d meet them because I’d have time to get to know them and earn their trust. However, if my livelihood had been dependend on this project, it would have probably never happened. Who has the time or the resources to travel many times accross the country over long period of time with no certain promise that you’d ever earn a dime out of it?

That’s a shame, since many interesting stories are left untold.

Anyway, here it is, click the link and see it for yourself!

Posted by Konsta
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