Living in Mogadishu
By Ansa Varughese
From the very beginning, you hear what it's like to be in Mogadishu. Bombs are dropping, feet dragging and a Muslim chanting in a mosque. These are the sounds of Mogadishu, and they're expressed in this audio slideshow from The Guardian called, Mogadishu: A City Besieged, by Kate Holt and Arjun Kohli.
One of the most effective techniques used in this piece is natural sound. Without it, you're reducing the impact the story has to listeners. Combining a photo with its respective sound completes that scene of the story.
You could take this example from a scene where a mother said a bullet went through a window and hit her daughter. The audio was the sound of glass breaking and it showed a picture of her daughter.
Although the mother was recollecting the story, I thought the journalists made a wise decision to create the sound rather than leaving it blank. This could also be a weakness, depending on how truthful you want the storytelling to be.
I found the pictures did represent the story, but going back to the audio not all sounds were natural, rather it added effects to induce drama. For example, when a baby cried, they made it echo so it distorted the baby's cry.
The pace of this slideshow was appropriate for each picture and its accompanying narration. It's important to have the subject's audio follow the pictures because they're telling the story. I especially thought it was powerful when you have sensitive subjects, like children, tell a story.
But one weakness I found as I followed the slideshow was how the narration was probably rehearsed or scripted, and that takes away from the actual moments of the picture.
So, having a clean audio could sometimes remove the viewers from the setting and I think journalists should have captured the breaths taken when the person spoke or even kept the native language for some parts of the slideshow.
Overall, the story about the people in Mogadishu was challenging. It could be hard for the journalist to interact with the subjects in a dangerous setting and get the right sounds. But the best thing to do would be to get the techniques down before you get to your story, and in this case the journalists were prepared to tell it, no matter the risk.