Mobile Story Telling

This photograph of Royal Navy Vetrans was taken by me in the Falkland Island on Remembrance Sunday 2011 where they were on a pilgrimage. It was transferred to an iPad, edited and then added to a WordPress blog, along with a video report, hours later to share with other Falkands Vetrans around the world so they could share the moment.

I'm a Royal Navy Falklands war veteran and at the age of 23 was sunk onboard the frigate HMS Ardent on the 21 May 1982 witnessing 22 of my shipmates lose their lives in the service of their country. In November 2011, nearly 30 years later, I traveled a total of 20,000 air, sea and land miles in 12 days so I could report on a veterans pilgrimage to the Falkland Islands. My main objective was to provide a near real-time blog for other Falklands veterans so they could witness remembrance day services and feel part of the pilgrimage as it took place 8000 miles away from the UK. The platform for this reporting was a Wordpress powered website www.hmsardent.org/falklands2011 which delivered video and photo and text based news reports from myself and another pilgrimage member who used an iPhone to report on events I was not able to cover.

My 20,000 mile roundtrip journey to the Falklands required flights via 6 different international airports onboard 10 different flights, starting in the UK and passing through Spain, Chile and Argentina eventually arriving at Mount Pleasant airport in the Falklands after 3 days of travel.

My video reports were edited in iMovie and then send to the video sharing site Vimeo by an incredibly slow and expensive pay as you go satellite powered WiFi service in my hotel room. Once successfully uploaded the embed URL was added to the blog report along with direct loaded photographs using the Wordpress native iPad App. Other photographs taken were shared direct to Flickr and picked up by the blog using the Wordpress plug-in Flickr Gallery by Dan Coulter. Photo editing on the iPad, and uploading to Flickr, was carried out with the excellent Photogene App. In total 25 news reports were made over the time of the visit with 4 video news reports and a lot of photographs.

The internet made my hope of sharing this trip with other vetrans in the UK a reality. The digtal tools at my disposal gave me the platform to create reports and post them online for all to consume. For me it was very rewarding. However, it is feedback from a visitor to the blog that made the whole trip worthwhile for me and makes for the final words in this item: "Thank you for the updates, l almost feel as we are there with you. Next time maybe?"