David Dunkley Gyimah: One-Man Hurricane
Gyimah has worked with Apple products since 1992 and bought his first Mac in 1999. He says: “The real turnaround came for me around 2000 when I was working on our interactive documentary, The Family, with a colleague, and I thought, ‘this stuff really works’. Since then, almost every film I’ve done has been made on a Mac. It’s about creativity, availability, affordability and compatibility”.
Gyimah started out cutting video with Adobe Premiere but switched to Final Cut Studio. He says: “The interface is more intuitive and you have lots of different options for getting to the same goal — for example, cutting from the timeline or cutting in the window. I can build-up preferences and find the right way of working for me. It’s about ease of use but also what the software can do”.
Evoking thoughts of his highly creative Web promos and documentary shoot of Lennox Lewis preparing for his world title fight with Mike Tyson, Gyimah says of the Mac: “It almost has the elegance of a boxer — graceful but power, power, power”.
Gyimah is a blue-sky thinker, endlessly reflecting on the direction various media might take and how such developments might affect our daily lives. He says: “One of my pet subjects is quin — short for quintuple — publishing... if a videojournalist takes footage of an event, they’ve effectively got a blog, a podcast, multimedia, a video and images. From video, I can pull out five elements. Although they’re different mediums, they’re all ones and zeros really”. This is the principle behind, for example, his interactive magazine, viewmagazine.tv.
Other bits of futurology nurtured by Gyimah include video hyperlinking whereby viewers can click on a moving image to call up a related clip, (in the same way that hypertext lets users click on a word in one document and transfer to another); the “Outernet”, a sort of outward-facing Internet for public spaces; and the interactive Web lecture, otherwise known as the ‘blec’.
“One of the chief reasons I’m attracted to the Mac is because it facilitates this aspect of my work — to either go for a straight cut or to get a bit more creative. The technology allows me to push and push and push.”
Gyimah also harbours strong opinions about the future of the broadcast industry. He says: “The YouTube generation are deconstructing television as we know it; thanks to companies like Apple, they’ve got access to the tools and are just getting on and doing things. They can see that if it’s good enough, people will watch it. There are no rules out there and if there are, they break them anyway”.
