Thanks to Stars4Media, the Image Display Control technology is yet again closer to its full potential
Not everybody comes to think that there is no one specific way photography is made. The steps and processes vary between and within organizations, and even individuals may have different ways of working depending on what type of assignment they are executing. In addition, photography is a very special form of expression, as visual journalism is a combination of professional high standards of integrity and gut feeling. The content plays a crucial role, but this all should be told in a visually interesting manner.
Creativity combined with journalistic integrity makes photography a very hard topic to teach to a machine. Still, we are determined that with our approach, where we combine the accuracy of human touch with the speed of AI, we can overcome these challenges. No matter the workflow, when we are making journalism, we need to have processes that enable complete integrity and transparency of information.
In an ideal world, every journalist should be able to tell their story without thinking about the restrictions future digital environments will cause.
This year was the second time for us to take part in Stars4Media, and this time we partnered up with CTK, the Czech News Agency. The initial idea was to include a media house as the third partner in the collaboration, but they had to withdraw from officially taking part due to restructuring. We also realized that it might have made the process too complicated to have three official parties in the active phase of S4M. Nonetheless, as we all know, Stars4Media projects do live longer than the official timeline, and the media house will be included in piloting with us as soon as the time is right.
Working again with a news agency was very good for us, a startup building technology for media companies.
It was very eye-opening for us to realize how different the workflows and thinking can be in two organizations that, from the outside, look like they are doing the same thing, just in different geographical markets.
This doesn’t mean one party is doing things wrong; no, it is just that things can be done correctly in many ways.
As a tech startup, our task is to build a scalable product that is easy to implement and fits every working style. We can now use the learnings from the Stars4Media project to shape Framerights IDC-technology so that it is integrable into even more touchpoints and processes.
The beauty of Image Display Control technology is that its philosophy enables creative freedom for storytellers. No matter what their preferred tools are and in what software environments they operate, Frameright will be there when needed.
We had a fantastic cross-industry team. Representatives from different departments. From CTK: tech, sales and photo desk, including Martina Topinkova, who recently earned her Ph.D. researching emotions in news photography. From Frameright: dev, machine learning, and me, a founder and photographer who stubbornly believes in the importance of solving this issue for the good of visual culture.
From CTK’s sales department, we got crucial information about the desires of their customers and how IDC technology fits into the realities they live in. This is important because it makes sense to implement the technology and start offering it to their customers only if CTK’s clients appreciate the advancements in image adaptability and the new control on their image assets in the digital environment.
As planned, we also ran a short pilot with dedicated image editors during the S4M period to get the first feel of Frameright’s IDC technology. Now we are analyzing the results and preparing for the right technology development window for further implementation and integration.
One surprise result that came out of our co-operation was a semi-regular weekly discussion group, originally initiated from a need to teach our machine learning engineers more about what photography is and how images are composed. The group has now expanded to a tradition, and we have also included external members. One of the invited is Michael Freeman, a photographer and a legendary author of photography books. His latest book is specifically about image composition.
We welcome anyone interested in visual journalism to join the talks. They usually take place on Tuesdays. Just email me at marina@frameright.io for more information.
❤ Thank you Stars4Media team for the support ❤
For those interested in the S4M program, a new round will be organized again this year, this time with a much larger grant. I highly recommend applying. This program makes much sense. The deadline is June 30.
