The video begins simply. Title cards set the stage for a story about the Kurds, the ethnic group of northern Iraq who now live in relative peace.

Then all madness breaks loose. Daily life in Kurdistan unfolds as a staccato, stop-motion dance. Cars jam a street, children play, soldiers train, nurses tend to patients – all at a few frames per second, synchronized like a ballet to instrumental music. As the frames flip by, the camera zooms in and out, hovering to line up a well-framed shot, changing brightness and focus.

The 12-minute multimedia presentation is made from thousands of still photos Ed Kashi shot on a National Geographic assignment in Iraqi Kurdistan last year.

The clip made its public debut Tuesday as the top headline on MSNBC.com (viewable directly here), and has already drawn strong reactions at photo seminars for its radical new technique.

Online slideshows often have the pacing of grade-school filmstrips, but the Kurdistan piece breathes some fast-paced energy into the format. It's like flipping the channel from PBS to MTV.

Kashi, along with his friend and collaborator Brian Storm, realize that the flip book technique is part of the project's appeal, but they hope people see it for more than just a novel way of showing images.

"I'm hoping people get past the technique and see the story," says Storm, the multimedia producer who worked on the project. "Because the technique is only going to work the first time."

For Storm, the Iraqi Kurdistan presentation is a proud moment for his production studio MediaStorm. MediaStorm celebrates its first anniversary Thursday and plans to publish its own version of Kashi's Kurdistan piece to mark the occasion.

MediaStorm licensed the web rights to the presentation through an online auction, which MSNBC won. This was familiar territory to Storm, who spent seven years as MSNBC's multimedia director.

The presentation owes much to Kashi's habit of shooting many nearly identical images. This is only realistically possible with digital cameras, and Kurdistan was Kashi's first all-digital project for National Geographic. Kashi's shooting style was also influenced by his work with video, including several documentaries about the elderly he has worked on in collaboration with his wife, journalist Julie Winokur.

When reviewing his Kurdistan take on the computer, Kashi noticed an effect that countless other photographers no doubt have experienced: As he paged through his images, they created an illusion of motion.

"I didn't discover something new," Kashi says. His multimedia presentation, he says, is a "marriage of an old technique with the new tools of the day."

The first version of the presentation came when Winokur's studio assistant, Lauren Rosenfeld, loaded all of Kashi's 17,000 Kurdistan images into Final Cut Pro and set them to play at a several frames a second. The whole show took 19 minutes and, as Kashi puts it, stopped being interesting after about four.

Kashi compares the early version to a "Grateful Dead solo." Storm's editing, he says, "made it into a symphony."

It took Storm and multimedia producer Eric Maierson a month to edit the presentation. "There were days when we'd do a ten-hour day and we would get through one minute of the piece," Storm says.

Most of MediaStorm's other presentations blend still photojournalism with audio and video clips shot on scene. (An exception is the studio's "1976" video, which employed another experimental technique of carving photos up into layers and setting them in motion to music.)

But the Kurdistan clip includes no sound other than music, a mix of local Kurdish music that Kashi secured permission to use and royalty-free music that MediaStorm selected.

Apart from the title cards, the images run without captions (though MSNBC added a small title bar at the bottom). In Storm's edit of the piece, no locations are mentioned and no one is identified by name. The idea, Storm says, is to let the images tell stories of the "universal human condition." "That's what matters to me about the piece, not who it is," he says.

Kashi showed the presentation at the Eddie Adams Workshop in October, where the audience reacted with cheers and loud applause.

Later, Storm played it for a panel at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York, where audience members said they were impressed, though some were apprehensive.

"I kept thinking, 'I hope no on else does this because it could get annoying,'" said photographer Craig Sherod of Mountain View, Calif. But he added, "I'm always interested in something that's totally new.... I salute him for trying it."

Kashi is aware the effect could wear out, and hopes to use the flip-book technique more, but not too much.

"I have a very finite amount of work I want to do with this... and then put it away," he says. "If this is about a shtick, ultimately it has very weak legs."

Kashi, who was on his way to Uganda this week, also hopes the presentation will be a way for more of his images to reach more people.

"If you step out of this little world of photographers, you see this in a totally different way," he says. "It's the rest of the people we're trying to really touch."

Related links
MediaStorm
MSNBC Multimedia