Praise for Burma: Grace Under Pressure

Burma: Grace Under Pressure - Beautiful photos, text, and voice-overs tell the stories of those struggling to survive in Burma. You will need the Flash Player to view this clean, elegantly designed site. Keep up the good work with the website. It says more than books and a thousand newspaper articles possibly could.

The Exploratorium Museum, San Francisco

Hiller obviously did his homework: his Web site is a trove of information on the country (which, for the record, was renamed Myanmar after an even more repressive military regime seized power from the ruling military in 1989). His online documentary is a heady mix of images, music, text and interviews - offers a glimpse into a forgotten world.

Dorothy Ho, Photo District News

This is a very moving site. I was totally satisfied with the story you told, which is saying a lot for something done in this medium where TOO many things get in the way.

Steve Heller,The New York Times

Your photos of Burma are quite strong, the text insightful.

Ellen Kampinsky.
Senior Editor,Talk Magazine

Excellent multimedia site on Burma. You have my profound respect. Good luck on future endeavors.

Nella Citino/Senior Producer
Wisconsin Public Television

I went through the whole site, and it's stunning. A beautiful job.

Richard Read, The Oregonian

Geoffrey Hiller has documented a recent trip to Burma (also known as Myanmar) on his Web site. Through images and sound, Hiller captures some of the country's essence, where a gentle, spiritual lifestyle and a popular pro-democracy movement often collide with a brutal military dictatorship. A must-see.

Canadian Broadcasting Company

Photojournalist-turned web designer Geoffrey Hiller presents this moving pictorial odyssey through Burma, a war-torn country described by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi , as "Fascist Disneyland." The slowly-streaming slide show, accompanied by haunting Burmese music, chronicles poverty, hunger, oppression, fear, and hope. Burma, renamed Myanmar by the military dictatorship in 1989, was once known as the rice basket of Asia, but today, rice is rationed and Burma has become the world's opium bowl. Hiller's high-bandwidth exhibit juxtaposes luminous beauty with tragic injustice and human misery.

Yahoo!

Burma - Grace Under Pressure - exploits the visual power of the Web to help the world glimpse the lives of people living under a brutal dictatorship.

USA Today

It's fabulous. One of the most compelling combinations of photography, audio and text that I've seen. The subject is also rich, and you have mined a very deep vein.

Peter Howe,
Former Photographer Editor
Life Magazine

While there have been a few faint signs recently of Myanmar/ Burma's military dictatorship easing pressure on the nation's pro-democracy interests, the country remains, in the words of Aung San Suu Kyi, a "Fascist Disneyland." Burma: Grace Under Pressure provides a glimpse at day to day life in this country, as well as a lesson in high-quality Flash-based Web design. Grace Under Pressure documents a three-week trip that photographer Geoffrey Hiller took to Burma in February of 2000 - combining text, sound, and a selection from the 3,000 images he captured, into what is probably the best Flash-based presentation I've seen since The First Nine Months .

After a brief personal introduction, followed by a flashing screen and audio clips from the 1988 uprising, (an abrupt interlude that certainly gets the visitor's attention) Grace Under Pressure offers a quote from Aung San Suu Kyi, and access to the first of the site's five 'sections'. Each section is an independent Flash exhibition, (breaking download times into easily digestible portions) which can be viewed in sequence, each linked from the previous section, or in any desired order, from a navigation bar near the top of the browser window. For the most part, images fill the screen, and all exhibit that rare combination -- on the Web -- of exceptional photography and exceptional reproduction. Music and/or sound clips accompany each presentation, and in another online rarity, continually playing background sound loops never revealed obvious splice points.

Finally, we have a nomination for 'best direction of a Flash presentation' -- an attribute you generally don't miss when it's not there. (Probably because we haven't seen enough good work to recognize the mediocre.) Most similar animated exhibits may use only one transition to move from one image to the next, or worse, try to use every transition available 'because they're there.' But Hiller's method of tailoring transitions to image content or storyline (as with the two-step revelation, and disappearance, of a shot accompanying, "A man came and took our sister to Thailand...") makes a compelling argument for 'attention to detail' when designing a website. There was nothing unusually difficult about what he did - it's just that few others go to the trouble to do it.

Grace Under Pressure won't give you the latest developments from the Fascist Disneyland, but if you're following those developments (or if you want to learn about Flash authoring), this site should definitely be on your itinerary.

The Christian Science Monitor

More than a travelogue Geoffrey Hiller's site Burma: Grace Under Pressure is more than a simple recounting of his time abroad. It is, as he calls it, a multimedia project, but it is also the first time I have seen a Web page that could easily transcend the boundaries of the medium it was created for. Hiller's Flash-required site combines music, copious photos, hand-drawn script, voice-overs, and text. The result is much like a documentary that you'd see produced for public television or the Discovery Channel. The music ties the sections together, both heightening the mood and the coherency of the presentation, and the voice-overs, which exist in only the section entitled "Women," are clean and emotionally relevant. The simple and seamless navigation consists entirely of small white arrows that turn red as you mouse over them. The simplicity of the site made me feel that I might have been watching the presentation on TV at home instead of viewing the package from my computer at work with my headphones on. This type of Web design could make technological convergence a reality, and--as cheesy as it may sound--allow more voices from around the world to be heard.

Heather Brossard
CNET.com

Awesome use of the Internet. Inspirational work. We are beginning to work with Burmese refugee groups in Northern Thailand. We're just setting up a quiet little office in Chiang Mai, and our purpose will be to assist media workers within the groups in making better use of local, regional and international media, including improving their skills as journalists. We're already in touch with the other NGOs working with refugee groups. Working within Burma right now is impossible, of course, but we hope that the porousness of the border will help get our training info disseminated. If you'd like to check us out, our URL is www.internews.org. There's nothing up there yet about the Burma project since it it very new. Best regards,

Deborah Mendelsohn
Program Development, Internews Network

Thanks for incredible illumination about a place of which I knew nothing. I'm spreading the word about Burma by sending out the link to your site. Thanks for a beautiful but haunting experience.

Bill Curtis, Bound Brook, NJ