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Archive for November, 2008
Simple yet touching story for the Thanksgiving holiday
As you are *hopefully* enjoying a lazy day after Thanksgiving, watch this nice Soundslide story by N&O photographer Ethan Hyman. “A home for the holidays” is a touching story about an injured Iraqi war vet who returned home to help build a house and a baby room for his pregnant wife. I’m sure this was a quick daily assignment, but I was happy to see a touching documentary piece amidst all of the Macy Day parade photo galleries and coverage of the Mumbai attacks.
Cooliris plugin introduces an entirely new way to surf the Web
I stumbled across a great new Firefox plugin today called Cooliris. It definitely has the “WOW” effect. Developers can utilize it as a stand-along application, or web users can download the plugin to surf sites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and more in an interactive, exploratory manner. For instance, instead of looking at the boring layout of Flickr, imagine flying around the images on a 3D wall. Intriguing, huh?
2009 New media training opportunities
Holiday season is time for 2009 budgets … and time for you to persuade your boss to put away some money for training seminars. Even if this year’s budget is tight, I have listed a variety of training opportunities that has something for everyone. Remember, our jobs require continuous education to succeed so be persistent!
Flash Tip: Detecting end of videos
I finally sat down today to watch “Remember Me,” a great multimedia project by Concord Monitor. Brent Foster of Visual Journalist posted the behind-the-scenes story, and I knew I wanted to spend quality time with it. As I ate lunch, I watched the presentation. The only problem was that nothing happened at the end of each of the six videos, disrupting my viewing experience as I had to manually start the next. For those who want to sit back and watch, it would have been nice to add a feature that detects the end of one video to immediately start the next. Here’s how to do it …
Finding royalty free music for your project
Most of us have struggled in the past deciding on whether or not to add music to our multimedia projects. You shouldn’t add mood music to alter the story, but you may want to add music to move the story along, or to create a sense of place. MediaStorm is a great example of adding subtle music to their pieces without going overboard. So … just where do you get that kind of music?
Designing interactives for mobile devices
Planning and designing mobile versions of interactives has become increasingly more important as our audience depends more on iPhones, BlackBerry devices and other cellphones. But wait, Flash doesn’t work on mobile devices, right? Not entirely … there might be hope for Flash developers.
How to improve within your workplace
Today was my last day at The Roanoke Times and Roanoke.com. I have decided to let the economy and industry sort itself out while I go back to school and hopefully double my current knowledge of the Web. I will be matriculating in the Masters of Science in Information Science program at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this January. While there, I will study interactive data visualization and human-computer interaction. That being said, I want to focus on what I learned from my newsroom, and hopefully what you should be learning as well to succeed in these tumultuous times.
CharityWater uses compelling multimedia to form successful nonprofit
If there was an award for a nonprofit that successfully uses multimedia and interactivity to capture people’s attention, spark intense emotions and open wallets, CharityWater would win it by a landslide. For an organization that is only two years in the making, their web presence is phenomenal.
Flash Tip: URLs in XML
One of my first assignments here at The Roanoke Times was to create a package detailing Virginia Tech’s 2007 football season, with links to archival stories, photo galleries and videos. I knew I wanted to use XML, but I wasn’t sure how to put a URL link in XML and have it show up as a link in Flash. Why I bring this up is because a recent assignment made me go back to these files to familiarize myself with the code, so I wanted to share it with you all in case you ever get stumped.
Multimedia programs for post production
One of the more popular posts on Innovative Interactivity is the “Multimedia types for storytellers” post. I wanted to do a second round, detailing possible post-production programs and software for each main type of multimedia: video, audio, photography, interactivity, text and graphics.
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