Multimedia competitions

Analysis on 2009 SSND multimedia entries and winners

SSND multimedia winners were announced today with winners in four categories: Best Overall College Newspaper Web Site, Best mini-site/special section of a Web site, Best interactive infographic, and Best multimedia slideshow. I was honored to be one of three judges, along with Journerdism’s Will Sullivan and graphic artist William Neff. Some of our comments have also been posted on the SSND blog, but I would like to highlight some entries in particular to discuss specifics in content, structure and quality.

Veterans Day 2008
I may cause some controversy here by saying this, but I argued that this entry was not journalism. There was no story behind it, and anyone attending the parade could have captured this audio and taken these photos. I always urge producers to find a story behind the event, not to just cover the event. The audio was bland, and will lose the listener’s attention after 10 seconds or so.

The pictures were boring – all taken from the same height perspective and distance range. My photography professor Pat Davison always told me to show the user a new perspective with my pictures – something different than eye-level. I would have loved to see distant photos from a rooftop … close-up photos of the drummer’s hands … ground shots of a parade participant dancing.

Redemption Through Art at Beach High
This audio slide show from SCADD had several major technical issues that were particularly troublesome. On the positive side, this is a powerful story (if the user gets through it) and the reporter track was nicely blended in with the sound bytes. However, this is a great example of when the audio file should have been thrown out. The audio quality of both the subject and reporter tracks is extremely poor, and we cannot assume that our listeners will put up with bad audio simply because they won’t.

Furthermore, the photo quality and sequencing was inadequate. The first seven pictures were redundant and boring. Since this story was about art, the viewer should have immediately seen the artwork and the students, not seven profile shots of the teacher.

Last, the Kens Burn effect has got to stop! Producers should only utilize this technique to draw the viewer’s attention to a particular part of the photo. Don’t zoom, pan and animate the image just because you can – it will make your viewer dizzy and annoyed! This advice was also listed in MediaStorm’s recent article, “Ten Ways To Improve Your Multimedia Production Right Now.”

LBC Gospel Choir
To compare, let me analyze the first place winner, an audio slide show from the University of Missouri. The audio is clean, the nat sound is energizing and the B-roll interviews are well blended to tell one larger story of the gospel choir. The photos are synced to the beat of the music, which effectively holds a fast-paced tempo from start to finish. Moreover, the pictures are all of high quality, with great use of light.

The only room for improvement would be to work on the compression size because currently the heavy file size prevents me from streaming it as quickly as I would like.

The Gold Standard: Anatomy of an Oscar
This interactive graphic was give an Honorable Mention because it was a great effort and there were some great aspects of the site. However, several usability issues prevented it from placing higher. First, a user should never have to scroll down below the ads to see the presentation. Producers need to plan their workspace accordingly, which in this case means reducing the width by a matter of 20-30 pixels.

The homepage is nicely designed, but users should not be forced to click home every time to get back to the navigation. Put the navigation on every page in the same place so users know where to find it, but where it blends into the background so the content is what grabs the user’s attention. Furthermore, the “back” button needs a larger hit stage because it currently flickers between a button and text which is frustrating.

The “Oscar Statuette Breakdown” should have had buttons informing the user where to roll over, instead of forcing the user to aimlessly roll over the statue to discover the hot spots. “The Assembly of Oscar” had great illustrations, but I would have loved to see a couple illustrations for each stage to make short animations. The last two sections had very basic interactivity with simple roll overs to see additional information. There are a lot of innovative methods to presenting a timeline which should have been utilized in this package.

Although I made a lot of suggestions for improvement, I am happy to see students submit their work for awards. Please do not get discouraged by these critiques, rather use them as advice for future projects. It is nice to hear what works in a project, but it is always more helpful to hear what didn’t work.

This year the turnout was relatively low, and for a student competition this should never be the case. Students, bookmark this competition so SSND can consider your work for 2010!

Other posts that might interest you:

• Online News Association lists 2008 finalists; Roanoke grabs two!
• NPPA sets bar high for first multimedia competition of 2009
• The importance of multimedia competitions within our industry

© 21 April 2009 Innovative Interactivity (II).