Slug & Lede

http://www.lasvegassun.com/videos/2008/dec/18/1320/

This piece followed University of Arizona and Brigham Young University football players as they visited children spending the holidays at Sunrise Children’s Hospital in Las Vegas. Their visits were part of several events the week of the Las Vegas Bowl game, in which the two teams participated.

The video involved a few brief before and after interviews with players from both teams, as well as a variety of shots showing the players interacting with the patients and hospital staff. The shots of the players are mostly from a side perspective, stationary and usually shot from slightly below the level of the player. Two panning shots are used in this sequence. Moving shots of players walking down the hall with their school’s respective mascots begin each team’s half of the segment. The ‘after’ segment in which players describe their reaction to the experience takes up a few seconds more than the ‘before’ section.

This is a well conceptualized and well produced piece which suffers mostly from a lack of depth and running time. This piece is posted on a website, was meant for a website, so the short length doesnt make much sense. Most of the players speaking sections are only 10-15 seconds long, and I feel that all but one of them could benefit from allowing the players more time to explain their experiences. Visiting children with serious illnesses is clearly a difficult topic to disscuss, so allowing at least a few players more time to describe their experiences would add much to the video. I also believe that wider frame shots of the players in the patients’ rooms would make the feeling of team much more clear. Finally, there is only one comment in the entire piece from a staff member and no comments from patients. This is a player-centric piece but its simply not complete without some commentary from patients and staff.

Overall, it was a great concept, with good camera work and solid execution. it simply lacked depth and length.

Article from The New York Times

“SHENZHEN, China — The ruling Communist Party threw itself a big party on Thursday. The country’s leadership marked the 30th anniversary of the reform era that transformed China into a global economic power and, in doing so, changed the world.”

China held a celebration on Thursday commemorating the beginning of the end of China’s isolationist economic policies, which ultimately ushered in a new area for the nation. Supplements to the article are a slideshow and a video clip.

Slideshow: China’s Long Boom Threatened

The slideshow does a fine job of describing, in brief, the economic progress China has made and the economic situation the country is in at present. The photography is exceptional. One photo seems reminiscent of Dubai, a rapidly expanding ultra-modern city in the United Arab Emirates. The placement of the photo descriptions is key. I much prefer having the captions off to the side, giving the text more height. It is much less annoying to read then if the descriptions were running along the bottoms of the photos.

Overall, the slideshow has less to do with the 30 year celebration and more to do with the economic situation in particular.

Video: China Celebrates 30 Years of Reform

The video acts as a great supplement to the article and slideshow. It focuses more on the commemoration as breaking news and allows for the slideshow and article to introduce uninformed readers about China’s economic growth and how it came about.

In a closed society such as China, I was surprised to see camera footage with Chinese leaders speaking. This has shown me just how ignorant I am of modern Chinese society and has piqued my interest.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/22/nyregion/20080822_LASTSTOP_FEATURE.html?ref=multimedia

This multimedia package lays out the final stops of each of the train lines of the New York Subway System. With almost 30 different routes running on more than 10 different lines 22 hours a day, the system itself is huge. This package include a central interactive map, photos, videos, and audio clips. The central map is overlaid with the paths of each line, with the end of the line for each linking to a package of photos, videos, text, and audio pertaining to each.

From my perspective, this is an intriguing, complete, and enjoyable mulitmedia package. As someone whose only NYC experience came in the form of a stopover at Laguardia and a cab ride through the city to Newark, this is a highly informative piece about one of the most famous parts of NYC - but something I knew nothing about. Each of the parts of the package easily accessable, make sense in terms of location and function, and are visually inviting. Nothing is wasted here, and the piece leaves me wanting to see an entire map of the city’s subway system.

The package gives the user the entire picture about what constitutes the end of the line on different routes and lines, and what kind of place the end of the line is. The way the producers of the package showed the differences between say, the 203rd street stop and the Rockaway Park stop makes clear what each place is and what it is about without being pejorative or giving way to bias. The package does a great job of telling the story in a concise manner, the only way it could become too time consuming would be for the user to choose to get lost in its depth.

Barack Obama was elected as the first African-American president of the United States of America on November 4. Time magazine named him the “Person of the Year 2008″. Many past political leaders have graced the cover of the magazine and in this multimedia feature, “The Six Degrees of Barack Obama”, visitors can connect Obama to every previously named person, just as the actor Kevin Bacon can be linked to any other actor through movies they have appeared in.
The video introduction is nice. It flashes previous covers with the year displayed alongside it as vox pop audio provides famous lines spoken by the chosen. For example, “Tear down this wall,” accompanies the picture of Ronald Reagan and “I have a dream,” pairs with Martin Luther King, Jr. This is powerful and moving. Against a white background, the view is focused only on the changing images and the audio. The only issue I had with it is that I didn’t always know who the person was. Some of them, the more recent ones, were easy, but I had no clue about some of the older ones. It would have been nice to have the person’s name accompanying the year next to the picture because not every cover had the person’s name printed large enough to see it. Also, some of the pictures changed too quickly to appreciate them.
As the years countdown to 2008, there is a music clip that builds suspense and then Obama’s picture is shown and immediately falls into the center of a large ring of all the other covers, in chronological order, with the names of the winners listed. As the mouse moves over a cover, red lines shoot out showing the “six degrees” to Obama. This can look confusing, and I could imagine less web-savvy users being uncomfortable with the graphics.  If the user clicks on a title, the path is brought to the front in order with brief explanations of the connections.  I think this is interesting, even though some of them seem to be grasping.  Some of the covers also have a speaker icon that allows the user to listen to a clip of the person speaking.  Not all have this icon and it isn’t obvious on all the ones that do.  Perhaps it would have been better to lift those links out for ease of use.

Overall I like this multimedia feature.  It is fun and interesting.  Since a lot of political coverage is serious and can be dense, a fun piece is a refreshing change. There are lots of links to the rest of the person of the year coverage at the bottom of the page and other links to more serious Obama stories, which makes for easy navigation. Overall, a nice piece.

Women’s Surfing: Passing the Torch is a multimedia piece by the New York Times.  The piece was done by Erik Olsen and Matt Higgins.  The story focuses on the old and new generation of women’s pro-surfers.  The old generation rrepresented by seven time world champion Layne Beachley, and the new generation represented by fifteen-year-old Carissa Moore.

 The multimedia package uses a few different elements to tell the story.  It uses video, audio and still images.  The video is effective and pleasing to watch.  It keeps the audience engaged in the story and makes sense given the context of the piece.  There is good use of natural sound.  Stale video in this piece would have felt awkward, so it was good to hear the waves crashing in the background.  There was good use of L-Cuts and good framing of the interviews.  The still images were interesting.  It was a good way of slowing down the story, because the surfing video is pretty intense.  The still images took the audience away from all of the high energy video and allowed the story a chance to breathe. 

There were a few negatives to this package.  First, it was way too long.  This story was about five minutes long.  It could have been told in two minutes using all the same elements without losing any content.  I found myself losing focus about midway through the story.  Second, the still images were a great idea to help further the story.  However, the zooming in and out of the pictures was a little excessive.  Third, the video of the surfing was interesting on its own.  By adding the zooming in certain shots, it took away from the natural element of the video.

Overall, the story was interesting.  I felt like there was a good mixture of media throughout the story.  I would have liked if it was a little shorter.  I also would have appreciated less of the zoom effect.

The Smokestack Effect is a piece created by USA Today. It holds a collection of articles that deal with the issue of air pollution in the United States. As one would imagine, the piece holds a number of pictures, videos and text “blurbs” describing the situation. It is an informative site with a collection of useful and interactive items to view, which in essence is the purpose of any informative web-page I suppose.

Unfortunately,in our society, the public is rather picky about what information they choose to consume, meaning if something is complicated, confusing or bland and uninteresting the public will move on to another topic.

This is the downfall of the smokestack piece. The information that is contained within the work is well written and informative journalism, it is just that it is presented in such a busy and overwhelming fashion I found it hard to read let alone decipher. 

Images, text and video are bunched together in a very cluttered format with no real sense of an over arching story. The individual articles feel as though they have been collected and placed together in a unconnected mess on the floor. Looking at the page I see no story, no compelling reason to keep reading.

Another aspect of the page I find displeasing is that, while I am not a 6 year old child, I do wish to see a little Flash on the page. I has almost become a staple in web-design, but totally absent from this page. It was one dimensional, flat and uninteresting.

As a whole, I love all the elements of this homepage. The <a href=”http://freep.com/>Detriot Free Press</a> website has a bunch to offer, especially in their video department. Their video editing is very very skillful, and very heartfealt. I do have some problems with their homepage as a whole, though.

The homepage is extremely busy. Although they offer lots of different options, such as sports, politics, local news, etc., they really just jam it all together and make it really jumbled up. It’s pretty busy, so it’s difficult  to really focus on one element of the website without being pulled into a different part. Maybe that’s what their intentions were, but I really found it quite busy.

On a different note, I liked how they separated all of the different multimedia elements to the website. They had a separate link for all the videos and the pictures than they did for the general news text. I thought that was a good addition to the website, because I would definitely like to visit some of the other videos of the website, and It is goood to have a specific place to look that isn’t all general news.

I think that the homepage should’ve added more color to it. It uses very neurtral colors, tans and grey-blues, which aren’t very attention-getting. Even though the advertisments are supposed to be getting my attention, I think that maybe the homepage could have used some more flash animations, because the only things moving were the advertisements. Also, I thought that a lot of the photos in the photo section could have been of a higher quality. A lot of the photo sections were pretty grainy, which was distracting..

But all of the videos that I was able to watch were incredible and moving. Especially the one about the Michigan orphanage…I was crying the entire time. If this were a video critique about that video, I don’t think I would have changed a thing about that video!

Overall, I’d say a decent set-up, but not taken to as good of a level as it could have been.

The St. Petersberg Times’, “Testing Grounds,” is a media package about outsourcing in India, except this isn’t the normal kind of outsourcing - like customer service calls - that we think of. Drug companies have been testing new medicines, that have not been approved by the FDA, in India and this has lead to many deaths.

Overall, I thought this media package was really effective. I, for one, had no idea that anything like this was going on so it was a magnetic subject and easy to get interested in. When I first arrived at the start page, however, I was a bit confused. The picture of two Indian women with their children drew my attention right away. I didn’t see the text at the left side of the picture that had a blurb about the package and a link that said Continue; instead my eye went below the picture to the text that I saw there. Here, there was a collection of article links with blurbs underneath. Though those were the articles that were featured in the package, what I really wanted to see were more images and narratives. Finally I saw the Continue button, I think it should have been bigger and more noticeable so that my eye wouldn’t jump to the text below it first.

When I clicked Continue I was lead to an audio slide show about the subject, the slide show starts automatically. I thought this piece was great, but it was a little long. The length wouldn’t have been so much of a problem had the slide show not started on its own. I think people might feel a little forced to watch the long piece and won’t all finish it when there’s more to the package than that. There should have been something along the lines of a table of contents so that I could choose to watch the slide show on my own.

I didn’t want to read the articles because the slide show was lengthy and so were the articles. I did, however, notice that the articles kept their text to the left side of the screen and put the pictures to the right, so they were laid out well.  I felt very informed from the slideshow  and able to understand the rest of the package which included a map of India showing what cities do test trials and how much have been done; an overview of the process a drug must go through to get from the lab to the market; and a link to other statistics. All of this, I think, helped add depth to the media package and was easy to navigate through.

http://www.time.com/time/2008/six_degrees/

This piece was found on Time.com. It is a multimedia package titled “Six Degrees of Barack Obama.” It uses audio, pictures from magazines, a vast interactive graphic, and many text blurbs. It is a play on the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” a proven phenomenon that any actor/actress can be linked to Kevin Bacon through other actors/actresses and movies.

This package shows the connections that exist between Barack Obama and many current as well as former world officials. Some of the names are Nixon, LBJ, Bush Sr., W, and even You (the reader). Perhaps this piece isn’t “newsworthy” in the traditional sense, but I think it is very creative, innovative, and substantive.  The links and connections are not described in long paragraphs, but in simple one-sentence constructions. It makes for an easily accessible that can be navigated quickly.

Most of the time I don’t like automatic intro videos, but I enjoyed the one that preceded this package. Since this piece was written as a result of Barack Obama having been selected as Time’s Person of the Year for 2008, the intro video showed photos of former Persons of the Year, and while those ran, there were audio quotes from the person whose image was being shown. This didn’t annoy me because it was actually very interesting: there were quotes from JFK, Reagan, Jimmy Carter, etc. Also, there was a “skip intro” button that allowed the reader to move ahead if they didn’t like the video.

I don’t think there was much more that could have been done with this idea. It isn’t a story in the usual sense, but it still offers a lot of uncommon knowledge in a quick and effective way. If anything, the graphic could have been more visually compelling, but that could have taken away from its ability to be easily understood. Overall, the package was very well done.