Deadline: 15 Minutes

You’ll run over by a few minutes, but if you’re done, check this out …

Deadline: 30 Minutes

If you’re done, here’s your treat:

Deadline: 45 Minutes

Hopefully, I’m sitting alone in the lab right now. Which means you’re probably sitting elsewhere with nothing to do. So, my recommendation: download Slaid Cleaves’ No Angel Knows album and listen to his storytelling. Particularly Dance Around the Fire – listen to the dramatic pause in there when Katie shuts the door and turns to Bill … man, it’ll just melt your soul.

Deadline: One Hour

So, one hour to go … if you’re done, head over to Amazon.com and download Susan Werner’s Last of the Good Straight Girls – easily one of the finest pieces of songwriting from the 1990s.

You’ll have a few extra minutes, so listen to the first and sixth songs again. They don’t disappoint.

Deadline: Two Hours

If you’re done, you have enough time to watch the classic Ron Howard film The Paper. If you ever want to work in a newsroom, this is your pre-HR prep – everyone in this movie you will work with.

Deadline: Three Hours

You’ve got three hours to get your final portfolio on the server

But if you’re done, you’ve got enough time to watch The Godfather.

Posting Your Multimedia Shows

Some of you have asked how you can share your shows and there are two ways of doing this.

If you have your own web site, you can take that publish_to_web folder and upload it to your side, then link to it. You can also upload it and then use the Soundslides Emebed utility if you have a CMS in place. That will also work, sometimes, if you don’t have a self-hosted site.

Second option, which will degrade the quality a little and cause you to lose the captions, is to convert it to a video using the Soundslides Video Converter. You will need to compress the exported publish_to_web folder and then upload it, then you’ll get a link emailed to you and you can download the video. Then upload it to a video hosting site like Vimeo or YouTube.

Lab Hours

As a reminder …

• Wednesday-Friday, 9-5
• Monday, 9-5

ASSIGNMENT: Portfolio

Due on the server by 5 p.m. On Monday, May 5, is your final portfolio and multimedia project.

Your portfolio is ten images that were made this semester, fully captioned, cropped and appropriately toned. They should show a variety of image types (long, medium, closeup, portrait, news, feature, etc.) to demonstrate the competencies you have mastered. Look for great light, good moments, clean compositions and storytelling.

You may have packages of 2-3 photos from the same subject (each image will be considered one image), but those photos need to work as a package.

You may have images from your multimedia project but they cannot be the same or substantial similar.

To submit, create a folder titled LastName_portfolio and inside that put your ten images and the final version of your multimedia project.

Things to watch out for …

– Not saving files as true JPGs
– Errors on your captions
– Not properly naming your images
– Not having ten images
– Turning in images that are not sharp
– Turning in images that are not properly exposed
– Turning in a multimedia project that was not exported properly and legally

Questions? As always, send them along.

Soundslides Hysteria

It sounds like there is a lot of entertainment in the lab this afternoon … let me answer the questions I’m getting.

CAPTIONS: When you import images into Soundslides, it brings over the captions you wrote in either Photo Mechanic or Photoshop. You need to rewrite those into what we would normal call “cutlines.” A cutline (even though Soundslides calls them captions) is what the public would see and is structured much like what you see published online and in print.

The first time you should a character, you need all of their info – name, age, job title, etc. On subsequent appearances, much like in a news story, last name only.

Your cutlines should flow – imagine someone looking at your piece without the audio, would they understand the story from the images and cutlines?

Some of those cutlines will be only one sentences, some may be more. None should have the contact information for your subjects in them – ever.

EXPORTING: The video has an older version of Soundslides in it so the contents of the publish_to_web folder will be a little different. This is what your folder should look like:

If you’re seeing more than one folder, named “400_300” and “600_450,” you did not set the output size to large. In Soundslides, there’s a Modify pulldown menu and, at the bottom of it is the option to cane the output size.

Remember that you need to rename that publish_to_web folder and drop the folder with its contents on the server.