Toolkit 1 down – 2 to go..yeay!

The one thing I can say about this class is that I always enjoyed it in retrospect. Simple – when I was doing the work in the field I cursed and cursed, but once the results were out I was really glad I did it. Another thing I really enjoyed (and was also frustrated by) was the unexpectedness of things. A rainy day when you want to take pictures, interviewees who don’t say too much, unexpectedly helpful people, all of it!

I had come in to this class expecting much lesser than I got. But I feel so much more confident about some things that I had no idea about before. I came into this class after a web design class and was riding high on the ‘I want to know more about this online stuff’ wave. I am so glad this class went beyond my expectations. Now I want to learn even more about the online medium. I really wish we had gotten to learn flash too. That would have been a pretty good learning experience.

I know for a fact that all the things I learned in this class will be more helpful in reality than any of the research papers I wrote!

I am really excited about learning to make soundslides. I feel like going out and making soundslides of every single thing! Overall, though I was a little apprehensive about the fieldwork involved due to some practical issues I faced I am very glad I stuck with it.

Final Package Done – The Water Wars Story

My third sound slides and final story package both are something that I can be proud of. The first couple of attempts were just that – attempts. Trials. Errors. However, by the time I got round to this final one I knew what kind of pictures looked good, what kind of sound actually made an impact. That is not to say that I managed to get the perfect pictures and sound; just that now I know what to expect from myself. Here goes nothing: Click on the image to view my final story package

The funniest thing about the very first sound slides attempt was that ‘my mom liked it’. It was this very same parent of mine who confessed a few days ago “The third one was much much better than the first”. Well, thank you mom!

Well here’s what I thought of the individual aspects of the final package.

Pictures:

They are beautiful but dangerous creatures! Rule of thumb – a nice vacation picture that adorns your walls at home is most unlikely to win an award. The getting down on your back rule applies. In my story package, there is a picture of a boat marooned on the dry shore of Lake Lanier. That part of the shore was a) Down a slope which could only be scrambled down literally on your back. Try doing that with an expensive camera and it adds a new dimension to mental trauma. But it was definitely worth it because that picture has a fence with a no trespassing sign, a marooned boat and a shoreline – all telling a story.

Sound:

First time around no natural sound, second time – very bad interview sound and third time around respectable sound. One of the biggest practical issues I had to grapple with for the sound was how many times you have to go to a certain place to get the perfect sound. It is kind of tough to achieve when you don’t have a car. But gathering and editing sound was probably the most underestimated part of this semester for me – in terms of how much work it would be. Overall, the sound for the final package was gathered from three different water bodies. All for 30 seconds!

Map:

As mentioned in the previous post, creating the map for the story package can be easy if only you do it a few times before the actual thing. It is easy; just takes practice. The decision to create a map instead of a data chart was simple. The best way to explain this three state dispute was to trace the river path along the states and map the major water consumers. There is also an excellent CNN interactive map on the issue.

Overall, the final story package felt like I knew what I needed to do to get good results. The only part I needed to work on was getting exactly what I wanted. I am sure that will improve with time a practice. I really wish we had another fou months of this so I could churn out some more ‘decent’ ones.

Journalism Web Design Experiences

 

{Co[u/a]rse Work??? – My Journalistic foray into the realms of internet(-esting) commonality}

I was not a geek. Not a technology geek anyway. However, all that changed when I started the journalism program at the University of Florida. Fresh from Law School with a family history of the journalism bug, I did not in the least have an inclination toward the technological world. I was in the journalism program because I loved to write. Period.

I am from India, the land of the rising micro chip, and I’d be damned if I was to be another “computer engineer”. Little did I know of my latent geek potential.

My knowledge of the world of computers and online jargon was restricted to Yahoo Messenger and emailing homework to my professors. Typing LOL made me feel internet savvy. And, why did I NEED to know this stuff anyway. I was a lawyer and a prospective journalist. People in “our profession” didn’t need in-depth internet or computer info.

And then I encountered my first Web Design and Electronic Publishing course under David Carlson.

My adviser suggested I take the course to stay up to speed on the new trend of online journalism. I did not relish the thought of being ignorant and decided to dabble in some web design myself.

Initially it was very difficult for me to wrap my brain around the fact that it took complicated strings of jargon to come up with that one flower you saw on the screen. Why could they not have invented a simpler way of doing things? But, I must admit the satisfaction of seeing the final results in the class exercises, however small, made me hate XHTML lesser and lesser each day. Eventually, poring over lines of code to find glitches became a mission more than an assignment.

Gradually I got initiated into the alien world of geek talk. There were Cascading Style Sheets to discuss, strict and lenient codes to talk about and Dreamweaver to fall back upon like a true friend. Technology subliminally crept into my blood and made me feel like I needed to know more.

I designed my first web site in that class. It was an attempt at a guide to all things Indian. It was not necessarily a great journalistic job, but it was a pretty good attempt at Web Design. It spurred me on to design another Web site for one of my professors’ Visual Communication course. I am still waiting for that project to get online.

What excited me the most about these projects was their easy access. All I had to do was send my folks back home a link and they could view my entire project in a few minutes. That is when the potential of online journalism hit me. It was access to stories 24/7 from almost anywhere in the world.

My most recent encounter with technology has been in the Journalists’ Toolkit 1 class. Now I can totally relate to Professor McAdams going into raptures of delight about del.icio.us and Google Reader. I understand now, how it can all seem so overwhelming: this almost unlimited access to unlimited stores of information.

As for my pursuit of all things technological, I foresee a long but eventful journey. The last bit of computer jargon I learnt was “dual-boot”. I stumbled across it when I was doing some research on the new PC game Bioshock. I am not quite the computer gamer – yet. It was a gift for a friend who IS a techno maniac. So now I know that you can have two operating systems, Ubuntu and Windows installed on your PC at the same time. This lets you play games like Bioshock which are designed for Windows, while preserving Ubuntu for other processes. Didn’t quite get that? Well then, you will just have to wait for the next time I spout my latest findings at the techno geek convention!