Soundslides Done Right

The Soundslide craze has swept the newspaper industry. Soundslides Plus is a cheap and easy way to produce audio slideshows with photographs and mp3 audio files. You can download a free demo version of Soundslides. The demo version is fully functional but puts a demo tag on the beginning of your project.
Soundslides Plus goes a step beyond the basic Soundslides program. The Plus version has lower thirds for adding names and titles beneath your photos and it allows you to add motion to photographs. The motion feature is also know as pan and scan or the Ken Burns effect which is widely used in documentary film making.

The Guru has some guidelines for producing Soundslides;
1. You must get good audio. Using an audio recorder with a microphone is key.
2. Keep it simple. 60-90 seconds is optimum.
3. A rule of thumb is 20 photos for every 90 seconds. You want each photo appear for at least 5 seconds.
4. Choose active subjects for your Soundslide project, community events, profiles of artists, actors and musicians and feature stories.
5. When editing your audio remember to include natural sound, it sets the scene and gives you good intro sound and closing sound.
6. Wide, medium and tight shots don’t just apply to video. Soundslide projects need the same attention to detail.
7. Find a character to anchor your story. The character in this story is compelling.
8. If you are using Soundslides Plus, you can add lower thirds and motion to your photographs. Don’t go overboard but one or two motion (Ken Burns effect) can reveal something in your show.
9. Don’t have your subject introduce him or herself during the audio edit. “I’m Val Hoeppner and I am the Manager of Multimedia Education at the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute,” gets old. Use Soundslides Plus and add a lower third when the subject’s voice and photo come in.
10. Use a title slide and credit slide to start and finish your project. Text slides be created in Adobe Photoshop by creating a new file 600 pixels wide by 450 pixels high.

Characters Welcome

“The guy who makes pop cans is probably my favorite video this summer, ” says Tileena Leighton, an American Indian Journalism Institute graduate and intern at the St. Cloud Times. Leighton has spent her summer producing one video a day for sctimes.com. The pop can airplane maker is Leighton’s favorite because she likes the character the story is built on. I agree with Leighton, the subject of the story is a character and characters make good video stories. The video also has lots of good b-roll to cover the interview and is edited tightly at about 90 seconds. Great job Tileena!
Tileena Leighton will graduate from the University of Idaho in December 2008 and hopes to pursue multimedia and video journalism at newspapers.

Chipsters on the Web

We have postings! Multimedia ready Chipsters, Maria Chercoles and Ashlee Clark have both posted audio slideshows. Maria wasted no time, posting her first Soundslide project from the Food and Wine event in Orange County, Calif just one week after multimedia training in April, 2008. The audio slideshow tells you everything you want to know about making orange sorbet. You can see it here.
Ashlee Clark tells the story of Johnson Elementary in the Lexington Herald Leader online edition. Ashlee worked with photographer Jenn Ackerman from Herald Leader on the project. You can see it here.
Anyone else out there producing multimedia and want to share? Just send the Multimedia Guru a link and I’ll mention it in a post.

Crazy Horse: Two (multimedia) Views

A few weeks ago I joined about 250 American Indian high school and college students, their advisers, bus drivers and journalism mentors at Crazy Horse Memorial near Custer, South Dakota for the 9th Annual Native American Journalism Career Conference.
The highlight of the conference is always the trip up the mountain to face the spirit of Crazy Horse carved in stone. Students snapped pictures, recorded sound and video all the way to the top. Fellow mentor and Des Moines Register photojournalist Justin Hayworth and I joined in the visual frenzy. Between the two of us we came down the mountain with hundreds of photographs and about 30 minutes of sound.
When it came time to edit the photos and sound into a multimedia piece we took very different approaches. Justin edited his sound together using Audacity, as did I. Justin used Soundslides to put together his sound and photos, I used Final Cut Pro. Working with the same material the two of us came away with similar, yet different stories.
Who is right? Well the Guru of course, I’m older and wiser.
It isn’t really that simple. Both Soundslides and FCP are fine production products. Soundslides is quick and easy, allows you to add lower thirds, transitions and adjust the timing of the photos. Final Cut Pro is more time consuming but allows you to have greater control over the transitions, text, lower thirds and pacing of your story.
Here are both stories, you be the judge.

(Produced by Val Hoeppner, photographs and audio by Justin Hayworth)

(Soundslide by Justin Hayworth)

Welcome from the “Evangelist”

I joined the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute in February as the Manager of Multimedia Education. I lobbied hard for the title of Multimedia Evangelist but found a blog poster who already was using that handle. I may win the title back because of my passion for journalism and multimedia. For now, I’ll have to go with Multimedia Guru.

As the MG, I’ll be teaching young journalists from diverse backgrounds how to record and edit audio, photojournalism, audio slideshow production and to shoot and edit video. The training is intense. Students who complete training at the John Seigenthaler Center in Nashville will be able to walk into any newsroom and produce multimedia content.

In future posts, this blog will give you tips for creating multimedia, storytelling, geek-speak (my own term for technical issues) and links to “must-see” multimedia.

To get you started viewing multimedia content, check out www.mediastorm.org. Brian Storm, creator of Media Storm, produces and hosts multimedia content from photojournalists throughout the world. Now playing on mediastorm.org is Marlboro Marine by Los Angeles Times photojournalist Luis Sinco.

Another place to watch groundbreaking newspaper video journalism is at WashingtonPost.com. Check out anything by Travis Fox, who travels extensively and produces visually stunning video. This link will take you to some of Fox’s video: Travis Fox