Daniel Sato

Mark Luckie, at 10,000 Words, has a great post on where to find tutorials that will help you to add to your skill set. He writes In order to be or remain employed in this industry its essential to hunker down and learn some new skills. The following tutorial sites will take you from journalist to multimedia journalist.

During my journalism education, I found that some of my most helpful and interesting classes were taken outside of the journalism building. For that reason, I have included some links to opencourseware classes related to photography and media. They may not teach you a new skill (some may, as with the Flash classes), but might help you to become a better, more informed journalist. There are, of course, some pros and cons to taking an open courseware class. Often you will not have access to a lecture (though some provide video) and you do not always have access to full course materials.

• Introduction to Photography and Related Media, Fall 2007 (MIT)
• Photography and Truth, Spring 2005 (MIT)
• Introduction to Media Studies, Fall 2005 (MIT)
• Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry, Spring 2006 (MIT)
• History of Media and Technology, Spring 2005 (MIT)
• Media in Cultural Context, Spring 2007 (MIT)
• Producing Films for Social Change, Fall 2005 (Tufts)
• Understanding Online Interaction (Utah State)
• Interactive Multimedia Production (Utah State)
• Modern Art and Mass Culture Spring 2004 (MIT)
• Digital Anthropology, Spring 2003 (MIT)
• Power: Interpersonal, Organizational and Global Dimensions, Fall 2005 (MIT)
• American Dream: Exploring Class in the U.S., Spring 2007 (MIT)

You can search for more classes from the 200+ OCW members at the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

I thought I would post some links to a couple of slideshow apps I have been trying out. The above was made with Animoto. You can link it to your flickr account and choose from a selection of musical options. It then edits together a short music video for you (30 second pieces are free, anything more and there is a fee).

I have also been trying out slideoo (which I used for the post above), FotoViewr, and splashr.

Slideoo is a horizontal scrolling slideshow that reminded me a lot of the Vuvox collage app. You can move through it by clicking on either end, or by dragging a scroll bar on the bottom. Clicking on a photo will take you to its flickr photo page.

Fotoviewr has four different viewing styles, all of which look very good, and remind me of Cover Flow in iTunes. There is also a full screen option, but currently there is not an embed option for your blog or web page (supposedly coming soon).

splashr has 23 different viewing styles with the ability to embed. However, when embedding, the default width is 1000 px, which is too large for most blogs, and changing that size lowered the quality of the images in the slideshows.

After playing around with Sprout more over the afternoon, I ran into some of its shortcomings. Then again, I am not sure anyone intended it for trying to create multimedia packages, only small widgets.

I ran into trouble when I wanted to use html within a text box (which has the option to include a scroll bar). Without being able to add html into the text box, I can’t add a collection of videos or photo galleries that users can scroll through.

Still, for the ease of use, I can imagine all sorts of uses for promotion of videos, galleries and special sections.

From the moment I moved over to WordPress from Blogger, I had planned on using my server space to build an actual showcase for my portfolio, and not just a blog. While I didn’t stray away from WordPress, I did finally make a site to house my various projects and multimedia.

The new site makes use of Robert Ellis’ Aperio theme. Ellis is also the designer behind a theme I previously used, Modio, and was the man behind the Upstart Blogger site, before he sold it for $14,500.

The Aperio theme is still in what Ellis calls a prototype stage, with limited support. While the main page is obviously very image-driven, the single post pages have extremely narrow columns (no room for images) and I found that I had to delete the sidebar in order to display my multimedia properly.

Uploading images for the main page is relatively simple, and photos are automatically cropped down when a post goes from the latest post slot (top left) to any of the other recent post slots which are half as wide. There is a spot for a seventh post on the main page, but I chose to put links there instead.

I had considered using the Monochrome Gallery theme I wrote about last week, with it’s featured categories, and prominent rotating recent posts, but it seemed more of a magazine-style theme than a simple portfolio.