Online A.S. election guide

Check out the Spartan Daily’s online Associated Students election guide, a multimedia package complete with pics, profiles and videos of individual candidates, as well as links to the Daily’s recent A.S. election coverage. (Consider it another prototype for your final multimedia project.)

This election guide was put together by spartandaily.com editor Kyle Hansen, who took this class last year. (Yes, we profs like to brag on our success stories, and we certainly count Kyle as one of them!)

Like you, he started a blog when he took the class; he’s still writing Kyle’s Comments.

Video storyboarding: the next step, the next assignment

You’ve been playing with iMovie, creating a short video using stills and video clips recorded with the built-in iSight camera on your Mac.

The next step is to actually plan a video — that is, to come up with an idea for a simple story, develop a storyboard that outlines the story and the shots you’ll need to make it work, and then shoot your video and edit it into a 2-3 minute piece. This will be your video project. (And if you’re really on the ball, you’ll think ahead and create a video that can also work as part of your final multimedia project…thus killing two birds with one stone!)

Your storyboard for your video project is due Tuesday, April 1.

What’s a storyboard, you ask? Here are a couple links to information on storyboards and storyboarding:

• Storyboarding – Resources and Vlogging Assistance, from a BlogHer presentation by Gena Haskett
  • If you missed class on 3/18 and/or 3/20, and did not pick up a storyboard template in class, you can download a sample from this web page. Just scroll down to “Analog Storyboarding” and download one of the two storyboard samples listed…or scroll down to “Digital Storyboarding” and download the (free) software for the Atomic Learning Storyboard Program.
• Five Steps to Multimedia Storytelling – Step 2/Storyboarding, part of an online tutorial developed by News U (click on Dancing Rocks Case Study to see a sample)
• Sequencing: The Foundation of video storytelling – a blog post on the Mastering Multimedia blog, another good resource

UPDATE: To create a video, you need to shoot video…and not just in front of an iSight camera in the computer lab. Some of you are planning to use the video mode in your digital cameras. Some of you are planning to borrow a camcorder from the DBH equipment room after spring break (we’ll hope they survive the Mexico trip).

However, if you’re interested in acquiring a camcorder of your own, here’s one possibility: I just watched NTY Tech Writer David Pogue’s video review of the Flip Ultra video recorder, a low-cost, easy-to-use, “point-an-shoot” version of a camcorder. It’s under $200, and it looks pretty neat. I think I may get one.

Direct link: http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=5599bfb498ac8619a79065bc71eb9549b8620db3

Dueling videos…courting the youth vote

Forget the debates…the Democratic presidential candidates are going direct to potential voters…via video (virally, they hope). Here are two videos posted on You Tube that clearly target young adults, one in support of Clinton and one in support of Obama.

Please take a few minutes to view these videos and offer your comments/observations. Do you think they work? Why or why not? Post your comments here by clicking on the “comments” tag at the end of this post.

“Hillary and the Band” video created by the Clinton campaign organization:

Direct link to video on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA8Wy51Ionk

“Yes We Can” video created by Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas in support of Barak Obama:

This video is also available at http://www.dipdive.com/

By the way, I looked for similar online videos targeting young adults from the Republican candidates, but mostly found clips from campaign speeches, debates and TV show appearances, and television campaign ads that had been repurposed and posted online.

If you’re interested, you might want to compare one or two of these Republican videos/ads to the Democratic candidates’ videos listed above.

Here’s a link to the results of a YouTube search for “Mike Huckabee” videos.
Here’s a link to the results of a YouTube search for “John McCain” videos.
Here’s a link to the results of a YouTube search for “Ron Paul” videos.

More on the Super Bowl ads

For last week’s “Late Breaking” blog post assignment, a number of you wrote about your favorite (or your most disliked) Super Bowl ads. So I thought you might be interested in hearing what ad critic Bob Garfield of Ad Age had to say about the Super Bowl ads he disliked the most.

You can watch his scathing video at http://adage.com/brightcove/single.php?title=1402023019

The web 2.0 video

In case you’d like to take another look at the Web 2.0 video we watched in class this morning, it’s called “The Machine is Us/ing Us” and it’s by Prof. Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. It’s posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g