Assignment thoughts…..

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It’s been a couple of weeks now since I finished off my practical work on the multimedia piece on the Camino and I decided to review it as if I was someone new coming to it; rather than through the late night fug as I’m battling away to complete against a deadline, learn new software and balance off how levels of protectiveness about stories….

Self-critique time.

Generally: i) a little too much like a child’s book? In trying to match commentary to images I feel I went too far. “I’m looking for the way ahead….” matched with an image of an arrow or something; “it’s been a long struggle….” matches with a shot of people walking uphill etc…… ii) at 15 minutes it’s too long. Each story is good in its own right; and I’m happy with them; but the total duration may be off-putting and detract from the story…..

Technically i) some of the crossovers from one person to another are too short, insufficient time for reflection or to prepare yourself before the next person comes in, ii) the volume on some of the audio varies a little between some of the people speaking. iii) the fact that I travelled with some of the same people and saw them night after night meant that the same faces appear in multiple images (it took someone else to point this out to me)

Good things: i) I kept myself out of it. I deliberately tried to keep it away from myself, or it being about me. ii) I wanted to show the diversity of people on the Camino and most importantly where they’re coming from emotionally and their reasons for the journey….i feel that this came across well. iii) the story tracks well – I managed to locate interviews which introduced and summarised the subject really well (coincidentally interviewed at the beginning and end of the Camino respectively) and I feel people’s stories flowed well

Would I have changed the flow or run? Most certainly; however I hit a combination of learning new skills, and products that didn’t do all of the things that I wanted them to do. I also needed to have introductory slides with titles, something to close it off at the end and possibly in the middle too, explaining the history and so on (although a written introduction is under the “captions” section – that’s not sufficient really).

Soundslides Plus – very good in fact with the sole exception of not being able to audit the audio within the programme itself. This meant that I had to learn …
Audio – tried Audacity (trouble mixing the tracks) and WavePad – OK’ish but both were cumbersome.

The huge difficulty was that the audio had to be mixed first; uploaded to Soundslides and then images adjusted around that. It sounds fine in principle but inevitably when you’re in there you want to edit the audio somehow – and that in turn would throw much of your existing work out of synch when you re-imported it……Soundslides claim they have this cracked, but they don’t.

Final conclusion – if I’m going down a multimedia path do I have to go to a Mac and get Final Cut Pro? I could spend lots of time learning new programs all the time before I eventually get there anyway. Do I just get on with it and splash the cash on a new computer and lots of software now?