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Inside Vandy pushes multimedia packages

March 2, 2010 in Flash, showcase

vandycityguide

Vanderbilt’s InsideVandy has been pushing the envelope recently in their online offerings. While they’ve been doing multimedia for a while, they are starting to package their efforts into more user-friendly experiences.

Check out these attractive packages: A City Guide, with restaurant reviews and an interactive map; a history of housing package with 360 panorama photographs from different dormatories; and a baseball season preview which features audio, statistics, and an interface similar to their basketball preview mentioned here earlier.

Check these packages out for inspiration. Are you doing something noteworthy online? Drop me an e-mail at scmurley -at- gmail.com and I’ll post about it.

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Flash animated editorial cartoons

February 28, 2008 in Flash, fun

If you want to get people involved in learning Flash, one way to do that is to make it more fun, and nothing is more fun than cartoons (at least, nothing you can do in print!).

There are a couple of editorial cartoonists out there who are doing flash-based editorial cartoon animations.

One is Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press. Check out his weblog and see some of the animations, along with his regular print editorial cartoons. Another is Grey Blackwell at the Raleigh News-Observer. Check out the videos here to see some examples of his work. UPDATE: Also, Nick Anderson from the Houston Chronicle. Check his work out here (look on the right side of the screen for his “channel”).

Update: Thanks to Mindy McAdams for reminding me about this topic with this post.

If you’ve got a good editorial cartoonist on staff, maybe they could be hooked up with a Flash designer, or use the opportunity to learn on their own, and create some Flash-based editorial cartoons for the web site.

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McAdams: Set yourself up for success

July 30, 2007 in Flash, Learn, Multimedia views

Mindy McAdams posts some good thoughts on her blog (now with WordPress goodness!) – Thinking about learning Flash:

I’m suggesting that you set yourself up to succeed, not fail. And that means maybe you shouldn’t plan to finish that project on deadline, and then rush and gnash your teeth and feel stupid — and quit. If you’re a photographer — was your first roll of film worthy of Page One? If you’re a designer — was your first information graphic suitable for a section front? And if you’re a reporter — surely your first story was completely rewritten by your editor?

Why should learning Flash be any different from other storytelling practices?

She has a good point. Flash is a different animal than print journalists are used to dealing with. Timelines, actionscripts, and a confusing interface all call for a different mindset than Word or even InDesign or Quark Xpress. So there will be a natural learning curve.

This semester, I’m using Mindy’s Flash Journalism for an interactive media class for the first time. I’m glad students will have time to explore the strengths and weaknesses of Flash over the course of a semester before coming up with a final product. If you’re hoping to use more Flash in your college media operation this year, I’d suggest a similar stress on training before attempting to put out something for the general public. Let students learn to succeed, then use that training to come up with innovative storytelling.

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