Post production work completed
The work I completed over the past week was mainly putting the finishing touches and finalising my video, audio and article. Due to having already drafted each area of my project I was able to receive feedback and then use this to improve them and create my final versions.
You can see the changes I made to my video piece after receiving feedback in this blog post. Between this version and the final version (seen below) all I changed was re-recording the piece to camera. This was relatively easy to re implement, I was able to record the piece word for word from memory.
However, there were a few issues with my recording, I had taken out a shotgun mic in order to get better recording quality. Upon playback during sound check I realised the microphone was not functioning correctly and produced very quiet audio of very low quality. Due to time constraints and availability I had to simply use the camera’s built in microphone. While this was not ideal the audio was of a much better quality of the clip it was replacing due to using a much better location (as the previous clip had slight echo).
This problem would have been an issue had I not done a sound check, this is something I realised I needed to be more careful with after receiving feedback on my original draft of my video piece.
As well as this I finalised my audio piece. This included completion of recording and I was able to do quickly and efficiently due to having had a lot of experience with audio editing in recent years. I then uploaded the piece to my SoundCloud account and was easily able to embed the this into my blog due to the sharing feature specifically for WordPress (seen below).
Finally after having completed my initial draft I received feedback after a proof reading of my article. This allowed me to clean up some of the grammar, remove some words and reword certain sections so the article read better and was a more fluid reading experience. Below is a picture of my annotated initial draft after having been proof read. After cleaning up the article (also seen below) I am much happier with the final product and feel it reads much better.
project 2 article – Initial draft
Above: Feedback received from college tutor and proof reading
PROJECT 2 FINAL ARTICLE – Final version of article after taking into account feedback and proof reading.
Examples of embedding audio and video for final blog post:
Final audio piece, embedded using soundcloud online audio player done simply by copying and pasting the HTML code from the soundcloud share option specifically for WordPress.
Final Video Piece using YouTube:
Online based problems in completing final post
How can you embed your audio/video?
As seen from my previous theory post, embedding audio and video to allow for an interactive element is vitally important to keeping reader attention. In order to do this I have uploaded my video piece to YouTube and my audio piece to SoundCloud.
By YouTube when I add a link to the WordPress post it will automatically use the YouTube player to have it play natively in the post. This means the reader does not have to click away and keeps them on the post for longer.
Again with the audio piece I am able to easily embed this using simple HTML code which is made available on SoundCloud under the share option. This allows me to just cope and paste the code and it will embed the audio player into the post.
What is the best way to lay out your piece?
As with the previous online based problem I intend to apply my previous theory post in order to layout the piece. The layout of that particular post is in a similar style to that of how I intend to layout this piece.
I will start with a large header to draw in readers with a emboldened first 25 words. Under this will be a large image and I will then spread out images, my audio piece and video piece throughout the article.
This will break up the article and make it a lot less intimidating to the reader and give the impression of easy bite sized pieces of information. This takes into account the idea of heat maps and how readers look at online articles.
How can you make your piece shareable?
In regards to making the piece shareable I will be applying the theory from this post in terms of creating a shareable piece of content.
WordPress has shareable social media links at the bottom of each post. It is more beneficial to have these both at the top or bottom, however, this is not possible to do with out installing a third party program or editing the themes overall code. This is something I will have to accept as a limitation due to using WordPress for this particular project.
How many images do you need and where will you source these from?
I intend to use around 4-5 images spread throughout my piece. I will use this to break up the content of my article to make it a more visually pleasing piece. In terms of sourcing this images I will be using screenshots from the games including in my video piece and still rendered shots from the video piece – therefore they will have all been sourced by me personally. I will be giving fully credit to the games that the images are sourced from below each picture used.