Infatisari

Finally www.calinilea.com is up and running.  Enjoy

I have found the News21 web site while researching possible funding options for my final master’s project. It was interesting for me to discover new initiatives in presenting online content. Since one of my plans is to approach the immigrant issue, the web site has provided me new information I was not aware of. The chapter titled Changing Policy from the Latino America project done by the students from Arizona State University is only one of the stories that have drawn my attention.

A story about a federal program that is set to change how immigrants are hired seams very dry at first. The piece does a good job of explaining the issue, using video, audio and text. The flash platform offers a good way to navigate between the sub-chapters and each of them brings a new and important piece of information. My critique is about the way video is used on the main page of each sub-chapter. I think the auto play works good for the first time you enter the page but once you start navigating it can distract the attention from the content. The on/off sound button it is a good compromise between auto play and a start/pause button. Another critique is about the size of the video player. It made the images difficult to read while the full size button made me navigate away from the page.

Overall I enjoyed flipping trough all the chapters of the project and I have now a better understanding of the pros and cons of E-VERIFY.

Click on the image to see the chapter.

This is a multimedia piece and an article for the Missourian’s Boone Life Beginnings photo column. In addition, you can find at the end of the article an audio exercise that I made for the Electronic Photojournalism class explaining the steps of horse shoeing. Enjoy!

Just as the sun begins to rise, a man pulls his boots on, says “I love you” to his wife and children, and heads out the door to a barn somewhere in Boone County.

“I shoe horses, what’s called a farrier, and that’s just a specialist that takes care of horse’s feet,” Travis Smith says.
It’s cold outside. He puts on his leather and canvas apron and starts unpacking his truck at the first barn. He has to shoe three horses. It is a highly physical job that demands a lot of attention.

Smith first analyzes how the horse moves toward him and how the animal stands so he can see if there are any issues with the horse’s feet. The farrier chooses which type of shoe will be used based on what the owner uses the horse for. He starts with the clinch cutter and the hammer to remove the old shoe. Then he cleans the edges of the hoof with a rasp and cuts just enough of the hoof to remove the excess while avoiding the horse’s live flesh.

“It’s extremely important, probably the most critical step is the shape of that shoe and this is what gets people in trouble the most,” Smith says. “It’s the improperly shaped shoes. Or people putting the shoe on the feet and shaping the feet to the shoe. The shoe is a piece of iron, it’s malleable, but the foot isn’t.”

The sound of the hammer pounding the shoe on the anvil breaks the morning silence. “If you are going to drive iron nails in there you need to get the piece going around the hoof wall right. Once you get that shape, you get that where it fits, then you begin nailing.”

Farriers take pride in their craftsmanship and their ability to make nails look even and make nice, fine clinches. “Once I got those nailed in I have to cut the nails and create hooks at the end, those are called clinches,” Smith says. “And it’s come down in our language, is clinching the deal.” A few more rasp strokes finish the job.

“The shoeing is very important for the horse because that’s the foundation,” says Sharon Rose from the Greystone Equestrian Center in Hartsburg. “If the horse does not have accurate shoeing, accurate trimming, if it doesn’t have shoes then the balance is off for the horse and the horse has difficulties in doing his job.”

Smith returns every other Friday to keep up with the six-week rotation schedule for shoeing the 48 horses at the center.
“We call them snickers, we give them new snickers,” Rose says. “Travis does many vital things for us to keep the shoes on for the jumping horses and to keep the angles correct and the feet correct so that the horses can be at their best when competing.”

I started this assignment by looking at the usual multimedia long-term projects. I was thinking in terms of navigation, integrated audio, video and stills and so on. I switched from Mediastorm to COPY and POYi winner galleries and I was still undecided were to direct my attention.

Then I found a list of The Best of Multimedia Design winners published by the Society for News Design. This gave me the possibility to take a look at multimedia projects that are different in form and content from what I was used to. I was surprised how audio and a good flash design can make de difference between reading a long and probably boring article and getting factual information really fast. A Day’s Work, Four Days’ Pay demonstrates how multimedia, in this case good audio and graphics can substitute the common 1000 words article. There are no pictures, but the overall is so clean and concise that at the end of the 80 seconds you know exactly how a man was able to earn more than 5 times his regular salary over a one-year span. This is another good example how sometimes less is more.

Enjoy! (click on the image to see the project)

This is not new but I have my reasons to walk the same road again. I enjoyed working for Advanced on the project Shifting Gears. Because a lot of our work was concentrated in applying certain lighting techniques that we learned, I feel like in some places we neglected the story. I would like to revisit this project with the new set of skills I acquired and turn it into a larger multimedia project. It can be highly visual but also it has the potential for better sound and video. Most of the people I will follow will not change but I really think that this project can use improvements. In the mean time please enjoy what we have done and send me any comments you think of.

For the next summer I plan to find an internship in Chicago. With this in mind I started to look at the web sites of the newspapers from the Chicago area. From the ones I saw I selected the web site of Chicago Tribune for my review. I think this web site was the cleanest in terms of layout. It provides information in an organized manner and takes advantage of all the new “gadgets” available on the Internet.

On the main page it is clear what the main news is, without to much trouble of reading trough ads or menus. I enjoyed their navigation bar that allows you to access each category of news. This makes the navigation to what I want easier. I was surprised to find that under some subcategories part of the navigation bar was gone. For example in the Entrainment/ Tv trough Theater, the to half of the navigation bar was gone. I think this is because the posts act as blog posts. Also, once I entered Metromix from the navigation bar I was in a totally new page, whit only the back button to return to the main page.

For me it was interesting to see how Chicago Tribune deals with multimedia. On the navigation bar there are two sections Video and Photos. Under Photos one can find multimedia, as we tend to know: soundslides, video stills and sound as a package and so on. I was surprised that under video a lot of the footage was from a TV station and some of the videos where actually multimedia pieces you where directed from the Photos page. I felt that the multimedia section was not organized as well as the rest of the navigation.

I enjoyed the overall interactivity the web site provides. Comments, instant links to facebook, blogs or other networking web sites are always a plus. The share link on the articles offers a connection to the most popular services on the web. Another good feature from my perspective is the one that allows changing the size of the text on some of the articles. There are many other things that I want to refer to but I have to finish. Overall I had a good time browsing trough Chicago Tribune web site. I will be a returning visitor.

good coffee, cigarettes… all in the same time INSIDE. it’s good to be home
PS: Zorki yam yam

Debbi Tapia arranges plastic flamingo birds in front of her house. I found her house while driving with no destination around Columbia. I had a disappointing spring break and stopping in front of her house made my day.