Media Interactive

Just a quickie today before I get down to the deep, dark work of deadlines. Feels like I have a million to do, and no time to do it. I like to think my lack of organisation will work well in my future profession - I can't do any work for anything until the pressure is on. I need a tight deadline, so journalism should suit me down to the ground.

Anyway, our groups media interactive topic has changed from the daunting subject of 'gun crime' to 'Speedway'. Personally, Im quite pleased with the change as filming videos for gun crime was never going to be particularly easy - especialy if you enjoy your life as I do. We will be focusing on the Birmingham Brummies who conviently race at the Perry Barr dog track. In my opinion, they could do with a name change though.

We've not really organised roles yet, although we do have some interesting ideas. For the flash background, we were discussing having a view of a motorbike's handlebars, with different backgrounds that the user could 'ride' to, representing 'videos', 'audio' etc... To give you an idea it should look something like this:



But better...obviously!

For videos, we have a number of possibilties. Neil and I know this lad, who shall remain nameless for the time being, who races Speedway to a high level. He is a bit of an up and coming star, and whilst he doesn't race for the brummies, he is a local lad, Walsall born and bred, and does race for a professional team. We plan to do an interview with him, interjecting his dialogue with footbage of him in action. We also plan to get video footage from inside Perry Barr stadium, although we have not discussed any details.

On the audio front, I am considering taking photo's of the Speedway for my Editorial Photography assignement (deadlines, deadlines!) so these could kill two birds with one stone. We discussed the possibility of a 'beginners guide to Speedway', which could combine my images with audio to produce a high-quality audio slideshow. With all these ideas in tow, I feel that we have the potential to produce a good quality interactive.

Wow, no wonder my girlfriend always looks so happy if this is what I consider a quickie...!

The power of blogging...

I feel like a corner has been turned on this blogging lark. Despite having so far recieved only 40 odd hits (although the new hit counter has only been up about a week and therefore has missed most of my posting craze), a post of mine has travelled far and wide across the internet, reaching people from across the globe.

A post of mine was picked by one of my lecturers, Paul Bradshaw, who wrote about it on his blog. His take on the hilariously bad video attracted a great deal of attention from fellow bloggers, prompting comment numbers that my humble site can only dream about. For those who wonder why he did not credit me, I asked him not to, as I have a working relationship with the company involved.

As Bradshaw himself notes, people are now blogging about this video as far away as Hungary and Australia. Meanwhile, comments have been flying around, meaning even more people are being linked to it. Lucas,writing on WordBlog comments: "That was painful to watch. The good news is probably none of their readers did." Unfortunately for the Reading Evening Post he was wrong. I did.

So when I started writing this blog and thought nobody was watching, I was wrong. Whilst my hit count remains dormant, at least my posts are actually proving a success, albeit for other peoples blogs!