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Archive for the 'Visual' Category

Slideshare

Published by Sam on February 25, 2009
Categories: Audio, Communication, Instructional, Mash-ups, Photo, Video, Visual, movies and presentation 4 Comments

Strangely enough, not everyone is comfortable talking on camera, or even holding a camera and pointing it at other things and talking, or even just pointing the camera at other things and not talking. After years of laughing at Americas Funniest Videos, perhaps I had this unrealistic expectation that everyone likes to be videoed, and in particular people like to be videoed making an idiot out of themselves. YouTube has backed up that myth, by the way. Turns out that most people are camera shy, especially in libraryland, so finding people to talk on camera can be difficult.

image courtesy of flickr user peoplearestrange

Here’s some excuses:

I hate the way I look on camera
I’m in the witness protection program
My voice sounds funny
The camera adds ten pounds
Why would anyone care what I have to say?
Never in a million years, period.

If you’re one of these people, and everyone you work with is also one of these people, but for some reason you still want to make a video, or perhaps you’ve been delivered a mandate to make a video, then Slideshare might offer the alternative you’re looking for. Most movie editors will allow you to use photos instead of video clips - take a series of photos, plug them into the movie maker, add a soundtrack of either music or narration (or both, if your movie maker allows two different soundtracks), adjust the amount of time each photo shows, add transitions, if you want (fade from one to the next, etc.), and voila you have yourself a movie.

Here’s something I’ve run into, though - when I tried doing this in the basic Windows Movie Maker, it crashed on me. Repeatedly. I’m pretty sure it had to do with the size of the photo files, but it might be that it just didn’t like me, and has a vendetta against me. Sometimes it crashes when I try to make a video with too many clips, too. When that happened, did i spend money on a better editor? No! I turned to another free solution, Slideshare!

Slideshare allows you to upload ppt slideshows to share with others. You can leave it a slideshow if you want, or you can add an mp3 to it and make it a “slidecast.” You can sync the slides to go with the music/narration - so that the slides change at appropriate moments in your narration.

Here’s one I made: http://www.slideshare.net/crashsolo/car-repair-for-fvrl-members-presentation

I can see several good ways to use slideshare in libraryland:

Presentations - if you deliver a presentation at a conference, a meeting, or wherever, you can post the slides to slideshare, and give people a link to go view them. Slides by themselves don’t tell the story of the presentation, however, so you can record a version of you talk and synch it to the slides, creating a multimedia document of your presentation that others can view later.
Tutorials - screenshots and photos can go a long way in instruction, and a voice over can finish it up. I’ll admit my initial attempt at a car repair tutorial is pretty rough, but it was more for pitching the idea than for actual implementation.
Events - Staff, teens, etc. could collect photos, put them in an interesting order, add a musical soundtrack, and voila, you’ve got something interesting to watch that promotes library programs. It might not have the splash of animoto, but it can be easier to control when the pictures appear, and when text appears, and for how long, etc.

One of the things I’ve struggled with with slideshare is that I can’t upload it to YouTube - something that would make it easier for me to work with. However, it does have embed code so you can put it on a website or blog. If my library were to make use of slideshare things like my car repair piece, we would just take the code and embed it where we thought it should go.

There are other slidecast/slideshow sharing sites out there, and I think the most recent version of powerpoint (the one I don’t yet have) allows you to turn your slideshow into a movie with sound.

Some other slideshow sites:

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Animoto - photos in motion

Published by Margaret on February 23, 2009
Categories: Video and Visual 3 Comments

In Sam’s kick-off post about video, he mentions that “there are a lot of tools out there to help make videos with photos, powerpoints, screencasts, etc.” Animoto is one of those tools. Upload some photos from your computer, Flickr or other photo-sharing site. Or choose from stock photos. Choose some music. Finalize your video. In only moments you can upload your Animoto creation to YouTube, Facebook, blogs, websites, and even i-Phone. Animoto has a slick 60 second video showing how to do it. You can make as many 30-second videos you want with a free account. Longer videos are $3 for a single video, or $30 per month for an account. If you are a teacher or school librarian, you may be able to sign up for Animoto in Education and have your students use their own accounts to make full-length videos while in-class or at home.

Just because it’s easy and quick to make Animoto videos doesn’t mean the results are automatically good. Case in point. Here’s a little video I put together with some photos I had on my computer. It was quick, it was easy, but it’s not at all compelling or coherent. It just doesn’t hang together. And it’s only 30 seconds. Imagine how awful it would be at 1 - 3 minutes.

It turns out that even very short videos need to be carefully crafted to tell a story, and it really helps to know what story you want to tell as you are collecting photos. In the Tips and Tricks section for adding images, Animoto gives me some insight into what went wrong with my first attempt:

“Animoto users often tell us they think differently about how they take images when they want to make an Animoto video. Instead of capturing individual moments, they try to capture a whole experience though a series of images. Instead of thinking like a photographer, they’re thinking like a director. They think about the story they want to share, and they use images to tell that story.”

That sounds a bit like the “long photos” Kate mentioned in her recent post. My video combining rhododendrons, the library spaces (no people) and Maple Leaf Rag makes a disjointed thing that’s somewhat surreal, but not at all in a good way. Now that I look at it that way… no wonder! Well, it was the first try.

So, for my second attempt, I tried to take Animoto’s advice and snap photos while skiing that would tell a brief story about heading to the mountain, gearing up, getting tickets and taking some runs. The tempo of the music I chose influenced how many photos were required for a 30 second video, so a few of my photos were not used. It’s better than my library tour, but when I compare it to a sample snowboarding video on the Animoto site, mine pales a bit. Action shots of snowboarders in the air trump close-ups of somewhat sedate skiiers any day. We’ve gotta work on our jumps!

Animoto has been making a big splash lately. I hope you’ll play with Animoto, and share some of your creations with us at infodoodads.

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Library Video - Trends and Tips

Published by Sam on February 2, 2009
Categories: How-to, Instructional, Teens, Video and Visual 4 Comments

The start of a month of posts and discussion about video - trends, tips, tools, experiences, etc.

At Internet Librarian last year, there were several sessions dedicated to different aspects of library video creation - some encouraged librarians and staff to just start making stuff with whatever they have, and others encouraged people to shoot for higher standards before releasing what they made to the world. I’d like to advocate for a little of both. Some projects will require higher production values than others, so picking a project that’s right for your budget and experience can be a good way to avoid getting overwhelmed.

First, some trends. There are a couple of standard library videos that you can find en masse on YouTube: Library Tours and Teen Library Videos. The Library Tour seems to be a popular choice for libraries wanting to experiment with video because it’s a subject they already know a lot about, they have a good sense of what areas of the library are popular, what people coming to the library are looking for, etc. Teen videos tend to be a lot more creative, a little spastic, and aiming to be humorous.

Library Tour Videos:
A library tour video is basically a little advertisement, or a piece of marketing, or an invitation to computer users to visit and take advantage of more library services, so I think that production values should be as high as one can make them. I don’t mean you should go buy a $2,000 camera and some lights and microphones and all that jazz, just to make one video. But I do think that unless you have access to equipment and people with at least some knowledge of the movie-making process, you should probably start with another project, or give yourself ample time to research and prepare for making the video.

My favorite library tour video (so far!)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHljR4LYmOA[/youtube]

Teen Library Videos:
I think viewers are more forgiving of technical limitations in a teen library video - it’s not generally meant to be taken too seriously, for one thing, and for another, teen programs are supposed to be fun, so the videos try and make whatever they’re promoting seem fun.

My favorite Teen Library video (until you make one better)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLmtkD1kiK0[/youtube]

Now for some tips:

Most types of videos require some pre-production work:

Write a script.
See what kind of equipment and resources you have.
See what kind of talent you have.
See what kind of scheduling issues you will be working around.
Re-write your script.
Story-board your script - even if it’s stick figures and boxes with words on them, story-board it out - It will help!

Two factors that can make an otherwise great video difficult to watch (and therefore opposite to your goal) are light and sound - if the people watching the video are thinking about the lighting or the sound, then they aren’t absorbing any of the content, no matter how awesome it is. Most average and low-end video cameras have microphones on them, but the microphones are generally not super great. If you video someone speaking from too great a distance, the sound becomes very fuzzy. From too close, it becomes muffled and waffly. ‘Waffly’ is a technical term meaning “like you are hitting the microphone with a waffle.” If you are shooting outdoors, there is the added level of ambient noise and wind:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6r9zC-nVqU[/youtube]

Some workarounds:
You don’t have to shoot a video to make a video. What I mean is that there are a lot of tools out there to help make videos with photos, powerpoints, screencasts, etc. Watch ten library tour videos, and you’re likely to see a variety of video, photos, voice overlay, musical intros and outros, and more.

Here’s a great teen library PSA that makes great use of audio overlay, basic video effects, and simple filming to make a nice little ad:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbKsWqOJnD0[/youtube]

Send me some links to your library videos, and I’ll watch them and give you honest, constructive feedback. Unless it’s really awful, in which case I’ll pretend I didn’t get it. Just kidding.

Also, what are some of your favorite tools, apps, and sites for creating and uploading videos?

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MahShelf: digital comics, manga and more

Published by Jane on October 30, 2008
Categories: Books, Visual and Web 0 Comments

Whew! I don’t know about you, but my October sure flew by. Just getting back to normal work load and with that I return to my usual doodadding. This week I’m going for an engaging visual find and I think I’ve found it in MahShelf. MahShelf is kind of similar in concept to LibraryThing. What’s the twist? MahShelf lets you post your digital comics, manga and graphic novels. It’s really fun to browse. Since it’s new, the amount of content is still under development. One find pertinent to a library session I recently gave is the Smithsonian Dibner Library’s Portraits of Scientists and Inventors. Unique content that I might not have found.
Much of the other content includes comics, manga and books with lots of images.

MahShelf has a couple of 2.0 features: commenting; tags (browsing to search the collection) and a community forum section.

I liked that the community section is a Meebo room. Nice blending of other applications!

I can imagine libraries linking to this collection or to specific books to enhance their collection or their web pages. Would it work if a library had a program where participants created books and then uploaded? I think that would be fun but then again, I’m no artist. Think I’ll go enjoy others’ talents!

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Voting America visualizes the history of US presidential elections

Published by Kate on October 11, 2008
Categories: Visual 2 Comments

My apologies to our non-US readers–today’s doodad is wholly US-centric. We’re fairly obsessed with our upcoming presidential election these days. The Voting America project from the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab is interesting because it helps to visualize and analyze historical election data back to 1840.

In addition to animated maps illustrating election history over time, there are also short video commentaries from historians and political scientists and even an interactive map (that they describe as “processor- and memory-intensive” and usually resulted in a browser-restart for me.)

Voting America is an interesting way to put the current US presidential election in a historical context.

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Digital Scrapbooks - a tool for learning?

Published by Margaret on October 1, 2008
Categories: Academic, Mash-ups, Media, Photo, Visual and presentation 1 Comment

Last month we were at the county fair where along with the fair food, we enjoyed seeing the livestock, the old tractors, a 1, 0000 pound pumpkin and the entries in the Arts and Crafts Building. Next to the woodworking, the quilts, and the counted cross stitch were displays of scrapbook pages in different categories. I can appreciate how scrapbook crafters build a narrative around their photographs using design, layout, color, papers and memorabilia.

Now that most photos are born digital and web applications make it easy, scrapbooking has moved to the web. A few weeks ago, an English professor was here in the library talking about how she was going to use “scrapblogging” in her course. I have never really connected scrapbooking with learning, but apparently I’ve been missing a trend in education. One teacher calls scrapbooking “personalizing the curriculum.”

Scrapblog is a “free web-based service for creating and sharing digital scrapbooks.” It’s been around since 2007 and has an easy to use drag and drop interface where users can build scrapbooks based on existing themes or by starting with a blank page. Users can integrate photos and videos from their hard drive or from online sharing sites like Flickr or Picasa. The final product can be stored and shared on Scrapblog, or shared to social network sites. This year, Photobucket partnered with Scrapblog to make scrapblogging available from within Photobucket. Scrapblog recently added a service where users can pay to have their scrapbooks printed as books, postcards, greeting cards, etc.

I found the integration of Photobucket and Scrapblog to be a little clunky.. I wanted to save my scrapblog to edit later, but found that my edits were not really accepted. I had better luck working directly with an account in Scrapblog. Please don’t grade me on my results.

http://www.scrapblog.com/viewer/viewer.aspx?sbid=652687

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searchme: bringing fun back to search

Published by Jane on July 31, 2008
Categories: Searching, Visual and Web 2 Comments

If you’re not entirely enthralled with Cuil, the new search engine that Michael just reviewed, you might give Searchme a try. What a fun search engine this is!

Searchme presents results visually and offers visual cues to refine your search. For example, my test search on primary sources included filters for libraries, history, us government and others. I really like how the web pages of the results display and that I can use the horizontal scroll bar to quickly “page” through results. Below the visual results is another option to view the results in a text format. One neat feature is seeing my search terms highlighted in the web pages results. I want to underscore how refreshing this approach to viewing results is, it’s so much more engaging than the typical static presentation.

Another notable feature is searchme’s concept of “Stacks”. Stacks are essentially folders containing your search results. I think it’s pretty cool that I can email, view or share my stack. If I want to add a site, I can do so as well. Now that I think about it, this just might beat del.icio.us (gasp!) because honestly I sure would like some more visual cues than what del.icio.us offers when reviewing saved sites. Of course del.icio.us’ focus is different.

When you go to searchme you might be presented with a black or Night Theme instead of my preference of the light blue Day. (I get enough enough dark skies here in Oregon.

For my parting shot, I will share that I was happy with the relevancy of the results I got from the several searches I tried. I didn’t feel that I needed to weed through numerous irrelevant content. If searchme didn’t do a good job with ranking results, it’d be just another startup, but with the combination of solid hits and good looks, searchme may stick around. Good results plus a fun display means I’ll be back.

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Aniboom

Published by Sam on July 7, 2008
Categories: Games, Services, Teens, Video and Visual 0 Comments

Here is an animation that I made as an experiment for this post:

I know, it’s not terribly creative, but I never claimed to be a master cartoonist. Although given the type of stuff that you can watch on Adult Swim these days, maybe I could be!

So, the fun part of Aniboom is making your own animation. They have a free tool that you can use, called Shapeshifter http://www.aniboom.com/ShapeshifterMain/ – it’s pretty fun, and as you get more familiar with the way it works, there are a lot of fun things you can do with it. You can move basic shapes around the screen, changing their colors, sizes, relationships, rotations, etc. It’s a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. I found that doing the basic animation first and doing the colors and things like that afterwards kind of streamlined the process for me.

You can check out my profile: http://www.aniboom.com/boomzones/crashsolo

I could see this being a fun challenge for teens, to make a short animation on a chosen theme, or to advertise the library or something like that.

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280 Slides: a step up in online presentation applications

Published by Kate on June 13, 2008
Categories: Publishing and Visual 2 Comments

I’ve done a lot of co-presenting lately, and I’m still looking for the ultimate collaboration-friendly slideshow program. I know, we could use Google Docs, Zoho, or several others, but they all seem to have quirks that make them more trouble than they’re worth and we always end up sending PowerPoint presentations back and forth. With all the buzz around 280 Slides, I was hoping my new favorite tool had arrived, but I still don’t see quite what I need.

Granted, 280 Slides is still beta, so perhaps this stuff is in the works, or maybe it’s just not the point, but what I’d really, really like to see is an option to edit collaboratively. I also kept looking for an “undo” button–does this brand me as a PC user forever? Most of the chatter about 280 Slides starts with “hey, this looks like Keynote!” which I haven’t really used, so I suspect some of the features I had a hard time figuring out are probably really obvious to Mac users.

On the other hand, some handy features like the option to upload a presentation from PowerPoint are already on the way. That alone will make 280 Slides a useful tool for me since I don’t have the double-p on my home computer and would love to be able to edit a presentation without trekking back to the office. Saving the presentations you create in 280 Slides in the .ppx format is already available. There are also some nice options for sharing your finished product including publishing to SlideShare, linking directly to the presentation, or embedding it in your blog or other web page (though the embedding doesn’t play nicely with our Wordpress setup, so you can check out my silly little test presentation here.) With more presentations on the way, I’m going to keep my eye (or should I say “i”?) on 280 Slides.

All you Apple Keynote users out there, anything to add?

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Digg Labs - Let the Fun Begin!

Published by Laurie on June 1, 2008
Categories: Communication, News and Visual 0 Comments

This week an MBA student told me about digg labs (because he thought it was something I’d like). I must admit I didn’t check it out right away, because I’m not a user of the regular digg site. I mean, digg is a great idea, I’ve just never connected with it. Well, I must admit I am enjoying Digg Labs! What a fun way to waste time while staring at a screen!

First up from the lab, digg swarm. this visual map shows “diggers” swarming around active stories and yellow stories have more diggs. While looking at this page, a student asked me, “Are you playing video games??”

Second from the labs is digg stack. This one brings in a bar of stories, and little cubes fall from the sky and stack up according to how popular the story is. Looks like the story “2012 The Year the Internet Ends” is currently the most popular.

digg labs also is experimenting with digg bigspy, digg arc, and digg pics, but you’ll have to visit to find out more! I wish I could make the library database into a fun visual experience…hmmm….

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picnik - easy online photo editing

Published by Laurie on May 25, 2008
Categories: Photo and Visual 0 Comments

I’m a longtime user of Photoshop, but I have to say that picnik offers almost everything I need, and it’s so easy! Once you upload a picture, you can edit (color, red eye, contrast, levels, etc) and create (add text and images, color the photo, fade the edges, round the corners, etc). I uploaded a simple color photograph of my husband and quickly made the following changes in less than 10 minutes! I love all the font choices (I’m a font addict). This is the BEST free photo editing software I’ve found…enjoy!

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The Awesome Highlighter–what more is there to say?

Published by Kate on May 23, 2008
Categories: Communication, Visual and Web 0 Comments

Lest you think nothing productive can come from Twitter, I want you to know today’s doodad is one that came to me in a Twitter conversation I had with someone I’ve never even met in real life (thanks alundstrom!)

The Awesome Highlighter lets you highlight sections of a web page, then save it for your own purposes or pass it along for others to see. You can begin by simply pasting a URL into the box on the homepage, but I had the best luck with the bookmarklet, and there’s also a Firefox extension to make highlighting while browsing easier. Once you’re on the page you just highlight with the mouse (like you’re going to copy something) and it automatically highlights what you select. When you’re done, you’re given a URL to share your marked up page. Really, if you’ve ever used a highlighter you know pretty much everything you need to know. Seems like this could come in pretty handy for email or IM reference!

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Archive for the 'Visual' Category

Slideshare

image courtesy of flickr user peoplearestrange

Animoto - photos in motion

Library Video - Trends and Tips

MahShelf: digital comics, manga and more

Voting America visualizes the history of US presidential elections

Digital Scrapbooks - a tool for learning?

searchme: bringing fun back to search

Aniboom

280 Slides: a step up in online presentation applications

Digg Labs - Let the Fun Begin!

picnik - easy online photo editing

The Awesome Highlighter–what more is there to say?

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