Digital journalism - reflection

reflection - overall i think our project was a success as we demonstrated that we learned about each area of digital journalism, we made it clear what we had researched in our presentation with the use of title cards and we also did background research through survey monkey to provide our own findings.

Our biggest issue for the project was using premiere pro as at first the video took 5 hours to render and ended up not being playable, we are still unsure what happened, I then had to edit the video together once again due to premiere pro crashing, finally on my third attempt at editing the video everything went smoothly and the video rendered in about 15 minutes. Unfortunately I did not realize i forgot to add in 1 clip we had recorded that showed off the site i made to re-create a longfrom scrollytelling site, as well as that i must have also added in the wrong size title card before one of the clips as it did not fit the screen properly. Due to the 5 minute time constraint we also had to cut out a large part of one of our more entertaining , longer clips and had to cut 1 clip entirely about vlogging.

I also feel we could have better represented our survey monkey results but again we had to cut most it because of time constraints . The 3 second image on screen with the very small text did not properly show off what we actually did for our project and this is our overall feeling for our presentation, that while it was good , it did not get enough of our research and what we actually did for the project across properly.

In hindsight , i wish we had used some of the transitions available on premier pro, but we also felt that this would make the video itself feel like the focus rather than the information and project work. We also didn't do as much audio editing as we should have  as when the video was played on the projector the audio quality became significantly worse. I had the audio working at a semi passable state when i edited the video for the second time but must have forgot the fix it again after the program crashed. We also recorded all video and audio on our cameras meaning we weren't sure how we could edit the audio from the video clips. We also stayed late on campus hoping it would be quiet enough to record our clips and slightly improve the audio quality of the video. unfortunately this did not happen and each clip had to be rerecorded at least 5 times or in the case of our newsletters clip , had to be re- done 12 times.

Overall this was probably the most difficult of our intro to digital media projects but it was probably the most enjoyable to do as we had to use practical skills rather than looking up information and paraphrasing into a powerpoint.

Clips that were meant to be in the final presentation - https://photos.app.goo.gl/BtePwRSMve8hXZX8A

digital journalism - product

Product - For this Project I made a HTML Page to be an example of a Longform scrollytelling site, a blog post to look like a listicle site, a lot of title cards for the video presentation, a survey about digital journalism , an audio backing track with help from my beat producer friend and Aaron attempted to make a timeline of important dates for digital journalism but was unsuccessful.

I made a HTML page to look like a normal Longform scrollytelling site so that we would not have to use footage of sites that we don't own. This meant it had to contain large images and large amounts of text throughout the page. I copied code i wrote for my web development project and made changes to make the items on the page fit right, i then compiled random images from my camera roll to use on my site, i used a large chunk of text from one of my google docs and repeated it under each picture as i knew it would not be legible on camera anyways and it did not need to have a point other than to look right. I played with background colour , image borders and text size for the page. Finally i attempted to upload it to the internet through a free website uploader but for whatever reason it has not worked correctly and so in a separate blog post there is a link to the files on google drive.

longform scrollytelling files download link -  https://drive.google.com/open?id=11R9SQyulR2XgWDz_QstsoxuIVpKp5OF_

I made a blog post to re-create a listicle site as the formatting is quite similar being all a long list. I compiled a number of photos i had taken in digital photography of a pencil pearer and made a listicle about the best photo ops for a pencil pearer and added some text under each image to replicate sites like buzzfeed.

listicle look alike blog post -  https://conorcdm.blogspot.com/2019/12/listicle-example.html

I used picsart, the app, to make each of the title cards for the video presentation, i fist downloaded the cdm logo and tud logo and placed them and my group's names on a black background. I then made cards for each of our topics in the presentation. Problems arised when i was editing the video clips as none of the title cards were the same size and were all being displayed incorrectly,meaning i had to redo all of them the exact same size, 2000 x 1333 pixels.

Images i made for the project -

I wrote a quick survey on survey monkey to give us an idea of what people knew about digital journalism and what we should do for our project. This also gave us survey results to add into our final presentation for a bit of extra information.

survey monkey link -  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QDSM3ZN
survey results - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yMjL5GZ3OhIZRzCVmADK0N2RwFA3qc4sBFVKTdHkGXU/edit?usp=sharing

I used the beat "sadmess" by Sagon , a friend of mine, for our backing track making my own edits to extend the audio from around 2 minutes to 5 minutes exactly. I used audacity to make the edits.

original beat link - https://soundcloud.com/user-315900057/sagon-sadmess

link to our extended version - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Atv3pJWmOi8uhuouy7EP_TCXshHo2Va-

Aaron tried to make a timeline of important events using the software recommended on the project brief but could not get the software working properly so unfortunately this idea had to be scrapped.

digital journalism - process

Process - We began by agreeing to work on a project based on digital journalism. We first read through the brief and made a plan of what we could do, we felt it would be best to find out about the history and or how each form of digital journalism works and what the differences are. I first began by making a very short survey on survey monkey asking people what they thought digital journalism was, what sites and apps they used and where they get their news from. After a few days we looked at the results and peoples opinions gave us a better idea of what we should be looking for as well as that , we also recorded the data of what media people use, to show off in our presentation.

survey monkey data table & link
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QDSM3ZN

We first met up in the college library to make a brainstorm of what we could talk about for each of our chosen topics and we also decided we wanted to present each topic in the same format, for example when talking about snapchat , we would take our video recording on snapchat, i also planned on making a html page to be an example of a longform scrollytelling-esque site and i planned on making a blog post that would look like a listicle page.

We spent a few hours in the seating area in D block on our laptops gathering information and background data for our project. My teammates did most of the research side while i was working on creating the HTML page, the blog post , the survey data visual aid and the title cards for our video presentation. We created a google document to keep all of our findings together and so we could each access the data, and make changes accordingly. We agreed to research 9 of the topics listed in the project brief so that we could each record 3 segments for our final presentation. We then wrote a script for what we wanted to say in each of the video segments before we began filming. Our first recording was for horizontal video recording, being like a normal news cast so we decided to use D002 as we thought it would be the easiest to record a segment in due to the white walls. This first segment was our longest, uncut about 2 minutes and unfortunately for the final presentation video had to be cut down to about 30 seconds. We believe this is quite unfortunate as it was definitely the most entertaining. We re-recorded each segment 3 - 5 times due to outside noise or mistakes.

We made our recordings over 2 days , I compiled all of them from mine and Aaron's cameras and added the title cards. I used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the clips and make a 5 minute video. The first render of the video went terribly for some still unknown reason taking 6 hours to render. the video also ended up not being playable. I re-edited the video 2 more times due to a computer crash before finally creating our final presentation video.