Video Project: The Pre-Preseason

I decided to document what we do on the soccer team in order to get prepared for the preseason which is just around the corner!

"Writing Web Content That Works" Review

Chapter 2

I found that there is a lot more to a web site after reading Chapters 2 and 3 of Janice Redish's "Writing Web Content That Works". As a web site user, I don't even think about any of the factors that go into making a website but I do however know if a website isn't something that I like. As users of the internet we like to find what we are looking for at a very quick pace. Otherwise, we could waste our time searching for something in a library which would obviously take way longer than a site. Here are some notes that I took from the reading:

Successful Writers Focus on Their Audiences

• Writing successful web content doesn't start with typing words. It starts with finding out about your audiences and their needs.
• Understanding why your web users come will help you select and organize the content so that it best meets both your goals and theirs.

Seven Steps to Understanding Your Audiences

1. List your major audiences: One way to list your major audiences is to ask: "How do people identify themselves with regard to my web content? Or "what about my site visitors will help me know what content the web site needs and how to write that content?" Write for humans and nothing else.
2. Gather information about your audiences: Know your audience and their realities. Do not write from assumptions! Watching, listening to, and talking with your web users and potential users of your site are the most useful ways to find out about your audience. Think about your mission, read the emails that come through your 'Contact Us' and other feedback links, talk to marketing, talk to customer service, get people who come to the site to fill out a short questionnaire, watch and listen to people, and interview people who use or might use your website, and do some usability testing of the current content.
3. List major characteristics for each audience: List key phrases or quotes, experience/expertise, emotions, values, technology, social and cultural environments, and demographics.
4. Gather your audiences' questions, tasks, and stores: Gather lists of the questions that people expect the web site to answer, the tasks they need the web site to support, and the stories they tell about their experiences with your web site, with other web sites, and in relevant non-web situations. As you gather them, don't try to translate them! Use the users' vocabulary in your web content.
5. Use your information to create personas: A persona is an individual with a name, a picture, and specific demographic and other characteristics. It's a composite of characteristics of many real people
6. Include the persona's goals and tasks: The persona's major goals and tasks for your site are an important part of your persona description.
7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site: Scenarios are short stories that give you a good sense of the people who come to your site, what their lives are like, and what they want to do at your web site. Scenarios give life to goals and tasks in the same way that personas five life to lots of data and about your web users. Scenarios tell you the conversations people want to start. Everything on your web site should fulfill a scenario that a real user might have for coming to the web site. Scenarios can also help you write good web content.

Chapter 3

To have a successful experience on a web site, people have to find what they need, understand what they find, and act appropriately on that understanding. They have to do all that in the time and effort that they think it is worth.

Home Pages - The 10-Minute Mini-Tour

Most people read very little on the home page of a web site. They want to get what they came for and leave which typically isn't on the home page of a web site. Home pages can be content-rich, but they must not be wordy. There are five functions of home pages:

1. Identifying the site, establishing the brand: Your site's logo, name, and tag line identify it. Don't use a paragraph to explain the site. Use a short phrase that tells people how to think about the site.
2. Setting the tone and personality of the site: You set the tone for your side of the conversation by sharing the web site's personality with you site visitors. 
3. Helping people get a sense of what the site is all about: Many people coming to your site for the first time want to know: whose site this is, who these people are, what the site is all about. They want that information quickly because they also want to know how they can keep going on the question or task that brought them here. Both too little and too much can keep people from understanding what the site offers. A useful home page makes it instantly clear what the site is about and is mostly links and short descriptions.
4. Letting people start key tasks immediately: When people come to a web site to do a task, they usually want to start that task right away. If people need a form, putting the form on the home page is a good strategy. Make sure to put what a visitor might be searching for at the top of the page and also put a 'Search' at the top of a page because that's where people expect it. Don't make people fill out forms they done want. 
5. Sending each person on the right way, efficiently: There are two critical guidelines about writing links to help people get started down a good path from the home page: 1) use your site visitors' words and 2) don't make people wonder which link to click on. Site visitors are looking for the words that are in their minds so use their words NOT yours.

Discussion Questions

1. Since we use Google and other search engines to find exactly what we are looking for, are home pages really a big deal to us?
2. What are some examples of good home pages that we use today?

"User Experience and Why it Matters" Review

After reading, "User Experience and Why it Matters", a chapter out of Jesse James Garrett's 'The Elements of User Experience', I realized that without users, all products are useless. It's the users that make products successful and when designing websites, we must not think about ourselves in the design but mostly must think of our users.

User Experience: The experience the product creates for the people who use it in the real world.

• User experience is about how it works on the outside, where a person comes into contact with something.
• Every product that is used by someone creates a user experience.

From Product Design to User Experience Design

• The aesthetic dimension of product design is a sure attention-getter.
• People think about design in functional terms (if something works or not)
• Designing products with the user experience as an explicit outcome means looking beyond the functional or aesthetic.

Designing (for) Experience: Use Matters

• The requirements to deliver a successful user experience are independent of the definition of the product and the more complex a product is, the more difficult it becomes to identify exactly how to deliver a successful experience to the user.

User Experience and the Web

• On the web, user experience becomes even more important than it is for other kinds of products.
• A website it a self-service product.
• More and more businesses have now come to recognize that providing a quality user experience is an essential, sustainable competitive advantage--not just for websites, but for all kinds of products and services.
• User experience forms the customer's impression of a company's offerings, differentiates a company from its competitors, and determines whether your customer will ever come back.

Good User Experience is Good Business

• Content, or information, must be communicated as effectively as possible. It has to be presented in a way that helps people absorb it and understand it.
• Features and functions always matter, but user experience has a far greater effect on customer loyalty.
• A good user experience brings customers back to your site.
• Return of Investment: For every dollar you spend, how many dollars of value are you getting back?
• Conversion Rate: a common way of measuring the effectiveness of a user experience. It's a common measure of return on investment. Conversion Rate can give you a better sense of the return on your user experience investment than simple sales figures. It tracks how successful you are in getting those who visit to spend some money.
• Any user experience effort aims to improve efficiency. 1) Helping people work faster and 2) helping them make fewer mistakes.

Minding Your Users

• User-centered Design: the practice of creating engaging, efficient user experiences. The concept is to take the user into account every step of the way as you develop your product.
• Everything the user experiences should be the result of a conscious decision on your part.
• The biggest reason user experience should matter to you is that it matters to your users.

Discussion Questions

1. Do we take in to account the our own experiences when we use our cell phones and other electronic media?
2. Do we tend to focus more on the user experience of electronic media versus traditional media?

"Point of View" Review

After reading Douglas and Harnden's chapter titled "Point of View", I realized how much thought producers must put into their work. Point of view basically determines how the audience views the film. If ballerinas and football players went to go see a movie about ballet dancers, there would be two different point of views in that particular theater. Here are my notes from the chapter:


Point of View 

1. a camera shot taken as if seen through the eyes of a character.
2. refers to the perspective of the storytelling.
3. actually the source of the phrase itself. Refers to the interests, attitudes, and beliefs associated with a character's or group's particular perspective.

Point of view is ultimately the message of the creator.

POV Shots

Moving POV shots are effective in horror and monster movies in order to build suspense. POV shots momentarily shift the storytelling to a first-person account from a character's point of view.

Perspective of the Storyteller

First Person

• First person perspective can be achieved by voice over. This gives the character's thoughts and provides opportunities for characterization.
• First person narrative can shift the balance from visuals and dialogue, to commentary and contemplative language.

Second Person

• "You" really isn't addressed in shooting a film because the "you" would be the audience.
• Advertising sometimes uses "you".

Third Person

• Most productions are in third person.
• Presentation in the third person is common in nonnarrative and narrative productions.

Character Point of View

• Storytellers can tell stories of storytellers telling stories.
• In film and video, point of view as perspective tends to be much more limited in variation.
• Film audiences share the point of view of the leading character.
• The lead in the story provides the focus for the audience.

Attitude

• We regularly see various film and video productions that present the same subjects from differing points of view (attitudes).

The Audiences Point of View

• Audience members are active participants in the production.
• What we see in the movies, we see as a created reality.

Defining the Audience

• It's important to identify the audience's point of view, its prior experience and attitude.

Discussion Questions

1. How do film makers know whether audiences will like their film before they make it?
2. Is it more important for audience members to be able to follow one lead character for an entire film, or is it better to follow multiple characters in order to get multiple viewpoints?

"The Aesthetics of Editing" Review

The Psychology of Editing

B-roll is footage that visually describes the story and is very common in nonfiction storytelling. 

• Image and Sound - sounds allow images to make a stronger statement
• Shot Order - The order in which shots are viewed create different settings for the audience.
• Shot Relationship - Editing can allow viewers to not know the difference of two different shots.
• Time - Usually editing compresses shots. Program length are dictated by distribution requirements which also effects editing. 
• Rhythm and Pacing - The editor decides how often to cut. The faster the pacing, the more specific the cut must be.

Continuity

Continuity refers to maintaining story consistency from shot to shot and within scenes. It pretty much makes the story believable to viewers. A jump cut is a series of two shots that lack continuity.

• Physical Continuity - relates to all the items used in the production. This type of continuity can be checked before shooting begins and someone on the crew can be in charge of this.
• Technical Continuity - refers to technical inconsistency from shot to shot. For example, changes in lighting, audio levels, or quality of the image.
• Continuity Conventions - A basic rule for editors is to maintain screen direction.

Sequencing

• A sequence is a series of shots that relate to the same activity. The purpose of the sequence is to add interest and sophistication to a scene and provide the viewer with a better understanding of the scene.

Transitioning

• A transition is the change from one shot to another. It advances a story line from shot to shot and scene to scene.
• The Cut - an instant change from one image to another.
• Cutting on the beat is effective when the image should change on specific beats, usually music.
• Besides the cut, transitions include mixes, wipes, and digital effects.
• Mix - a generic term for a gradual transition where one image appears to fade away while another begins to appear.
• A fade has black or another solid color as either the incoming or outgoing image.
• A mix between two images is called a dissolve.
• A wipe is when one image moves across the screen replacing the previous image as it progresses.

The Magic of Editing

For every problem, there's usually a creative solution.

• An L cut occurs when the picture and sound start at slightly different times. This creates interest or suspense.
• A filter is an effect that can be applied to a clip or entire program in order to alter the perspective, color, or other attributes of the clip.
• Compositing is the layering of tracks on top of one another.

Editing is the third and final time a story is told during the production process and before screening. I never really think about the editing of a film while watching it. I may reference it when I am done watching a movie with a lot of special effects but that's as far as I take it. After reading this chapter I have realized that there is a lot more to editing that just putting pieces of film together to complete a story.

The following is a film by Wendy Apple titled "The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing" which I believe goes into detail what the Osgood and Henshaw article discussed.

Furman Soccer Pre Preseason Slideshow

I wanted to arrange my photos very specifically. I wanted to not just include picture of the team playing. I also wanted to incorporate what we do in our off time during the summer or the pre preseason. So I arranged the pictures with soccer in the beginning, middle, and end with what we do in our off time in between.


1. Goal Mouth: I heightened the exposure, the hue, the midtones and highlights in the Quick Panel to give the photo an authentic but very green feel. Taken with an iPhone 4.

2. Eli Header: I didn't edit this picture at all. Taken with an iPhone 4.

3. Goalkeepers Passing: I didn't edit this picture at all. Taken with an iPhone 4.

4. Coaching Campers: I didn't edit this picture at all. Taken with a Canon PowerShot A470.

5. Kid Sitting on Ball: I increased the SmartFix option to 25 and increased the midtones to 25 and the highlights to 12. I also increased the saturation to 50 and the tint to 25. I sharpened the picture as well to 125. I wanted this picture to pop with color because soccer camp is supposed to be fun and bright colors signify fun. Taken with a Canon PowerShow A470.

6. Hungry Camper: I didn't edit this picture because I wanted to leave the inflatable field in the picture with the boy not centered. Taken with a Canon PowerShot A470.

7. Soccer Ball Pyramid: I increased every option in the Levels tab including shadows, midtones, and highlights. I didn't touch the saturation or hue but I increased the vibrance to 50. I wanted this picture to pop due to the bright colors. I sharpened the picture to really get the detailing on the balls. Taken with a Canon PowerShot A470.

8 and 9. Bobby Warped Ball: I decided to post the before and after of this picture. I was amazed when I saw the ball on my camera after I took this picture. Firstly, I cropped the photo but left a little extra room on the left so that Bobby wasn't centered. Next, I only increased the saturation and vibrance (both to 25). Surprisingly taken by an iPhone 4.

10 and 11. Marco Scissor Kick: This was my favorite picture to edit out of the entire bunch. First, I increased the exposure to 1.0. Then I increased the shadows, midtones, and highlights. I didn't touch the saturation or hue but I did increase the vibrance to 25. I also sharpened the picture very lightly. I wanted this picture to come off as clear and vivid. Taken with an iPhone 4.

12. Adrian Neck Trap: I didn't edit this picture at all. Taken with an iPhone 4.

13. Dylan Bench Press: I increased the SmartFix feature to 37 without touching the exposure. I also didn't touch the shadows or midtones but increased the highlights to 67. I didn't touch any of the features dealing with color. Lastly, I cropped the photo to eliminate the uneven space on the right of the photo. There wasn't much to edit in this photo but I really wanted to brighten up the overall picture. Taken with an iPhone 4.

14. Adrian Squat Rack: I cropped the photo to trim out some unwanted area  of the Physical Activities Center. I increased the SmartFix feature to 12. I didn't touch the shadows, midtones, highlights, saturation, hue, or vibrance. I severely increased the sharpness of the photo to 375. I wanted to enhance the silver colors of the weight rack and mirror. Taken with an iPhone 4.

15. Ice Bath: I didn't touch anything in this photo except the vibrance which I increased and I decreased the temperature to 37 due to the fact that I wanted this photo to have a cool feel to it. I also had an uncontrollable beard in the original photo and the spot healing brush took care of that. Taken with a Canon PowerShot A470.

16 and 17. Adrian After Run: This was the first picture I edited in photoshop and I really think it turned out great. I increased the SmartFix to 12 without touching the exposure. I didn't adjust the shadows but I increased the midtones and highlights. I lowered the saturation to negative 50 and sharpened the photo to 125. I wanted the rain to stand out in the photo and I wanted the sweat to pop out on his hair and face. The sharpness really helped me do that. I wanted to lighten the photo but still have deep colors present. Taken with a Canon PowerShot A470.

18. Jacob Driving a Golf Ball: I cropped the photo to get rid of some of the extra forestry. I increased the SmartFix to 37 without touching the exposure. I didn't touch the levels, color, balance but I dramatically increased the sharpness. Taken with an iPhone 4.

19. Adrian and Martin at the Driving Range: I didn't edit this photo at all but I wanted to take it from that angle so that I could get Martin in the background. Taken with a Canon PowerShot A470.

20. and 21. Cleats Lined Up: Soccer players are known for their crazy hair and their wild cleats. I lined up the cleats from the players on the squad preparing for preseason. This was the only picture in the slideshow in which I edited in the 'Guided' tab within Photoshop. I wanted to really feature the details of the photo. I increased the brightness to 84 and increased the contrast to 87. I didn't touch the hue but I increased the saturation to 20. I raised the input level to 8 and didn't touch to output level. I increased the shadows to 18 and the highlights to 11 without touching to midtones. I sharpened the image to 60. Finally I added a black vignette with an intensity of 59 so that viewers would really focus on the cleats. Taken with a Canon PowerShot A470.

22. Sven and Trent Stretching: I didn't edit this photo at all. I thought it would be important to show how we take care of our bodies in the pre preseason. Taken with an iPhone 4.

23. Eli Juggling: I didn't edit this photo at all. Taken with an iPhone 4.

24. and 25. Sven Diving Save: I increased the SmartFix feature to 12 without touching the exposure. I didn't mess with the shadows and increased the midtones, highlights, and vibrance. This was one of the few pictures I adjusted the tint. I sharpened the image to 125 and deleted the cone from the original picture using the spot healing brush. Taken with an iPhone 4.

"Meaning of Composition" Review

Kress and Van Leeuwen's chapter "Meaning of Composition" strived to find what messages images are really trying to portray. The authors said that there are three systems that reveal what messages are trying to be portrayed through images:

1. Information Value - the placement of elements endows them with the specific informational values attached to the various 'zones' of the image: left and right, top and bottom, center and margin.
2. Salience - the elements are made to attract the viewer's attention to different degrees, as realized by such factors as placement in the foreground or background, relative size, contrasts in tonal value, differences in sharpness, etc.
3. Framing - The presence of absence of framing devices disconnects or connects elements of the image, signifying that they belong or do no belong together in some sense.

There are also two integration codes which the authors believe provide logic:

1. Spatial Composition - operates in texts in which all elements are spatially co-present. Paintings, streetscapes, magazine pages.
2. Temporal Composition (Rhythm) - operates in texts which unfold over time. Movies, speech, music, dance.

 Given and New: The Information Value of Left and Right
Some pages are aligned on a horizontal axis. So if something is Given, then the reader already knows what that something is. If something is New then whatever is presented is not yet known by the reader. The authors explain that information of the right side of a page is typically New information and information on the left side of a page is typically Given.

Ideal and Real: The Information Value of Top and Bottom
Some pages are aligned on a vertical axis. If something is Ideal it is at the top of the page and if something is considered as Real then it is typically at the bottom of the page. For something to be ideal means that it is presented as idealized or generalized essence of the information. Real is then opposed to this in that it presents more specific information.

Basically the way in which different cultures read information whether it be right to left, or up and down, they may interpret what is presented differently than other cultures.

The Information Value of Center and Margin
Composition can also be structured along the dimensions of centre and margin. If something is placed in the center then everything on the outside of that is considered a margin. People can refer back to the center after referencing the margins for better understanding. Center and Margin is able to combine with Given/New or Ideal/Real.

Salience
Salience can create a hierarchy of importance among the elements, selecting some as more important, more worthy of attention than others. Anything that can create an auditory contrast between successive sounds can serve to realize salience. Salience promotes visual weight and being able to judge the visual weight of the elements of a composition is being able to judge how they 'balance'.

Framing
Framing is brought about by rhythm. Visual framing is a matter of degree: elements of the composition may be strongly or weakly framed. The stronger the framing of an element, the more it is presented as a separate unit of information. The absence of framing stresses group identity, its presence signifies individuality and differentiation.

Discussion Questions
1. Do we naturally view the informational value of images?
2. Is it harder to determine the meaning of compositions from the past?