I worked on this project while at Ohio University, where I was doing coursework for my Master’s Degree in Visual Communication (VisCom). My track was Photo & Graphics Management, but it was changed a year later to Multimedia Management. I took courses in everything from Print Design to Video Editing. I even took some Telecommunications classes in Video Documentary Production because I was just interested in learning as many new skills as possible. I am a fast learner so I picked up many skills in every aspect of new media production, which works well with my many years of print production skills.
This Website is an annual spring-quarter project (that started in 2007) and to participate in managing or designing for the project, you must take a special course. I was part of the Content Management class, where we served as Editors of the site. We discussed content possibilities for the site and selected projects to feature from submissions from students in VisCom. Each editor pitched stories to the group and continued to discuss what fit into the project’s mission and worked with students to make the stories a better fit for the site or just better in general. The projects were all visual and could either be slideshows, videos or both.
Some editors produced work specifically for the site which fell under the same guidelines and parameters as work done by other students. I managed and edited two projects, Fighting Challenges, which was an audio slideshow project, and Milkmen, a Master’s Project, both of which I re-edited in Final Cut to meet our length requirements.
Because of my unique newsroom and technical experience, I also served the site in other ways. The project was fairly new, so I served as Technical Editor. No one from the previous project left us any guidelines or documentation on how to physically produce projects, so I had to research how to do them, write up step-by-step instructions and documentation for everyone and also set the standards and sizes after consultation with professors, designers and other people I knew in the industry. I also created the Live Type credit templates for everyone to use and it turned out, they all asked me to go ahead and do all of the credits for every project so they would be consistent.
I also ended up troubleshooting several projects in which the editors or producers didn’t follow directions and shot footage at the wrong size. I also took the lead in a crisis over whether to ditch the Character section of the site, which no one had planned for when it didn’t fit in with the rest of the projects, so I sketched up a way to design it and incorporate into the site with Flash. I instructed the web designer on how to create it and I designed the icons in PhotoShop. And when it was discovered that no one had edited any of the cutlines for the Dawn2Dusk section of the site, they asked me to jump in and edit every caption on deadline.
