Week 4: April 20 to April 24

This week the ads on which I worked so far got critiqued by those who work on the Global Journalist magazine. I learned a lot from these critiques. Here are some notable criticisms that were particularly helpful.
The curves that I used for the International Press Institute and Reporters Sans Frontieres were not effective. The one in the ad for the International Press Institute was lengthy and the words were hard to read. The one in the ad for the Reporters Sans Frontieres was not in balance.
For the ad of Reporters Sans Frontieres, instead of having smaller text for the English translation of the French name, I should give equality for the two names. The solution is having the logo changing back and forth between French and English, which is what the RSF did themselves, in French, English, and Spanish. Due to the technical restraints of the site, I should not do this animation in Flash but a Gif animation instead.
The length for the ads should be less than 350 px, as the current ad with that length stretches the Web site.
There should be a way for the ads to tell the audience that if they click at the ads, they will be taken to the sites of these organizations.
The color for the ad of the International Federation of Journalists should be changed. The explanation for this organization should be changed also, as their own claim of being the world’s largest journalist organization could not be verified.
In other words, from the critiques I learned that my efforts to be artistic might not always be effective with the audience, if the type was hard to read. Also, the ads should be as intuitive as possible. For my audience, it might be not obvious for them that they could click at the ads to go to other Web sites.
I changed the first two ads for the International Press Institute and the Reporters Sans Frontieres based on the criticisms and to test whether I should follow suit with the other ads (I include the ads at the end of the entry). The reactions from my supervisor Pat Smith and my colleague Brian Schraum are quite positive and I will made further changes based on their suggestions and finish up the changes for other ads.
During this week, I also helped Sarah Khan in her video story of William Lobdell, a journalist who worked with the LA Times and covered religion. Khan managed to get an interview with Lobdell in the last minute and I shot his lecture.
The lecture however was very personal and not ideal for a global audience, as Lobdell discussed how he uncovered children’s sexual abuse in the Catholic church in the US specifically and ended up becoming an atheist. I also made the mistake of shooting the lecture and my tape ran out before it came to the more interesting part, which included the questions and answers between Lobdell and the audience.
So we decided to use Khan’s interview instead, as it had much better quotes about journalism and religion on a broad sense. I helped Khan in editing the story with Final Cut Express. Khan wanted to use all the quotes, but I said that I believed even though her questions were different, there were a couple of similar answers, and only the one which was more informative should be kept. Also sometimes a quote was lengthy but not of much substance
For some reasons, in my first capturing of Khan’s video, somehow the sound and the images did not match. Thanks to this difficulty though I learned from Lilian J. Kelly how to sync the sound and the images. However, it took us a lot of time and labor and both Kelly and I eventually decided that it would be much easier just to recapture it. To save time, I let Khan capture only the quotes she wanted to use for the video and from these clips, we edited further to the best bits of the interview.
In the byline, I let Khan's name stand as the one who compiled and edited the video, while I was the one who assisted her. I believe that she deserved the credit, as my footage was not usable in the video.
Also the fact that we shot and edited the video together successfuly encouraged two other students, despite having no or very little video experience, to approach me for their potential video stories which I considered a notable success.
Here are the evidences of my work in this week.




RESEARCH
My committee chair agreed with me that 15 Web sites for the survey are too many considering the number of answers the audience are going to have to answer and I decided to reduce the number of Web sites to 6. I finished working on 6 lay outs for 3 Web sites, each Web site with the ads on two positions: on the top and in the middle of the page, as these are the most desirable spots for advertising.