Magzalez’s eyes on media

One of my new favorite blogs is The Miami Herald’s Crime Scene. I can never get enough of this crazy crimes stuff. Some of the highlights of the last week or so:

• Peekaboo, I see you: “A homeless woman lived undetected in a Tokyo man’s closet for a year before he discovered her yesterday.”
• Antarctic Sexual Mismatch: “…researchers snapped shots of a 45-minute encounter in which a 240-pound fur seal sexually assaulted a helpless, 30-pound penguin…”
• Granny: Thug video is fine with me: “The grandmother of an 18-year-old Lake Worth man told investigators she consented to him filming her while holding a weapon, cursing and saying things like, ‘This is for all the pigs.’ “

This is a pretty crazy blog. They put some pretty racy things on their blogs at The Miami Herald, but I like it. This one in particular is funny, witty, well written and constantly updated. Check it out when you get a chance

A couple of my co-workers at The Alligator took on the next installment of Gainesville Explorer. They went to the McIntyre Stained Glass Studio. Lots of good video was shot, and lots was left unused unfortunately. The main problem seemed to be the potential for two story lines, but neither had a clear beginning or end.

The video and audio was shot and captured by Chris Hayes and Ken Schwencke. I just helped Ken edit it after. It was a long and tedious process–editing with another person–but I think I did a good job of showing him some of the ropes of Final Cut Pro as well as my work flow, which I consider to be a good one.

A couple good photos came from this as well. You can see one on the front of the Alligator Web site. I think a photo gallery will be going up too.

Here is a video I did this weekend for The Alligator. I’m kind of upset that I haven’t been proactive enough to get more of these done so far, but I have a LOT on my plate for this first half of the summer–lots of work, lots of school and lots of Alligator.

This video was about a memorial the Gainesville, Fla., chapter of the Veterans for Peace and some volunteers put together for memorial day. The memorial consisted of rows of four cardboard graves. Each row was 48 inches apart. All together, the memorial came out to be a mile long–more than 4,000 dead.

The video came out alright. My thinking behind the way I edited it was that I started off with a shot of me and my cousin driving down this mile-long memorial to all the soldiers that have been killed during the war on “terror.”

It took a little more than a minute to drive down and see the entire memorial, so I edited the video around that. I made that shot my base track, so that it pops back up from time to time. The idea was for the viewer to see how long the memorial was by realizing that all those interviews were seen in the span of time it took me to ride along the entire memorial. It was a fun idea, I thought. Let me know if it translated well.

There was a print story that went along with my video that my classmate, Chris Hayes, wrote. He’s also going to be working in the online department at the Alligator this summer.

I edited a podcast — or a bit of audio for the Web which has absorbed the name of “podcast” — for alligatorsports.org last night. It is the sportscast for May 22. The topic isn’t exactly the most interesting, but it has a niche — UF softball.

Alligator Softball Podcast

The guys who put together the audio, Mike DiFerdinando and Kyle Maistri, did a pretty good job considering they’ve never done something like this before. I just edited the audio so they sounded like they knew what they were talking about even more than they already did.

I talked to the guys after I finished editing and encouraged them to try and do this sort of thing more often. Hopefully, next week I’ll get a chance to talk to them about how to make it better. I’d like for it to change from a regurgitation of information to more of a leisure conversation — more like a five-minute segment of a sports talk show let’s say.

I’ve been inundated with work lately, not to mention I’ve been having some problems with the site. Everything is resolved now though.

What I have been up to:

• CookingMatt.com: I have been working on this cooking blog for the last few days. While I have been wanting to do something like this for a while, it was my CMS, Data and APIs class I am taking this summer that has given me the initiative. I am trying out a new CMS, Textpattern, which UF’s College of Journalism and Communications has been using for some time. Right now the site is just a home page with no real navigation. Some people don’t like showing the building process for these sorts of things, but I don’t mind, especially considering that this is just a learning process–academic and life-style.
• Working at Web Admin: Same ol’, same ol’ around here. I’m working here about 20 hours a week for the first half of the summer. Starting in the second half I will be transitioning to full-time. That process should be complete by the time I graduate in August. I’ve been fixing up the university’s Office of Information Technology Web site. That has been interesting but tedious. I’m just making it semantic and what not, removing the presentational code, tweaking XHTML and CSS and making it comply, for the most part, with Web standards. I’ve also written a couple of articles on writing for the Web and a new phone book application put out by my office for the university. I’ll link those once they’ve gone up. They’re a cross between a press release and a regular article.
• Biting my nails as budget cuts slowly ruin my precious university.
• Online media at The Alligator: Not much going on here yet, putting in about 10 hours a week. I’m just having late nights putting content on the site, brainstorming and just hanging around the newsroom. We haven’t gotten to any real multimedia yet this summer, but it’s coming! We’ve got a project on our hands that we hope to get out by mid June–lots of video and lots of getting to know the community. It should be fun. An explanation will be its own post later.

Suggestions for CookingMatt?