Deconstructing an audio slideshow

Our own Apex Cougars girl's soccer team won the state title recently, and the crack Cary News multimedia team (me...with [more than] a little help from my friends) was there to record it for posterity. [Click here to see the audio slideshow]

Sports editor Tim Candon and I decided that this was a perfect opportunity to make an audio slideshow that would generate some buzz on the Cary News website. (Actually, Tim thought it was a good idea. I just nodded and went back to the scramble on the comics page.) So, once that was decided, I had to come up with a game plan.

"A game plan?" I can hear your gasp of disbelief from here.

Yes, a game plan. It's an 80-minute game (high school rules), there are lots of players, coaches and parents, and I didn't want to find myself buried in pointless images or a mountain of meaningless sound clips when I got back to the office. So I started brainstorming exactly what I would need to make a comprehensive presentation.

(I hear the Rocky Mountain News takes six months, a staff of 12 and a golden-egg laying goose to put something like this together. [Not that I'm bitter. Or jealous. Heavens, no.] Me, I have...well, me, and a sports editor sent from heaven who's more than willing to dive in and help.)

I broke the problem into two areas: sound and images.

Sound would drive the slideshow, as it usually does for me. (Good, relevant audio is an absolute necessity for any multimedia production. People will forgive bad pictures, and jumpy video, but bad audio will send them clicking right off of the page.) Having covered more state championships than I like to think about, I knew that the PA announcer would give me the intro and explanatory clipss that I needed: "Welcome to the NCHSAA 4A state soccer finals, featuring the Apex Cougars and blah, blah, blah." I needed early sound of cheering fans. I needed to be in the team huddle before the start of the game. I would need the PA again for any Apex goals, and I would need the final score and announcement of Apex as the state champions. I'd like to have the ten-second countdown to end the game. I'd want crowd reaction from any Apex goals. I'd want team react as time expired. And I'd want post-game quotes from the MVP and seniors.

Images were easy to come up with. Fans. Team huddles. Sidelines. Game action. Goal reactions. More sidelines. More fans. Postgame reaction.

The only problem was that I had to do both, which meant I was (at least) two hands short.

Enter sports editor, stage left.

While I gathered most of the pregame audio, Tim took over the recorder for the pregame huddle, and stood guard on the sidelines for fan reaction and all of the other post-game necessities, freeing me up to shoot the pictures we would use in the paper, an online gallery and the slideshow itself.

Was it a perfect setup? No, and that's mostly my fault. I gave Tim the recorder tutorial as we were standing on the field. It honestly didn't occur to me to have him help me out until that very moment. (No, I'm not the brightest bulb.) He gathered a lot of repetitive stuff, and stuff that wasn't necessarily relevant to the slideshow, that took some extra time to edit through. And he was juggling a notebook and recorder during several of the postgame interviews, which was a challenge for him and made for some interesting extraneous sounds for me to edit around.

But by gosh and by golly, we DID IT. And we did it as a team.

It probably won't win any awards, but it tells the story, tells it creatively and well, and (judging by the feedback) the community likes it.

We helped ourselves out by shamelessly promoting the slideshow in print, and in several places on the website-but let's face it, what's the point of putting in that much effort if you're not going to give people every opportunity to find the darn thing?

What did I learn from this? As an avowed "lone wolf" who is very much used to doing this sort of thing on my own, it was a pleasant eye-opener to see how much more and how much better of a job I can do with help. And I learned that I might want to do the training a little bit earlier in the process. But mostly, I reinforced the idea that prior planning really does make a huge difference on the back end.

Could I have done it by myself? Yes...but it wouldn't have been as good, because I would have been forced to pick one or the other medium at any given moment, and I would have missed things.

So, what have we learned today?

• Plan ahead. Know what you need to have for both audio and images. (Especially key if you're working alone)

• Work tight. The less extra stuff you have to edit through, the faster you can get the finished product online. (Especially key if you're working on a "due 5 minutes ago" deadline)

• If you can spread the workload out, do it. But don't wait until the last minute to make that decision.

• In the long run, we do this for the community. Not for ourselves -- although that's certainly a part -- and not for our peers, FOR THE COMMUNITY. That's our job, in whatever medium we choose to work in. The final product may not be (and probably won't be) perfect, but as long as it tells the story, and tells it well and with respect, it will be more than good enough.