Multimedia: Working on a New Interface

Been busy lately working with a new interface format. Meaning: lots of sleepless nights.

I’ve been trying to minimize the role of HTML-code and move the emphasis — as much as possible — to flash. And as anyone familiar with flash knows, it is a rather complicated program.

Nothing new in this per se, but with a couple of interesting twists: I’ve been using GUI (graphic user interface) instead of relying entirely on handcoding, incor­po­rating not only stills, slideshows, video and spherical panoramic images, but also interactive sounds depending on the combi­nation of the visual content displayed. In addition, been doing it with images and work of other photo­graphers — also a new development in my workflow.

But more about this later, as there will be a forced delay of about a week in this while I head to Sölden to cover the opening of the new alpine season.

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Yesterday I did something a bit different, although nothing spectacular: we had our annual riding compe­tition in Helsinki, the Helsinki Inter­na­tional Horseshow. I did the usual shooting for the print ‑your basic sports images — but at the same time, I also decided to create a simple multi­media story on course­design for my client Aamulehti.

Shot a 360°x180° in the middle of the arena and set another camera — a remote clamped upstairs, with an inter­va­lo­meter to shoot images every 20 sec while they were building the course — and did a elementary time-lapse with these images. Did a quick inter­view/­voice-over with the German course­de­signer, mixed the audio and finally combined everything in GL CS2. I wanted to do it in flash entirely, but there was one line of code I just could not get to work — and by midnight, after too many cups of coffee, I just had to accept it.

WP has it all wrong in their add: “Code is not poetry” — “code” is a four-letter word…

But: it is not bad, consi­dering it is about 5–6 hour effort of one single person, out of which the compe­tition and prepa­ration of the course (i.e photo­graphy) was something like three hours. I did all the editing, stiching, coding, designing and posting in less than three hours.

Bottomline and point being: this kind of work could easily — and SHOULD — be incor­po­rated into normal, daily proce­dures of news(paper) website operations.

If these papers want to stay in business, that is.

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(UPDATE: Sorry again about the broken link for the horseshow-image. As I said, code is a four-letter word… It is fixed now / KK)