Media arts internship January 23, 2015

Tonight I put the review from last years top 30 prospect special together:

I had to edit some audio at the end of commentary and take a few out to make it fit into the four minutes of music I had. I got the music from a guy I used to work with at the church my wife attended. It’s music we used to use for the podcast open, but have since moved on. It’s got an uptempo rock feel so I like using it for these reviews. One of the things I try to bring to my podcasts is energy. Often times that means I’ll drink an energy drink before I go live so that I have that little extra enthusiasm. I also finished the post for the Saturday podcast and rewrote the section about contacting me for feedback.

We're doing our live show at 4 p.m. CT on the Crawfish Boxes if you're interested in tuning in.

Media arts internship January 23, 2015

I finished grabbing soundbites for the review of our 2013 special. I then started putting together the post that will hold the embedded audio player, describe the podcast and allow for listeners to interact with each other while they listen to the show. Part of the post requires a graphic. Instead of using a generic picture or one of the sports images we have access to we usually create our own graphics. More specifically our graphics artist Ryan typically does the graphics, but not this year. With me being on an media arts internship and genuinely wanting to improve my graphic artist abilities I decided to put the podcast logo together myself. This is what came out:

The background image is a picture I shot while I was in Nashville watching one of the Astros minor league affiliates play ball. As part of my post editing I decided to see what it would look like with a filter. I can’t remember exactly which one I went with now, but I thought it gave the picture an old-time look. Like a painting you would see of people playing baseball in the early 1900s. I overlayed a black background over the picture then lowered the opacity so it could be seen through. I then added the sites logo and words. The words and overall size of the image were the areas I spent the most time figuring out. The original font looked to pixelated so I played with several different fonts before settling on Source Sans pro. I thought I pulled the right canvas size for the editor we use, but it was coming up short on the sides, so I had to adjust the canvas size a bit until I got it to fit correctly in our editor on SB Nation.

I always feel like my graphics are missing something or are too simple. This piece is no exception, but I really don’t know what else to add. I had a black bar behind the words and logo, but got feedback from Ryan that he thought it looked better with a drop shadow. Here’s what the other version I was thinking looks like.

I still don’t know which one I will use. That decision will have to wait until tomorrow.

Media arts internship January 21, 2015

I spent an hour tonight listening to the second hour of our Top 30 podcast special from last year and pulled a few more soundbites to use in the review audio. While I was listening to that I created some GIFs that a writer on staff intends to use for some analysis. Then I began some preliminary work on my Top 30 prospect infographic that will be released the Friday after we record our prospect special. After starting that I realized I probably need to get the post together and scheduled for Saturday’s event.

To avoid making this post completely devoid of anything interesting, here is recently signed Astros reliever Pat Neshek getting Yasiel Puig to pop out to second base.

Media arts internship January 20, 2015

Tonight I spent time preparing for our Top 30 podcast special. While listening to last years show I refined our show notes, created and scheduled promotional graphics (really liking the the meme tool at our disposal) for the podcast, and grabbed last years rankings and added them to this years rankings for our reference. We rank over a 100 prospects so I had to put in last years rankings along with this years rankings so that we could compare last years rankings to this years rankings and use that as a talking point during our show.

I am listening to last year’s recording of the show to grab audio for a replay and highlight of last years show and what we were saying about prospects. Once I have all the audio clips I want to use I’ll put music with them.

Here is one of the graphics I created for promotion the rest of this week:

Media arts internship January 16 - 19, 2015

Graphic creation and scheduling

I finished creating and scheduling our countdown graphics for our social media accounts. On the 17th and 19th I worked on our Top 30 prospect podcast special, which is a three hour episode special where we reveal our top 30 prospects as ranked by the TCB writing staff. We’ve doing this special since 2010 and was actually the genesis of the audio content produced on the site. I, believe or not, was not the one that produced our first audio. David Coleman, the managing editor of the site was. I was simply along for the ride and hoped we would do more. David was not able to get anything going with a regular podcast, because he was busy running the rest of the site.

Six months later, while mowing the lawn, I decided I would run the podcast myself. There was no reason not to and thus began our foray into the world of podcast content for the site. A lot of this week will be spent preparing for the podcast special which we will be broadcasting live January 24, 2015. I’ll get into the finer details as I work on this week, but I was working out a time frame to record the show Saturday with my co-hosts for the show. We’ll start around 5 p.m. ET and expect to wrap up around 9 p.m. ET. I also started putting the show notes for the co-hosts and I, which is essentially a map of the show and the order of the prospects we’ll be revealing from 30 to one.

Sunday, January 19, 2015, the Astros made a trade with the Chicago Cubs, acquiring two players for one of theirs. I produced three graphics for articles with quotes from the players and general manager for use on our social media accounts, pictured below.