Media arts internship February 22, 2015

Created the podcast live recording post and spent time preparing for the live podcast recording. As part of my preparation I decided to add a new segment to the show. My original idea for the podcast, many, many episodes ago was for the podcast format to be Astros fans hanging around having a couple beers. It’s become a bit more structured than that and I’ve had a hard time accepting that fact. I think I may have finally given into the structured format, because I decided to add a talking sabermetrics type of segment where we talk about a sabermetric or analytical topic, concept, or term and explain it in layman terms.

The recording itself went well, which is not something I typically thing, but I think because Spring Training has officially started and we have baseball topics to discuss and that’s bring some extra energy to the show. I really liked it.

I also created two more posts aggregating tweets that included media type of content.

Astros Spring Training workouts part 1

Astros Spring Training workouts part 2

Finally, I decided to get a head start on updating the March Madness bracket and I’ve decided to add vote totals to each matchup.

Media arts internship February 20-21, 2015

February 20, 2015

Pitchers and catchers have reported to Spring Training, which means the amount of articles published by Astros beat writers will go up significantly, so I’ll need to set aside more time to go through those articles for podcast content. I had other obligations tonight, but I found an hour to read some articles and refine the podcast notes for the upcoming episode on Sunday.

February 21, 2015

The first day of Astros workouts happened and Astros reporters were there to capture it all on social media. I thought it would be a good idea to collect all the tweets with images, video, and other media into a couple of posts for the day. Here are the links for those posts:

Part 1 Astros pitchers and catchers workout

Part 2 Astros pitchers and catchers workout

As you can see I did one in the morning and one in the evening.

A few readers of our site pointed out that I had missed a few names on the sites Spring Training roster infographic. I resolved that by adding the names, however I ran into another issue. The new names made the graphic look cluttered and squished together. To address this I had to redo the background. I counted out the names so that I knew how many columns to add, then took another screenshot of a spreadsheet to use as the background. Once that was in place i had to shrink all the names and titles so they fit into the now smaller cells. After that, I had to realign everything, which is what took the most time. Once the graphic was squared away I had to re-upload and re-post.

 

Media arts internship February 19, 2015

I performed the a live tweet session of Mike Scott’s no-hitter that clinched the Astros the division in 1986 on Twitter. I have the game on DVD, so I logged onto Twitter and gave a play-by-play of the game via Twitter. I included screenshots and GIFs of the game. This is something we did last year that a lot of people seemed to enjoy and that continued this year. I had several people tweet at me indicating that they enjoyed the tweets I produced during the game. I discovered that lowering the pixels of the GIF allowed me to get it posted on Twitter instead of just a link. Here are some examples of the GIFs and screenshots I included in the session:

Media arts internship February 18, 2015

Ryan our graphics designed decided to go ahead and make a graphic for the March Madness logo. I decided that we needed to keep some consistency with the logo so I took out the words and site logo on the one I created and added the word part of his graphic to my background. He really does an excellent job so it only improves upon my graphic, which is fine with me. He also made a generic logo for Spring Training. I took that logo and added it to the bottom left corner of my Spring Training Roster infographic. Here’s what we’ve got for logos now:

I was also asked to make some GIFs for a future article. This is what I made:

Colby Rasmus home run vs. Edison Volquez

Colby Rasmus home run vs. Ubaldo Jimenez

Colby Rasmus home run vs. Ubaldo Jimenez take 2

Colby Rasmus home run vs Gerritt Cole

I’m really starting to like the jump cuts to different angles. I used to do just a single swing, but I think these are better for analysis and make the GIFs more interesting to watch.

Media arts internship February 16, 2015

I edited the podcast we recorded last night and created the post for the episode, which is scheduled for its typical Tuesday morning release. I also started prep for next week’s episode. Today Baseball Prospectus came out with its organizational rankings and the Astros were farther down on the list than most of us expected, which makes for some potentially good content on the next recording. I also had to schedule another co-host because one of mine wasn’t sure if he would be able to make it next Sunday.

I then created and scheduled the post for Friday for our Spring Training infographic. Then I began work on refreshing a graphic for our minor league content. Here’s what we had as just a general graphic for use:

I created this graphic a few years ago so it’s due for a remake. I’d like to keep the bus, but I might have to ditch it entirely. I really like what I’m doing with backgrounds of the images I’m creating, but I think the letters and the display of those letters needs to be better. I’m going to see if I can improve that for my next graphic. The infographics seem to be coming together nicely so far; the graphics on the other hand are a bit frustrating to work with.