Writing for video

It's actually really difficult to switch from writing for print and writing for a visual medium. You have to understand that people will get bored if a script has too much information that isn't interesting to the viewer. I think that many people have a much smaller attention span when they are watching a video compared to reading a print article. Because of this, it is essential to make the audio for videos interesting and brief in order to capture the viewers. I've also noticed that people sometimes just repeat what the interviews already say and that to me just seems pointless. I think that if you are going to do voiceovers at all in a story then it needs to be worthwhile and actually add something to the story! 

-Lauren Stine

Quealy's article

When reading Quealy's article I found myself completely agreeing with many of his opinions. Sometimes when you are constructing a website your brain runs faster and thinks of more graphics than you should really be putting on one page. You can clutter a page with too many graphics or too many interactive objects. In class when Lynda showed us the various newspaper websites the one with the waving american flag sticks out in my mind as a good example of this point. Quealy explains how to cover a topic and compile all of the information onto a webpage without over doing it. This will be useful information for all future convergence projects and really make me think before I create a new graphic or bury something 5 clicks deep into the page.

interactive-ness?

I believe that interactive graphics can add a ton of information to a story, allowing people to understand it that much better. However, more and more people are using interactive graphics for stories that don't necessarily need them, making the stories over-flooded with information that doesn't add anything to the story.

"...data alone does not make a graphic useful." That is something that most people forget when it comes to implementing an interactive graphic to run along with another story. Giving the audience too much information can confuse them when your main goal was to make it easy for them to understand everything.