Media arts internship March 7 - 8, 2015

March 7

I created and scheduled the post for this weeks podcast recording and refined the show notes. I got permission from one band to use their music for the shows intro and outro. I planning on instituting the new music once the regular season starts.

I also started work on putting together a GIF of Dallas Keuchel frame by frame. I’m about 29 frames through and I’m still not sure if this GIF will work or not. I may be short some frames but I’ll make it work.

March 8

I finished putting together the Dallas Keuchel GIF and will release a post on it later this week. I also updated the bracket for our March Madness tournament which completed it’s first round on Sunday. 

Sunday night I prepared and recorded our podcast for the week.

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:

Have yourself a year Kevin Bass #Astros1986 pic.twitter.com/Sb1Cr8vp3Z

— The Crawfish Boxes (@CrawfishBoxes) February 20, 2015

Here's Walling's home run to give the #Astros a 1-0 lead over the #Giants #Astros1986 pic.twitter.com/I0H2OmqM71

— The Crawfish Boxes (@CrawfishBoxes) February 20, 2015

Now can we talk about it? #Astros1986 pic.twitter.com/Zaajq3jF6G

— The Crawfish Boxes (@CrawfishBoxes) February 20, 2015

Here's the last out of the game #Astros1986 pic.twitter.com/GWdG1pxMNB

— The Crawfish Boxes (@CrawfishBoxes) February 20, 2015

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 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 13, 2015

GIF creation

Today I spent two hours creating nine GIFs for two writers who intend to use the GIFs for analysis in a couple of future posts. The process I use to make GIFs is to record the video, trim the video, import it into photoshop, edit, crop and watermark the GIFs. Then I upload it to the site. I use a program called Fraps (http://www.fraps.com/) to record video from MLB.TV which has archived games from last season and beyond. I use Windows Movie Maker to trim the video. It’s simple, quick, and easy to use. Plus I’m only trimming the video. There have been a couple times that I’ve used Adobe Premiere to edit some video, but that’s for special cases where I’m trying to do a little more with the GIF that I can’t do in Photoshop. Once the video is trimmed I import it into Photoshop where I delete unnecessary frames, crop and add a watermark to the GIF. If I can fit two different shots into one GIF I will do that from time to time, like one of the GIFs I created tonight.

The GIF is then exported and uploaded to our site and placed in the editor at the writers discretion.

Graphic creation

One of the promotional things we’re doing leading up to the start of Spring Training is creating an SB Nation meme counting down the days. We grab pictures from the photo database upload them to the tool and then fill out the text. Here is what’s scheduled for tomorrow.

As you can see we’re on day 37, so there are a lot more memes that need to be created and promoted on Facebook and Twitter. I will be doing this over the next few days and scheduling out the posts on our social media platforms.