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 12, 2015

I’m finally home, so I was able to finish the flowchart infographic by adding a couple graphics. I uploaded the new version and added it to the post I had created last week. The post is scheduled for Friday morning.

I’m including the journal log for another hour I did on February 9th, because I did another hour of my internship after I had already logged the hours and written the journal entry. I had planned to include it in the next day’s work, but I got caught up in some other things that kept me from doing any internship hours. Anyways, late in the evening February 9, I decided to gather some ideas for a fun project I wanted to do later in the Spring or even early in the season. The Astros ballpark has a couple goofy elements to it that they’re thinking of changing in the future. One of them being Tal’s hill which is a small hill in centerfield in play. I had the idea of making some changes to the hill in Photoshop and wanted to get some interaction going on the sites Twitter account, so I asked our followers, “what changes they would make to Tal’s Hill.” I’ll take those ideas and do some Photoshop work to Tal’s hill. Except that our graphics designer Ryan saw what I asked on Twitter and started to Photoshop some of those ideas. Here is what he did.

Some good stuff there. I’ll be adding my own additions to it and creating a post for the site.

The last part of February 12 I spent creating the main logo for our Astros Fan Favorite March Madness Tournament event. Here’s what that looks like.

Kind of plain, but I’m hoping to improve upon it the next few days.

Media arts internship January 30, 2015

I started preparing for my next two infographics by gathering some data. My next one will be an infographic that highlights all the transactions the Astros have made this past season. The other will be an infographic that covers the Astros Spring Training roster. Currently about 57 player have been invited to Spring Training. As players are moved down to the minors or released I will update the infographic with that information.

The other thing I did was fix my scheduling goof. In scheduling the dailys countdown memes I noticed I had skipped a day and so the last 10 days were off by one day. I had to delete those 10 and start rescheduling with the correct pictures on the correct day.

Media arts internship January 27, 2015

Tonight I edited and uploaded the third and final hour of audio for our TCB Top 30 Astros Prospect special. I also updated the RSS feed with the information for the second hour, which will release Wednesday. I then started the graphics work on my infographic for our Top 30. This is what I have so far:

I am using a gradient for the background. It starts orange at the top and shifts to blue at the bottom. I added a texture to the background at the suggestion of the graphics artist on staff Ryan Dunsmore. I used a picture of some ground at the Astros Spring Training that my daughter took while we were there last year. I had to duplicate it to get it the full length of the infographic and then drop the opacity. Now that I have the design I just need to fill in the other 24 names, which I plan to work on Wednesday.

Media arts internship January 26, 2015

I edited the second hour of the podcast special recorded Saturday. I also put together posts for the Tuesday and Wednesday release of the first and second hour of the special. I also put together the live post for the podcast recording tonight and updated the podcast show notes. I also found some time to finish grabbing the information I needed for the Top 30 infographic I plan to start work on soon.

An hour prior to the live podcast recording I started setting up my equipment and reading up on a few of the transactions we planned to cover in our show. We recorded our show and then I wrapped up a few things for the Tuesday release of the first hour of our Top 30 podcast special. The XML file for our RSS feed needed to be edited and upload it to the FTP server so the podcast directories could pull the new release information. I also uploaded the first and second hour of the special. The site I use for hosting had been down for a good part of the day, which is why I was uploading the content so late. Usually, that’s something I do when I finish editing.

I'm going to be honest here: I am pretty worn out from the weekend.