Graphic creation and stuff

Tonight I continued my work on the countdown graphics, but also worked on some other graphics due to a trade the Houston Astros made today. The Astros acquired two players from the Atlanta Braves for three prospects. Once the trade was made I created some complementary graphics for our Facebook and Twitter pages. SB Nation would like to get more activity out of Facebook and a good way to do that is to post media content on the site. I made a couple memes that either commented on the trade

Post by The Crawfish Boxes.

Or quoted some comments from the Astros general manager on the trade

Post by The Crawfish Boxes.

We’ve gotten good responses to both posts so far. I was also able to find, via Twitter, a YouTube video of one of the Astros new players and posted it on the site.

www.crawfishboxes.com/2015/1/14/7550465/evan-gattis-has-his-own-song-what

I also coordinated a few things for our podcast. During the offseason we typically have a podcast every other week, during the season is weekly, but we’re going to make an exception this week because of the trade and because the week after is our Top 30 prospect special, which I also started coordinating what time people can be available. Back to this Sunday’s recording, I had to coordinate with my co-hosts to see if at least one of them is available for our usual Sunday recording.

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.