VisVox round up – The benefit of wisdom? What we’ve learnt so far…

In this our final podcast, the team discuss our experiences writing this blog and investigating the world of audio slideshows, podcasts and online audio. And for the first time, the podcast has taken on the form of an audio slideshow!

Rob Carragher, Ellen Arnold, Harriet Bradshaw, Vanessa Baffoe and Phil Allen give an insight into how we’ve learnt to love the audio slideshow, the value of writing to picture (or marrying audio and visuals together), what platforms they work on,  how photographers are finding new ways of communicating their work…and most of all, how they can be used totell stories in compelling and innovative ways.

And to give our readers a special treat Phil Allen has ditched his technophobia and dived into the production of slideshows. See us talking about slideshows, whilst deciding if Phil is any good at making them. Here’s what he had to say about putting it together:

“I quickly realised several useful lessons, many of which have already been raised by other Visvoxers. The main thing is that high quality pictures are key.

Also, the best slideshows I’ve seen are about 2-4minutes long. If your slideshow is going to be 8 minutes , you need lots and lots of nice images – this slideshow tests the visual appeal of the shots to breaking point and our radio studio is not a very interesting environment (though everyones looks fabulous, obviously!) And to get lots of qualityimages in a montage style, you need to use the fast-shooting mode on the camera, or use a fast shutter speed. If not, the shots can blur easily if someone moves their head or gesticulates.

It would have been good to get a proper portrait-style shot of each of the group before. Also, if I’d collected lots of images of us working on the blog over the course of our academic year, we could have escaped the confines of the radio studio, and worked nicely with the moments we were talking about our changing attitudes to audio-slideshows.

The sound of a camera shutter going off throughout the slideshow gets a bit tedious.

Windows Movie Maker is pretty user friendly and easy to get to grips with, but no doubt other programme offer the same or more options.

Cheers to Rob  for letting me upload it to YouTube with his account. All in all, it was really enjoyable putting it together, and I’m keen to make more of them!

Take a look and let us know your thoughts

If you enjoyed this audio slideshow, see more on our VisVox round up page