Milkmen, OU Soul of Athens 2008 Project from Maria Averion on Vimeo.

Content Producer

Software: Drupal, Adobe PhotoShop, Final Cut Pro, LiveType, ProTools
Description: I worked on this video project for The Soul of Athens, a multimedia project for Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication. The Spring 2008 project was titled, The Pursuit of Wellness in Athens County, which explored both the positive and negative aspects of the subject. I was part of a class where we were Content Producers, which essentially meant we were the team that managed and coordinated all the content for the site, most of which were video projects. We didn’t have much control over the design and mechanics of the site, which fell into the domain of another class at OU. But when it came to the content, we controlled most of it and worked with the technical team to make it work.

On our team, I also served as kind of a technical troubleshooter as well, because so many people were unsure of the technical aspects of the projects. We used LiveType templates for all of our Lower Thirds and Titles and Credits, which we tried to make uniform, so there was consistency, but that didn’t always happen. I spent so much time setting up workflow and fixing other people’s problems that I only had time to coordinate really one major story and this was it. It is the Master’s Project of my good friend Jerome Nakagawa. It is kind of a teaser for his project, which is much more in-depth than this. On this site, we were kind of limited to about 2-3 minutes per project, however, mine was slightly longer, which I didn’t think was too bad because the images were so strong.

One of the changes we tried this year as opposed to last year was that we worked with content from students that was previously gathered for their classes over the course of the school year. Last year, they planned the stories and coverage from scratch, so the Content Producers were part of the story a little bit more than we were in some cases. This caused a lot of conflict in ‘ownership’ of a project. A lot of students didn’t understand that we wanted what we did with their work to be in a different format from what they had done for class. We wanted stories to be more narrative as well as they had to meet a certain standard of the project. So often, stories went in another direction from what the student wanted.

Our jobs as Content Producers were to make sure everything conformed to specs and to excellence levels and that story direction worked well for the subject of the website. I learned so much during this quarter. I fixed so many problems that people ran into technically that I became the resident LiveType and Final Cut Pro expert, which was good for me because it was a goal of mine to learn more about FCP. I learned correct workflow and what all the settings and specs meant. Overall, it was a good but tiring quarter.

Year: 2008