Anyways, of all the fun classes I had this semester, this was by far my most favorite. I’ve always had a love for graphic design and I just recently got to put it into real use with my job at IMG. I’ve been working with design and creation media for a while but have always been looking for way to improve, this course helped with that immensely.

I have always worked primarily in graphics, making posters, video board slides, etc. That being said, I have always wanted to learn audio and video editing. Those two components of the class are why I signed up, and I would have to say the audio and video projects were by far my favorite. I had an incredible amount of fun learning Audition and Premiere and when I saw my perfect grade on my audio story final it just made it all that much more awesome. My video story turned out amazing, at least I think it did. It was exactly what I was hoping to learn how to do.

The two most useful skills I learned in this course, and that I’m most likely to use down the road in my career, would probably have to be video editing and vector image creation on Illustrator. I’ve been around the graphic design community for a while and I’ve found that knowing how to use Illustrator is highly useful; I hope to expand my knowledge now that this class is over now that I know the basics of the program.

I see my career path definitely being in the sport management industry, an area where lots of graphic design work is utilized. I do not see my ultimate career path being in graphic design but I do know that having graphic design knowledge is always helpful when applying to jobs, it’s a skill many employers value highly.

The only thing missing from this class that I had hoped would be covered, and maybe could be covered in future versions of this class, would be basic website design and/or Flash. I feel like those two aspects of design are hugely important to have knowledge, seeing the rapid expansion of technology use across all industries.

Overall, I think this course was incredibly well organized and put-together. I had fun learning all the programs and teaching myself new skills. If I had one suggestion it would be to have more tutorials available that go beyond what is graded. Tutorials that students can do if they are looking for more knowledge in each individual section. I know there were extra tutorials in the Illustrator section, but having those available in each section would be really nice.

Have a great summer, everyone!

A few tweaks later, I have my final video project done! I’m really excited about the product I ended up with. I definitely think I got across the feel I was aiming for and told the story well at the same time. It was surprising how much I enjoyed video editing, I hope to do a lot more of it in the future.

I felt the best way to get the story across more clearly (some peers suggested maybe the story wasn’t clear enough for non-baseball viewers) was to add some scrolling captions to the game footage, describing what the viewer was seeing and why it was important. I had to fiddle around with the speed a little bit, but eventually get them all where I wanted them.

It was minor, and probably only bothered me, but I got all of the PIP boxes in generally the same location, relative to the corners.

There was an odd skip in audio in my draft video and I was able to fix the mistake, somehow I had clipped the audio out, so it was a fairly easy fix.

My favorite addition from the draft to the final was the addition of the opening and ending descriptors. The scrolling text was easy to do, but the picture in the background was my favorite part. I already had the cutout images of each individual player on my computer from a previous project, so it was just a matter of importing them and adding some effects.

I really appreciate all the input on my draft video, it really helped me improve my project. Also, to all my friends who did me a huge favor by watching the video and giving me input, I really appreciate your help as well.

I think this is my best work from the whole semester, it was a great way to end a really fun class. Hope you all enjoy the video!

Video Storyboard

Opening descriptive text, player backdrop with fight song playing

Opening text slide:

• WSU Baseball (13-12) v. Seattle University (14-10)
• WSU fight song playing

Game 1 transition with players postgame:

• WSU 2 – Seattle 1

Interview with Ian Sagdal:

• Question about game winning sac fly
• Interview goes to PIP, video of sac fly becomes dominant video

Interview with J.D. Leckenby:

• Question about start
• Interview goes to PIP, video highlights of Leckenby becomes dominant video

Interview with Coach Marbut:

• Question about Monda catch
• Interview goes to PIP, video of Monda catch becomes dominant video

Game 2 transition with players pregame:

• WSU 19 – Seattle 1

Interview with Derek Jones:

• Question about tying record for career HR at WSU
• Interview goes to PIP, video of 40th career HR becomes dominant video
• Transition to Coach Marbut talking about Jones’ achievement

Interview with Joe Pistorese:

• Question about how his start went
• Interview goes to PIP, video of pitching highlights becomes dominant video

Game 3 transition with players postgame:

• WSU 4 – Seattle 5

Interview with Coach Marbut

Interview with Taylor Ard

• During short answer, video of Ard HR becomes dominant and interview goes to PIP.

Closing descriptive text, again with player backdrop and fight song playing

Credits

Of all the projects I have worked on, this is by far the one I had the most fun with and am most excited about. It’s not yet complete but I’m still incredibly excited about how it looks.

I couldn’t have gotten this far without help though, so I have to thank Craig Lawson from WSU Media Communications for being so great with post game interview accommodations and the WSU Athletic Department’s video department for providing me with game footage.

Originally I planned on simply throwing together interview footage and narrating the weekend series against Seattle University for the video story, but then I realized that would be pretty boring and went searching for game footage. After I got the footage my plan was to simply show the footage of highlights while the interview audio continued over it but soon realized how much better it would be to continue the interview video as a picture-in-picture (PIP) over the highlights.

There are still a few things missing, such as narration of the series so everything is pieced together and the story makes sense. I’m still in the process of writing the script so that should be included in the final draft.

I shot all the interview footage with my digital camera, which records in 720p HD so the quality was fairly nice, which adds a lot to the video. It worked out nicely that the game highlights were also shot in 720p HD so the quality is equal throughout the video.

In a few of the night interviews the stadium lights were shining directly into my camera and caused some weird streaking down the video. Obviously I’d like for that to not be there but I don’t think there’s much I can do about it.

All in all I’m really excited about where my video story is at. I’ve included my storyboard at the bottom of this post. Hope you enjoy the video!

Video Storyboard

Opening text slide: (Still needs to be added)

• WSU Baseball (13-12) v. Seattle University (14-10)
• WSU fight song playing

Game 1 transition with players postgame:

• WSU 2 – Seattle 1

Interview with Ian Sagdal:

• Question about game winning sac fly
• Interview goes to PIP, video of sac fly becomes dominant video

Interview with J.D. Leckenby:

• Question about start
• Interview goes to PIP, video highlights of Leckenby becomes dominant video

Interview with Coach Marbut:

• Question about Monda catch
• Interview goes to PIP, video of Monda catch becomes dominant video

Game 2 transition with players pregame:

• WSU 19 – Seattle 1

Interview with Derek Jones:

• Question about tying record for career HR at WSU
• Interview goes to PIP, video of 40th career HR becomes dominant video
• Transition to Coach Marbut talking about Jones’ achievement

Interview with Joe Pistorese:

• Question about how his start went
• Interview goes to PIP, video of pitching highlights becomes dominant video

Game 3 transition with players postgame:

• WSU 4 – Seattle 5

Interview with Coach Marbut

Interview with Taylor Ard

• During short answer, video of Ard HR becomes dominant and interview goes to PIP.

Credits

After being disappointed in my draft audio story, I ended up being quite satisfied with my final product above. The draft was raw, very raw, and needed a lot of work, about 5 hours worth of work.

My final audio story was created as a season preview of the WSU baseball season, even though the season has already begun. Originally I had planned on it being a story telling how the team had done up to this point, including the games they have played. Quickly I realized that to include game audio and interviews I would have to go way past the four minute limit, so I cut the story line down to simply the preseason.

The WSU fight song plays in the background to open up the story, being about Cougar sports I felt it was only fitting. I got this track through my connections in the Athletic Department and was pretty excited about the quality. It fades away and is replaced by a pretty great instrumental I found on SoundCloud; Sheer Delight by Maxx Black and Vlad Joshephson proved to be pretty good music for drowning out some of the background noise in my player/coach recordings.

I bring back the WSU fight song at the end of the story, bringing everything full circle and trying to instill some school spirit in listeners by bringing the singing up right after J.D. Leckenby mentions bringing the team back to the College World Series in Omaha.

Honestly, using Audition was a huge pain in the beginning, but after I played around with it for a while and got used to all the tools it became quite fun. The hardest part was putting together my story and writing out what I wanted to say for the parts I recorded with myself speaking. Once I had my story line laid out and the clips in order it simply became a task of mixing everything together, which took the least amount of time.

Coach Marbut is used to speaking with media so his interviews were pretty straightforward and usable. The players, however, were constantly pausing and repeating words so there was a lot of cutting to do with their pieces.

Everything considered, I turned out quite happy with how my final audio story came together and I hope you all enjoy it just as much as me.

ASIDE: All the audio interviews gathered for this audio story were possible thanks to my great job writing for the Daily Evergreen. I cover the baseball team in the Evergreen and for my personal blog, which I will now shamelessly plug! If any of you want to read my coverage on the WSU baseball team you can head over to Sports Minds and check it out! Three of my friends also write for the site and talk about all sorts of other sports things, it’s pretty great.

The idea for my audio story was to tell the story of the beginning of WSU baseball’s season, from the opening series to the conclusion of last weekends series with Northern Colorado. Since I cover the baseball team for the Daily Evergreen I have access to players and coaches before and after every game, providing me with plenty of audio for the story.

In my limited amount of time all I was able to incorporate was some audio from Head Coach Donnie Marbut from my season preview. In my final draft I plan on including audio from players and Coach Marbut after each series and make the story feel more complete.

Some pieces I would like to include would be the players talking about how important it was to have such a successful home stand the last two weeks, Derek Jones climbing the WSU all time home run list and the success of the young, inexperienced pitching staff early in the season.

There were some good story lines surrounding the team to kick off the season and in the final I hope to have some of them in place, as well as getting rid of some of the wind in the background from my interviews and maybe some light music and transitions so it’s not purely spoken word, because that’s boring.

After reading the input on my draft logo and talking to my roommates about changes they’d like to see, I ultimately wound up with the final logo you see above. Not many drastic changes were made between the draft logo and this final logo, but I think the few minor changes I made added a lot to the logo and gave it a different feel.

The biggest change I made was adding the stitches to the seams on the baseball. I believe one person in my critique group suggested this, as did both my roommates. Looking at my draft I always felt something was missing, there was too much trapped white space in the inside of the logo; I feel like adding the stitches helped eliminate that problem.

Another change I made to eliminate trapped white space was to change the size of the baseball in relation to the rest of the logo. By shrinking the baseball and enlarging the silhouette of the player in the middle I think the logo takes on a new, more balanced feel.

The words at the bottom, the ones inspired by our “fist” tutorial, were changed slightly from my draft to my final logo. Simply adding a crimson stroke (the same crimson as in the clock tower) added a nice touch I think to the words.

The final change I made between draft and final logo was moving the clock tower further over to the right. I mentioned possibly moving the clock tower in my draft logo post and the idea went over well in my critiques so I ran with it, I think moving it off-center helped balance the logo, since everything isn’t stacked on the center line anymore.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how my logo turned out, it was fun learning Illustrator. Okay I’ll be honest, learning Illustrator was much more frustrating than fun at times, but once I got the hang of it the process became a lot more enjoyable.

Hope you all enjoy what I ended up with!

Sticking with my theme, my logo revolves around the world of baseball, in particular college baseball. I tried to keep the logo as simple as possible while still getting across what makes Cougar baseball different than other places.

I drew inspiration on the words at the bottom from our tutorial on the fist logo, using the rounded corner rectangle with words placed on it. I used my favorite font, Univers, for the “Cougar Baseball” portion. Univers is a strong font and the official font of the WSU Athletic Department, so I felt it fit well in my logo.

The silhouette is of a WSU baseball player, although I’ll keep the player nameless, see if anyone can guess. I blacked out the image, making it a silhouette, because I feel it makes the logo have more potential to be timeless, since no player can be easily identified the viewer can place any player they wish in that place, no matter what era it is.

Obviously the figure in my logo is baseball, words at the bottom and Bryan Tower piece at the top. I though about adding something in the background but I thought it might make the logo too busy, so I left the rest white, making a lot of ground.

I tried to balance the logo by placing the Bryan Tower portion near center, however I’m not sure I’m happy with the placement so it will probably move to off-center either left or right in the final design.

The Bryan Tower and Palouse hills portion were added to the top of the baseball because I thought it gave it a more “Pullman” or “college” feel, which was one goal of the logo. This isn’t professional baseball, college baseball is something different and I thought something to represent this town/college would be a nice addition to the logo. I feel like this potion could use the most work though and will most likely be much different in my final design.

Anyways, hope everyone likes this draft of my logo, let me know what you think!