(Note: This blog is defunct as of March 2015, but I’ve left it online for posterity’s sake. I’ve moved my activity to wordsareroads.com. Please keep in mind that many of the links, platforms, services and apps I used in creating posts have become outdated and no longer may work — one of the issues I frequently warned my students about in trying to help them anticipate problems.)
Click here for a slide show about Willow River State Park, stored in myfiles, and linking to the soundslider.swf folder using the procedure in the post below for linking to an .mp3 file as a podcast.
Note that your URL will be something like “http://students.uwps.edu/spoint123/slideshow/my_slideshow_about_cats,” with “students” in place of “myfiles” and NO inclusion of “inetpub” in the path name of your URL.
Note also that this URL includes a subfolder inside my “inetpub” folder called “slideshow.” You don’t have to have such a subfolder — as long as your entire folder structure is housed in inetpub, it will be accessible to the public (assuming you link to it properly).
Here’s another example of a slide show — this one on soccer. Note how there are six different sources used in this one, in addition to my voiceover. With proper source-building and scripting, it’s not that tough. While this one is 3:30 long instead of three minutes or less, there’s a lot of material in it and virtually nothing that can be edited out without cutting interesting detail from the story.
And one more — this one is too long and is more interpretive and analytic. It was not done as an example for the class as much as just fooling around, learning how to use the software to tell a story. But it’s useful for showing how SoundSlides can be used to match sound and imagery. Note in particular the timing of transitions and the selection of pictures for characteristics such as their topics or even colors (red flowers during the lyric about blood; pictures of my son playing in the water during a lyric that reflects that idea). Note also how the captions appear automatically (this is a setting) and how the font on the captions is larger so they are more noticeable during playing of the slideshow. Finally, note how credit is given for the songs at the end. I contacted Dr. Urena directly for permission.
Here’s another test I did to check publication using the basic, free version of Soundslides. I spent about three minutes making the slide show just to test the software. Click on the picture below to access the slide show. From start to finish, it took me 20 minutes to post this.
— updated 11/7/17