All of the content in this year’s Soul of Athens is fantastic, no doubt. Take one look at the site and you’ll agree. Multimedia blogs from around the Web have taken notice, and in this post I am proud to present links to blogs that have featured some of our fantastic pieces.
We’re getting a lot of positive feedback on Twitter, which I’ve been monitoring throughout the morning. If you’d like to see what people are saying, search the hashtag #soulofathens. Also, if you tweet something nice about us, we’ll probably follow you.
There’s a great article about us on RESOLVE, the liveBooks photo blog, in which Miki Johnson interviews SOA Senior Producer Jenn Poggi about the project.
The launch is coming up in no time, but I can still remember first seeing the Soul of Athens posters around campus at the end of last quarter calling for photographers, designers… and writers.
I was one of those journalism students who ventured into the project to try to add some more written pieces to this year’s site.
Walking into class the first day, I didn’t know what to expect. I was jumping into a huge multimedia project where the majority of students were photographers and designers. I didn’t have very much experience with the visual end of stories.
But that just meant I learned that much more when I did get to collaborate with two photographers on two stories throughout this quarter. I got to sit down and discuss ideas about story directions with them, as well as actually go out to take notes and to interview people together. While the photographer was absorbed in capturing moments visually, I was thinking about capturing the details in a different way by talking to more people and asking different questions. It was fascinating to see the different ways we put together the information for the stories through photos, text and audio.
This experience has definitely gotten me to think about the bigger picture of packaging the different elements for a whole story. It’s been a good starting point for working closely with photographers and designers. It’s nice to know that everyone’s different talents can come together well — whether it’s using language, photos or designs — to tell a story.
Written by Jaclyn Lipp, a writer for Soul of Athens
Audio collected by:
Liz Borda
Jennifer Cecil
Maisie Crow
Kristin Heinichin
Ryan Henriksen
Julia Marino
Rachel O’Hara
Jenn Poggi
Joel Prince
Jenna Schoenefeld
Julie Van Wagenen
Abby Verbosky
Special Thanks to:
Brandon Flayler
Justin Gordon
Chad Stevens
As the hard launch of the site approaches, the design and technical teams are pulling long hours in the lab to make the magic happen. The photographers, videographers, writers, and graphic artists have finished their work gathering “soul.” There is a tension in the air as the deadline creeps closer and closer and closer. It is almost here. It is going to happen.
Keeping this in mind, the marketing team has been planning strategies to get the word out. What use is a phenomenal project if no one sees it? So, with only a week and a half to go before the official launch, flyers are being printed. Post-its branded with the URL and launch date are stuck up anywhere people can find space. Posters are appearing in business windows around town.
Posters like this one are being hung around town to promote the launch of Soul Of Athens.
Soon, chalking will commence. Chalking is always a good way to get the word out to the university community. Sidewalks and pavement everywhere will get Soul treatment as anyone not working on the tech side will be running around campus scrawling the URL with rapid strokes of kids’ chunky chalk.
A video promotion will be going up on YouTube in the near future as well. The marketing team collaborated with Black Sheep Inc., OU’s only improvisational comedy troupe, to create a humorous version of what people think the soul of Athens is. Characters “interviewed” in the video range from fraternity brothers to an environmentalist couple. There was even a debate about pizza and Descartes being the soul of Athens. The hope is that this spoof gets people thinking about what the real soul of Athens is and prompt them to discover it through the stories waiting for them on this year’s site.
- Written by Kristin Hulse, member of the marketing team
The launch of the ‘09 Soul Of Athens site is less than two weeks away! We thought you might like a preview of what you’ll be seeing.
The front door of the 2009 version of Soul Of Athens! The only main difference between this and the finished product will be the absence of the white box at the bottom and the brick background.
The All Projects page of the 2009 version of Soul Of Athens. Check out those gorgeous thumbnails! The little icons in the top-right corners will describe what type of multimedia is used in each presentation.
The Design Team is working around the clock to get this site off the ground, and as you can see in the pictures, we’re definitely close.
Well, we’re only a week away from our first soft launch and things are really starting to pick up. One thing I’ve been working on for quite a while now is connecting our Drupal database with Adobe Flash. To manage the enormous amount of content we have, our team is using Drupal , which is a content management system (CMS). CMS’s make it incredibly easy to update, rearrange, and reorganize your website, and they store all your content in a database which is very search-engine friendly.
If you’re not familiar with Flash, let me give you an extremely abbreviated summary. Flash is a program that is great for creating interactive, animated Web sites, but it has been criticized for not being search-engine friendly. Our plan for this year’s site is to use a CMS database and integrate the strengths of Flash, giving us the best of both worlds.
Without getting overly technical, that’s the gist of what I’ve been working on, and it’s been a very exciting experience. When you get a great group of people together like we have, everyone comes up with such great ideas and it makes everyone more motivated to put in the extra time to make this site truly great. To think that the site goes through every phase of production in ten weeks is crazy, just think of what it would be like if we had all year!
We’ve taken inspiration from PostSecret and created a postcard project.
Local Athenians are encouraged to decorate the blank side of these postcards to reflect what Athens means to them. Postcards can either be stamped and mailed to the P.O. box as addressed or placed in a drop box at the locations listed (blank copies of the postcards can also be picked up at these locations).
Athens County Libraries
Lodi General Store
Cool Spot
Stuart’s Opera House
Contributors can choose to remain anonymous. Submitted postcards will be encorporated into a multimedia presentation on the Soul Of Athens site.
So, Atheniens, grab a post card and show us some soul!
