Wednesday, May 6, 2009

"Hope" - musicslideshow

To get the best effect please view this full screen and listen through headphones (or decent speakers).
You need to hit play on both the slideshow AND music track - one after the other, fast as you can !! - you choose which you do first!
(The speed setting on the slideshow should automatically be set at medium). The music and slideshow last for just under 3 minutes. You'll kind of spoil it for yourself if you look through the images first, so please let them just come to you with the music.








@kate_day mentioned audio slideshows on twitter a couple of weeks back. I used to enjoy watching and making them. I've put this one together over the past couple of weeks. Copyright issues tend to put a damper on them being used professionally. But I think I've got round those issues with the way I've prepared this musicslideshow (let's call it an MSS).

If you want to find out who took a particular picture, and then maybe check out the others from that set, just play the slideshow in full screen and click the info link when your chosen picture is displayed. I'm going to contact everyone who has a image in the slideshow and of course, William Fitzsimmons who wrote and performed the song 'Beautiful Morning'. And by the way, William is in the UK next week ! At Bush Hall (shepherds bush) next wednesday 13th May, Brighton on Thursday 14th May, and Bardons Boudoir on the 15th May.


I don't really want to give an explanation the MSS itself. Its theme is Hope. Other than that you can make your own mind up about it.

Technical Stuff
The music is just embedded from a site called http://www.thesixtyone.com. So no copyright issues here to worry about.

The slideshow is embedded from flickr. I favourite the images I choose for this and placed a start and end image in these don't seem to be working; so when you see pictures of clouds the show is over ! If you let the slideshow run after the music finishes you see the rest of my favourites. I unfavourited the rest of my favourite images to help this MSS make sense (I've taken a note of them though so will be putting them up on tumblr soon). I did decide on an order in which the images should appear, so I had to favourite them in this order.

Flickr does give you some control over the which images from your favourites you place in a slideshow. I did experiment with this. You use the search feature to select in, or select out, images tagged with a particular label. However, I found that when I set the slideshow to play I encountered problems. It didn't seem to play at all if I selected out particular tags, and even if I unfavourited an image, it still appeared in the slideshow.

So what I ended up with is the simplest method of showing a slideshow of my 'favourited' images. Using a flickr created slideshow does have the benefit of getting around copyright issues. The image producers will have already have given their permission to flickr for the images to be used in this way. (Of course, if anyone does object to me directly I will remove their image.)


I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope it was a little light relief from my money posts - which I think might be quite hard going sometimes ! Please do let me know if you like it - I'll do more then ! And please RT on twitter, too. Thank you.

Oh. And please have a go yourself. Its a really enjoyable process.

PS. I'm happy to expand upon the technical process stuff if people want me to, so you don't have to go through the tedious experimentation I did.