Soundslides under pressure

JACC completed its annual convention this weekend and one of the big changes was the introduction of our first on-the-spot multimedia contest. Student teams (2-3 per team) from 25 colleges set out on LA's colorful cultural icon Olvera Street to find a feature and develop it under deadline pressure using SoundSlidesPlus software. For about half the teams, this was the first exposure they've had to SoundSlides, much less editing audio. But the excitement for a multimedia challenge among our contests was high.

The students had one day to find a story and collect photos and audio, overnight to edit everything and one hour in a contest lab to assemble the final product. Most teams stayed up all night editing and not all completed the task. Unfortunately, four teams who DID complete a project, had their files corrupted in the save process and judges could not open them. (My mistake for not checking them as we collected them so that students could re-export! I learned something new, too, as I've never seen this kind of corruption before.)

Projects were judged on the spot and winning teams honored during the convention.

A lot of tired folks at the end, but they were stoked.

All completed entries, except for the corrupted ones, can be found on the JACC web site at www.jacconline.org. (Or jump directly to the story with links here.)

We called this contest Team Feature 2.0 as it replaced our earlier contest of a writer and photographer working together to develop a written feature plus photo. For the future we hope to introduce Team Feature 3.0 where the final project is video. We need to work out computing issues though and, quite frankly, I'm not sure we have enough time for good editing to take place even if we find a level playing field with computers.