For the production assignment I chose to do the geo-narrative. I never knew that Google Maps had a feature to do this, and was intrigued by it. I found it a little difficult to find inspiration of what the theme of my geo-narrative would be, but once I figured it out it was quite a fun process. Firstly I decided I would make it a photographic tour, and settled on the theme being music and arts festivals. This way I would be able to use my own photos from festivals in Australia that I have been to, as well as using other peoples photos that were under creative commons licensing. I was able to execute my initial idea that was to overall have 10 festivals in different countries, and explain a little bit about each one. Having actually gone to the festivals that were in Australia made it easier to discuss, although I enjoyed writing about the festivals that I would someday like to go to.
I used Flickr as my resource for finding creative commons licensed images, and found this to be quite a smooth process. When it came to adding the hyperlinks of images to the map is where I ran into trouble. I thought it would be as simple as copying the image location and adding it to the map, but Flickr doesn’t facilitate this. What I ended up doing was taking screenshots of the images on Flickr then uploading these to Picasa, which I also uploaded my own photos to. From there I was able to copy the image location for each photo and add the link to the map. In the end the process wasn’t too grueling as it was handy having all my images in the one place. To give credit to the creative commons licensed images that I got from Flickr, I added the links to these in the map, just under the image.
The geo-narrative was like no other media assignment I have done before, in that I created it using an Internet platform, rather than a computer program. This project allowed me to see the fundamentals of networked media and how each part of the geo-narrative makes a difference to the end result. I was able to further my knowledge of different new media platforms, and how they can be integrated with one another to create a production piece. This process of networked media production allowed me to utilize skills that I have learnt over the duration of the semester such as HTML and privacy, and putting them into the one project. In creating the geo-narrative I was also able to see what works and what doesn’t when it comes to networked production; such as the inserting of images into Google Maps and finding a way around it. Overall this production project allowed me to further explore the fundamentals of networked media, and put them into practice.
Take a peek at my geo-narrative here!
