I remember reading a post over at Strobist a long time ago about ‘Stretching the Canvas’. Multimedia basically. Ever since I’ve had this thought about doing a multimedia slideshow… pictures with either music or a soundtrack of whatever you’re seeing in the pictures. So for Election Night, I decided that the time had come, and went out to Rockefeller Plaza (‘Election Plaza’ for the evening) armed with a sound recorder and camera.

As always with these first-attempts, I learned a whole heap of things from the experience… like how it’s harder to take pictures of key moments when you’re trying to record the sound from the key moments as well. Or how the editing process is actually simpler than you imagined, but that that simplicity can cause some headaches if you’re not working to the exact same process that the software expects you to.

Anyway, please click on the picture above to link to the slideshow itself.

The photographs were all taken in Rockefeller Plaza on the night of the Election, 2008. The sound was also recorded live at the site, but then I added a music track in post-production. If the slideshow seems a little biased towards the President-Elect, that’s because this is New York. Almost every person there was wearing an Obama pin, and screaming excitedly every time the Obama basket pushed its way a little further up the side of the Rockefeller building. There was also only one huge canvas painting that I saw a group of people carrying across the road – and that was of Obama.

For those interested in the software side of things, I used Soundslides to put the slideshow together – a really great bit of software – very reasonably priced and simple to use. It also allows you quite a bit of creative flexibility when putting together the timings and transitions. When you have a sound track, you see exactly where the slides fade in and out, and you can plan the show down to the wire. It’s also really intuitive to use – I found myself thinking ‘hm, if I could just change the transition for this one slide change only…’ and found that if I clicked on the little area below, I could do just that.

On the audio side, I used Audacity. Just like Soundslides, this was the first time I’d used this kind of software, so there was a learning curve involved, as well as thinking about the actual sound track itself. After a while I got used to the interface – simple and not over-the-top, easy to figure out what does what. After a while I realised that, just as layers are good in Photoshop, multiple tracks are great in Audacity. Once I mastered that, and found that things like cut and copy of a chunk of sound work easily between different projects and tracks, I was well on my way. Oh, and it’s free???!!! Isn’t that crazy!

Hope you enjoy the slideshow…