Wednesday, April 21, 2010

EPJ: Second Multimedia Critique



Reuters piece A day at Frontier Airlines about Frontier Airlines was a solid look into the business. The interview with the airline official is good quality and well edited to keep the story moving. It speaks both to the changes that are occurring in the airline industry and to Frontier's character in particular.

While the project contains many telling images, the zooms that occur randomly are distracting and lessen the quality of the story overall. I am also left wanting to get leave the ground. None of the images show a plane carrying passengers. There are also no images of planes in flight. These are not optional images. A story about passenger transportation needs visual representation of that happening. That said, many of the photos showed impressive access. The viewer gets to see things from viewpoints they would never visit otherwise- behind the ticket counter, under the plane on the tarmac, and in the baggage transport tunnel. The story starts and flows well, but it ends quite abruptly. An ending so quickly after the speaker stops talking is jolting. A few seconds of silence afterward would help immensely.

As far as presentation, the video starts immediately after the page has loaded on the Reuters site. This too, causes a start and would be easily avoidable by giving the viewer the control to hit the play button.