I quite enjoyed producing Oksana’s Soundslides profile, despite the unpleasantness caused by my technical mistakes and a faulty memory stick.

Here is a picture of Oksana I didn’t use because I thought the post overpowered her very powerful personality – and impressive gymnastics.

As I was already late finishing this assignment, I took some time Tuesday night to look at multimedia displays at the New York Times website to see how they do it.

I hope someday to be able to tell a story as well as they do.

One challenge I faced was technical. I can usually visualize how I want something to look, but sometimes new technology slows me up. I wasn’t raised in an Internet or digital world so I can be a little slow figuring it out. But I get there eventually, always.

Another challenge I faced was that because this was Oksana’s bio and I want to make her look as good as possible, I didn’t feel as objective as I’d like. I felt a bit of self-pressure to make her look good, which thankfully wasn’t too difficult, since she’s photogenic and articulate. But profiling a friend has its challenges.

I loved Soundslides so much I bought it, and hope to use it to tell stories in pictures and audio in future.

When I was at the Times’ website, I watched the video accompanying Art Buchwald’s obituary. It was, I think, the first interview-based video obit the Times or any paper I know of has run, and opens with the writer facing the camera saying, “Hi, I’m Art Buchwald and I just died.”

So for my next project, in video, I’d like to look at the issue and future of online obits. I could interview Cathy Dunphy to start, because somehow I managed to pass her magazine course, she writes obits for the Toronto Star, and she’s still teaching at Ryerson.