Fire-Wired Blog

Excited to share my latest multimedia endeavor, Audiography. A few feet beyond what I would define as a hobby, Audiography is a new nature sound recording effort mixed with personal storytelling. If that's enough for you, here's the soundcloud. As you may know I am a podcasting fanatic . I first started listening to podcasts in 2007 when I discovered Filmspotting , and in 2012 my good friend Jacob Rosdail and I set behind the mics ourselves to create our own podcast " Filmcast Without a Cause ." Well Audiography is something new. Part podcast, part storytelling, and a large dose of natural sounds. Roughly two weeks ago I drove up to Okoboji's Iowa Lakeside Lab to spend a day filming Alex Braidwood 's Acoustic Ecology course. For two weeks, Alex takes college students, artists, and creatively inclined individuals out into the world to record nature sounds and examine the world of acoustic ecology. At the end of the experience the crew produces a set o...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Somewhere in America a giddy tween-ager is right now being handed his or her first cell phone along with that parental warning: “Remember, once you post something online it is there forever.” Thankfully forever now has a pit stop, and it’s an application called Snapchat. While I won’t profess to be fully attuned to youth culture, I do know this: Snapchat is in: Facebook is out. For those even more out the loop, Snapchat is a social messaging service that allows users to send multimedia messages with a shelf time of 10 seconds or less. Basically, users can share content privately with their social circles without their entire Facebook network of friends seeing it (i.e. mom), and it will self-destruct protecting the user from potential fallout. Much has been made about the nefarious aspects of Snapchat: lewd photos, offensive or harassing content and the potential to bypass the self-destruct feature via screen capture. But in t...

This article was first published by dmcityview.com After years of swimming against the tide, I finally broke down and bought a tablet last week. While I still feel they have little value outside of watching videos and surfing the Web, tablets are an extremely convenient way to share multimedia content and cut back on paper use. Outside of practical concerns, one perk of purchasing a tablet is Flipboard, an application that turns virtually any Web content into personalized magazines. It’s no coincidence that tablets are roughly the size of the average magazine, and reading Internet content on them is extremely easy. Flipboard takes both those virtues and turns the Internet into a bottomless pit of reading material, tailored to the reader’s interests. Plus, like the random magazines that drift into our lives, Flipboard is a great way to discover content that sits in the periphery of our interests. Launched in 2010, Flipboard allows mobile device users to search the Web and subscrib...

After 5 years in the news-media I am out. Forever? Who knows. But for the forseeable future I'm a Multimedia Specialist for the Iowa State University Foundation . The Foundation is a non-profit fundraising entity that raises funds for the University and helps promote its mission. My role is to produce multimedia content to that end; videos, presentations, advertisements and more. It's really exciting, I've had some fun calling myself the Foundation's in-house documentarian. Today I took advantage of the beautiful weather and used my equipment for the first time. Shot a building on campus. Not for any specific project, just to learn the camera. After that I took five minutes and shot the weather on campus. Not a perfect video, but for my first DSLR filming experiment, I think it turned out well.