The journalists at Reuters.com were looking for a quick way to showcase Reuters photography in a video format centered around a particular story, and with voiceover. They wanted a system with an easy-to-use administrative system that didn’t require heavy development resources to build. Oh, and did I mention they didn’t have much of a budget?
Creating a small team that consisted of myself, a maverick project manager and a rather talented JavaScript developer we decided to make a quick prototype based on off-the-shelf software.
SlideShowPro and SlideShowPro Director were the perfect solution to producing this quickly and cheaply. SlideShowPro is a feature-rich Flash-based slideshow component that can handle both photographs and video. SlideShowPro director is an administrative back-end for SlideShowPro built with CakePHP. SlideShowPro Director is also offered as a hosted solution using Amazon’s EC2/S3 services.
I designed a front-end to house the SlideShowPro component which would allow users to bookmark particular stories and share them with a friend. We used jQuery UI to add some slickness to the interface, because that’s how we rolled.
Our team was able to build the prototype in less than two weeks and presented a functional product to the business team for further review.