The other night, after publishing my review of episode 67, I finally began the task of adding images to my previous episode reviews. I wanted to “liven up” the reviews since I had never put in episode images before — I thought it wouldn’t be necessary, and I didn’t want to waste space in the WordPress media gallery. As reviews got longer I realized this left many articles quite barren and I’d probably want to add images in the near future.
The big question was how to go about this — yeah, getting an image from an episode is easy enough, but getting a good image is a pain. I settled on a process which is a bit involved but I really like the end result.
- Step 1: Download the episode in question from YouTube.
- Step 2: Play the episode in VLC, using its “take screenshot” picture to make a quick image from parts of the episode I think are interesting or worth being examples from said episode.
- Step 3: Add watermark to those images, give them a systematic name for easy identification and upload them to a media folder on the server.
- Step 4: link them in the article with an appropriate caption.
I settled on 2 images per episode – one of James to show the evolution of the Nerd character, the environment and the like, and another of a game in the episode, to show what to expect from the subject matter.
At first I really felt like it was too much effort to go through, but as I’ve gone on and added images, I think it has really made the reviews pop, especially when combined with the new “season” banners. This also was a good test of this process since this is how the upcoming King of the Hill episode reviews, as well as most any other future review of any sort, will work as far as media inside the articles goes.
I went up to episode 25, so all of Season 1 of the AVGN and part of season 2 have had images added. If you haven’t done so and are interested, the reviews can easily be found at this link.
More to come soon, as always.