Narrated Slideshow: A New Home Away from Home

While looking for a narrated slideshow through Google, I came across The Washington Post where I found a slideshow about kids at Washington's Children's National Medical Center which caught my attention. The slideshow is about a new $75 million inpatient wing designed to make kids' hospitalization feel more homelike and comfortable with the intention of encouraging healing, and how the family and patients feel about it.

The pictures were not place chronologically, but it still worked pretty well because it connected to the narration. There were different people narrating, and every time a different person spoke they changed the picture to the person who were speaking, which I thought was really helpful to understand the story. I think that the pictures were really powerful to the slideshow because it brought a greater understanding of what they were talking about. For instance, when they showed how important it is for the relationship between the patients and parents and the support they provide, they showed a picture of a mother lying in bed with her daughter, and I think that it helps the viewer to feel some compassion since some things you won't have the same reaction it you explain it versus showing it in pictures.

The audio, I am not sure I liked because there were background noises which helpt to get a feeling of what it was like to be at the hospital, but there was narration on to of the ambient sound which turned out to be distracting. At one point, they had ambient sound, music and narration all at once, and that was totally confusing. I think that if they would have kept the pictures, narration and maybe music every now and then, it could have worked out, but the way they did it I think they actually over did it.

Besides the issue with the sound, the slideshow was pretty interesting; the pictures and narration kept me interested, and it wasn't that long, so that was good too.

Here is the URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/health/interactives/childrens/index.html