Reitz Football Photo Archive

The Reitz Football Photo Archive is a Flash-based interactive CD containing over 1,100 photographs highlighting the 2007 undefeated football season of F.J. Reitz High School of Evansville, Indiana, ranging from early summer practices to the IHSAA Class 4A State Championship. Proceeds from the disc sales are donated to the school.

Concept

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about a thousand pictures? The memories become too many to count. And its all too easy to let each memory become a blur in time. The Reitz Football Photo Archive is a project intended to capture the blur and provide a venue for the Reitz football community to relive the magical year of 2007 for decades to come.

To understand the impact of the project and the 2007 year, one must understand the Reitz community. F.J. Reitz High School was founded in Evansville, Indiana in 1918 with the football program starting one year later. Since that time, the school claims dozens of championships, including 17 undefeated regular seasons and 10 state titles. It is not an overstatement to claim football is the life-blood of the school and its dedicated community. Pre-season hype proclaimed 2007 to be the best chance in 37 years for the school to grab a state title. The hype was more than justified when the Reitz Panthers acquired the Class 4A title after defeating Lowell High 33-14 on November 24, 2007 at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis. A few weeks later first-string quarterback Paul McIntosh was named Indiana's Mr. Football, the most prestigious individual football award granted annually in the state. 2007 truly was a magical year for this diehard blue-and-grey, West-side community.

One such diehard fan, a mother of one of the seniors, took the initiative to photograph the entire season -- every practice, every dinner, every event, every game -- from late June through early December 2007. In order to broadcast the story to the rest of the community, she approached me to be her voice.

Presentation Interface

As requested, the photos should be presented as a single, complete package that could be given to each senior at the end of the season. Due to the shear volume of photos to be stored, the archive would be best presented as a single CD. Though the easiest solution is to simply throw JPGs in the root of the CD, it would require the OS to preview the images. To create a unified experience across all operating systems, a custom, cross-platform presentation layer would need to be developed. An executable Flash application would serve as the middleman, telling the story of the Mighty Reitz Panthers.

The interface navigates to various galleries through a pop down menu listing the event gallery hierarchy (or alternatively for a the right-brain crowd, a filmstrip version). Likewise, each gallery features three ways to visually organize its respective images: grid mode, filmstrip mode, and slide-show mode.

Data Organization

Gathering and organizing image data in a format Flash could easily read was one of the primary tasks to solve early in the development of the project. Photos need captions and need to be organized into events and events into groupings. (For this project 1,100 photos were organized into 40 events; the 40 events into 4 groups.) All organizational and image data are stored in XML files, which are parsed and executed on application load. This structure allows flexibility to modify the content independently of the proprietary Flash environment, making updating information relatively effortless.

Acquiring and formatting the information was the next problem to tackle. Since the client would be responsible for organizing photos into events and writing all photo captions, it would be unreasonable to expect the client to write the information in the desired XML formats and individually resize the hundreds of images to fit the constraints of the interface. Therefore, a mini web application was built for this specific purpose. The client could build and organize the structure of the images, while any caption information would be stored in a MySQL database. When the client finished all content changes, a PHP script would execute to simultaneously write the XML files based on the database information and resize all images from their original file sizes to more manageable dimensions, all placed in a single data directory, ready to be read by the Flash interface.

Packaging

After completing the presentation interface and gathering all the necessary data, the last part required to finish the archive was to package it all together on a CD. Since several hundred discs would be made, each labeled with a full-color printed cover, the best solution is to outsource the duplication process. In just over a week, the discs were delivered, ready for distribution by mid-January 2008. All proceeds for the Reitz Football Photo Archive are donated to the school.

Summary

Completed: January 2008
Creating: Interactive Photo CD
Role: Adobe Flash-based Presentation Interface; Image Management Application; CD Packaging