My Podcast Evaluation.

For the Digital Cultures brief we had to create a visual essay considering on how Leeds can be an 'Ubiquitous City'. There were many choices to choose from, I wanted to do it on futuristic cars and all sorts but I chose to do a podcast on 'The Octopus Card' which is used by the citizens of Hong Kong. I chose this because I had the oppotunity to use it when I went there and I'm quite familiar with this revolutionary technology.
This card already existed in 1997 and I was wondering why can't it be launched in more countries. It was able to make payments in transit fees more quicker therefore queues and traffic congestion might improve. Today you can even use it to pay for food in restaurants and supermarkets. I found it really fun to use in Hong Kong and it was more convenient. I wanted to compare some events in Leeds such as going on the bus with the life in Hong Kong as they use the card. I had a friend to film me getting on the bus and using the vending machine. We also tried to film in zara but got kicked out by the security guard and people delibrately got in the way of our filming when I've only got one chance to film it. Filming the vending machine was a little hard and we had to do it twice because the first packet of crisps got stuck in. I went on youtube.com and downloaded the methods of using the card to get drinks and transit as the comparison to my filmed videos. I love the speed of the card transfering wirelessly the sums of money when purchasing something. It takes about 0.03 seconds which is so much faster than credit cards. The downside of these is that it doesn't store any information of the card holder therefore when it's lost, someone else can find it and use whats left on the card.
For the podcast, I used Final Cut Pro to assemble all my research into one video. I still can't use it that well and I always had to render everything. I decide not to use a voice over and used subtitles for my video. The background music is from a korean film soundtrack and I thought it matched my podcast very well. After creating the podcast, I was able to learn alot about the idea of making travelling and everyday life more simple and functioning comfortably. I realised there were other cards similar to the Octopus card such as the Oyster card in London and the Suica card in Japan.
The podcast lasts to 2 minutes so I wished I could of done more like try to film more videos to compare it to Hong Kong. It was very time consuming when I had to try and make the timing of the film clips match the pace of the music, but I thought it flowed quite well. Overall I was quite happy with what I have done and I hope the podcast was able to convey to the viewers the idea of how the Octopus card can be used in Leeds when we approach to the future.