The L.A. River Remixed

The Los Angeles River belongs to all of us, and so does Departures: L.A. River. Using online tools like VUVOX Collage and Picasa, as well as your own ingenuity, you can make you own version of the signature Departures multimedia panorama. Each week, we'll be featuring new panoramas showcasing different aspects of the River as imagined, documented and remixed by you. (Scroll down for further instructions.)

See more remixes...

VUVOX.com's collage-making tool is an online service that allows people to create Departures-style panoramas using their own audio, video, photographs and text. These collages can then be shared with your friends, published to your Facebook page, or (most important to us!) shared with KCET so that we can see your take on the Los Angeles River.

VUVOX is relatively easy to use, but, like all things, rewards the carefully prepared. Here are some quick tips to start you on your interactive journey along the 52-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River:

1 - Join VUVOX and then review their help videos, FAQs and how-to's.

2 - Think about the sort of panorama you'd like to make about the Los Angeles River.

(This image was taken by flickr user pink_fish13. It was used under Creative Commons license.)

What would you make if you could construct an interactive mural about the river? What elements would you include? Interviews? Long pans? Photographs of your friends exploring the narrows? Images of wildlife?

3 - Collect your video, audio, photographs and text. Making a VUVOX collage or a Departures panorama is much like painting a mural: you take your ideas, illustrate them with assets - in this case pictures, videos, audio and words about the Los Angeles River - and you arrange it all on a physical or virtual wall.

Without the constituent stuff , though, you'll have a hard time making a panorama. To get you started, we've uploaded a library of over 700 photographs of the river to a Picasa account we created called "losangelesriver" - one word, lower cased, no quotation marks! VUVOX allows you to upload assets stored on your computer, but also allows you to use photographs stored on Flickr or Picasa accounts. To access our files, just write "losangelesriver" when VUVOX asks your for your Picasa username, and your starter library should load.

These images are all files from our own Departures: Los Angeles River collection, allowing you to remix our panoramas a vision of your own. It's fairly straight forward to add text and audio, but maybe you also want to add video to your panorama. Interviews? Images of the river?

4 - Make your panorama!

5 - Share your panorama with us!

In order for us to feature your panorama, we need you to tell us about it. The easiest way is to write a link to your completed panorama into the comments field below.

If you have any questions, feel free to write them in comments as well, and we'll do our best to answer them!