"killer" shoes

Right, ive added music, chopped it and edited it here and there, added titles and Im happy with my little creation!

From the samples I mocked up in Photoshop, I like the 'diffuse glow effect' applied, again, as mentioned before, it gives it a sort of dreamy like surreal mood. Furthermore, the inclusion of sound always adds another dimension to the piece. There is the humour, where the song reflects the action on screen, but also it gives life, and a punch to the overall experience whilst watching. (My particular favourite part is the end, where I've doubled the last few shots up, meaning they appear as a pause on screen, and when the beat goes hand in hand with what's on screen - its rythmical and works well!)

The title screens also add a touch more humour as well. At the beginning "killer" is presumed to mean cool, ace. At the end however, it refers to the exploits the shoes have been up to!

I did find it quite a slow process cutting everything and pasting, due to the speed of my hardware and it having to deal with quite big video files. Getting the music to fit was quite an in depth process: making sure it fitted what was happening in the footage: a few microseconds earlier/a few microseconds later. The last little bug is that it all wizzes by incredibly quickly. This final cut has had the speed reduced down to 50% of 25fps, but still alot happens in a little time! The way to get around this in future would be to take more snaps of even slower movements, yet it is only after experiencing the whole photograph taking process that I was able to find this out to implement next time.

Nonetheless, this will be my first reference point when it comes to my first official tasked project and I've enjoyed the process - especially when you can see it all in one final piece -completed and so on. Hope you like!

Thanks must go to my group: Ross, Andria and Kane. Great ideas, acting(or should that be posing!), and shooting the snaps. Pretty much a cool team, cos it all worked!

SPP1 Homework

From the blogs I've posted since beginning the course, here are a few examples of analytical/critical viewpoints I've made on various items.

WEBDESIGN:

"Some of the difficulties whilst making the site was that you have to save your work to get it to refresh on IE7 or Firefox. When you change some of the XHTML or CSS and then have a look, it either sometimes doesn't work at all, or isn't what you wanted - it's then sometimes proves difficult to easily get the page back to how it was before!"

"I like the colour scheme; when you hover over the links on the left hand side the colours invert- you find designs like this on proper, pubished sites. Overall I think it has a clear, clean cut design - just what web design should be."

STOP MOTION ANIMATION:

"Being brutally honest, it is no way of standard, it isn't even amateur. I see this as just a tester, a first go at dipping my toe in the water of stop motion animation. So bear this in mind!"

"(do things in tiny steps, don't do big jumps, even if frustrating and time consuming, its worth it in the end. don't shake the camera all over the place, it really tells when watching ensemble) It is with these such pointers that I can develop further to make even better sharp, witty animation sketches in the future."

WHITEBOARD ANIMATION:

"Points fed in by myself and the other teammates sometimes fell to deaf ears, perhaps for the better, yet on the other hand it does make you think of how different you as an individual would like it to turn out, in comparison to how it eventually turned out from a group's effort."

PIN HOLE PHOTOGRAPHY:

"The first shot came out quite well in my opinion: it wasn't blurred, you can see something in it and I hadn't gotten fingerprints etc all over it in the dark room! It has to it almost a brooding, ominous feel you could say - horror film type setting."

Just a few opinions/comments there, as can be seen, quite a bit to say!

@

pixilation photographs

So after spending the afternoon shooting hundreds of shots alongside Ross, Kane and Andria; my group, Im now presented with the opportunity to choose from my edited pictures.

The whole idea for the sketch came really quickly, which was great. It was simple, had quite a few ways in which it could pan out, and altogether, would be funny to make and view!
Deciding to use this initial idea meant we could begin and thereafter chip in and think up more funny ideas to add along the way too.

We were presented with a few issues when it came to dangling the shoe down in front of the camera and have it fly down to hit Ross in the face, my hand kept getting in the way. There are two options for this: either remove that frame, or edit it out using Photoshop.

Next up, editing.

I imported a random photograph from the 360 we took, into Photoshop, altering the saturation levels, colour levels, sharpness etc and tried one of the filters.

The results can be seen below and its decision time, so I can then proceed with an automated batch process to the rest of the photographs, and combine these into a moving animation piece using Premiere.

Of these, the first is basically the original image, but i added alot more yellow to it. Instead of pasty pale wooden floor, instead now you can see a egg yolk yellow. It adds life to the image I think, more cartoony, maybe child-like.

The second is the charcoal filter which strips it of all colour, and as I see it, makes it appear like a photocopy. It has a grainy effect which adds a sort of age to the image and the contrast means it has a strong presence, instead of being all washed out.

The third image on the other hand does have a washed out feel. It could be described as a glowing effect, sort of heavenly, dreamy look or supernatural feel to it. In regards to the idea and action of the sketch, this may fit in. Shoes don't come to life, so being a dreamlike scenario could work.

The fourth is an inverted glow line filter from Photoshop. It is in a word, weird, and quite Sci-Fi. I don't see this working well as a combined animation sequence due to it being quite a thin outline of all the articles in the shot, and coupled with 12fps - you may not be able to see what is going on!

Lastly, the fifth picture is just another variation in colour. Green this time, although not as obvious in the image thats been compressed by Blogger. Whereas the yellow was colourful and bright, the green gives it an odd tinge, yet still, interesting and different from the norm.

I'm torn between the punchy, colourful yellow edit and the glow, washed out white effect. Both would work well, and on the flip side, both have slight disadvantages. The yellow could be seen as just a normal snap, where the floors and so on are just yellower than yellow in that said building. For the glow effect, the heightened white effect could mean that the shoes (white) could loose some of their focus and be harder to follow in the quick moving piece.

Nonetheless, the way in the glow effect could be deemed alike that of a dream would make the concept of possessed shoes feasible. If problems do arise due to it being too whitewashed, that can be toned down. This then, is my choice.

Now then, comes Adobe Premiere.

Watch this space.

@

website#1

I've filled up and finished the few pages of the MINI site that I've whipped up. It all links and looks decent enough. Overall, it is a simple, functioning website. What's helpful is that once you've done the main features and layout of one page, its a copy jobby, where you move the code all over to another page and just add/alter the relevant info for that page.

The site has an included feedback form, with subsequent error/thankyou page, and just generally, the making of this site has proved an incentive to go on and make another, and then another - each time adding, bettering and perfecting the art of web design. I can make now something simple. But i want to make something great. (features, looks) So will be having a play about in the background to see what else I can do with Dreamweaver.

Some of the difficulties whilst making the site was that you have to save your work to get it to refresh on IE7 or Firefox. When you change some of the XHTML or CSS and then have a look, it either sometimes doesn't work at all, or isn't what you wanted - it's then sometimes proves difficult to easily get the page back to how it was before!

I need to learn/find out about sizing of elements - pixels, percentages, ems etc. Whilst I can choose one of these and it looks fine on my browser, that's not the case for others, so using these properly is a must.

Here are the screens from the site, I've not put it live on the web yet cos I'm still banging my head against the wall trying to think up a URL that I can use for lots of work, not just specific minidriving.co.uk, for example.

I like the colour scheme; when you hover over the links on the left hand side the colours invert- you find designs like this on proper, pubished sites. Overall I think it has a clear, clean cut design - just what web design should be.

A basic site, but nonetheless, my first!

Over and out,

@

still being all spider-like: creating a web

Well since I posted my first rough logo, I've been playing around with it and have made it look better - design wise, its simpler, but I think it has a more striking effect to it. Noticeably, you could say this is a brand new design, which in fact it is, but from building upon the original.

I'm also making steps with Dreamweaver. So far, i've created my index page, with the links and so on. Making this into an official template, sort of like you would when you alter the data on a XHTML file, - just editing the different fields, whilst working alongside a CSS, makes it really simple to build a whole website.

Here's a screenshot of the very first draft of the site:

This is just very basic, learning to use the software, but I managed it all on my own thanks to my XHTML book - never before have I had the joy of Dreamweaver. Lots of potential for development - more links, snazzier effects, whilst possibly also trying different structures. Dreamweaver has lots on offer too, its just a case of finding out what all the buttons do! But so far so good.

@

cracking the code (XHTML, CSS etc!)

Well the course is starting to pick up in terms of introducing us to techniques, software programs etc, but in my spare time I've decided I'm gonna look into something myself.

I think I'd like to head in the webdesign/application sector of Multimedia, looking for a career there, so after completing a night school course earlier this year, I will again start afresh and make myself a website. This time though, gonna write alot in XHTML - that'll no doubt change when it gets too much and I want to use Dreamweaver (another thing I've got to really get to grips with!)

So to start off with, after having a flyer shoved under my door for learner driver school, MINI Driving School has been spourned from my imagination.

The first sample that I can show is a simple logo. Made it in Word showing the lack of what software I have, but I know how to use it, so why not!

Now back to more coding!

@

Stop-motion animation #1

Well after being introduced to the wonderful world of stop motion animation, this has got me thinking about some little bits that I can make individually. Normally you'd at least work in a partnership - one acting, being the focus of the piece, whilst the other takes all the individual frames. With a play around on my own though, I've managed to make something from my rough attempt at stop-motion creativity.

Being brutally honest, it is no way of standard, it isn't even amateur. I see this as just a tester, a first go at dipping my toe in the water of stop motion animation. So bear this in mind!

It was after seeing the example of the Guinness advert in my seminar that I had the idea to play around with fingers for this piece. I added a few props, drew a few doodles and generally just tried different things to see how they turn out. One thing I noticed was that this is a great potential for magic tricks - you control exactly what can be seen, defy physics and logic, so any poorly skilled magic men amongst us are immediately in the posession of highly effective trikery skills!

What I enjoyed about this is that it can all be done in a relatively straight forward manner. You don't need to spend hours adding technical detail. By having a simple story with relatively simple action, means it has quite an effective and enjoyable feel - nothing over the top or complicated. Its best when seeing it all as one piece, rather than the hours spent moving in tiny incremental steps, where it's difficult to relate to and appreciate what you're actually producing. Even at this stage of posting I'd forgotten about the use of any sound. Going back and adding some has now made a difference. It adds an element of life, and a more entertaining feel to it, all round.

Problems came in the form of the angle of the camera and trying to judge if it keeps the white background in shot and not anything additional! Lighting also proved a problem - for whatever reason the flash would come on intermittently, and so after a while I just resolved this by turning it off completely. Apologies for the watermark hovering in the background, its one of the cons of sampling free user software - better that than nothing I suppose!

Already I am starting to learn the do's and don'ts (do things in tiny steps, don't do big jumps, even if frustrating and time consuming, its worth it in the end. don't shake the camera all over the place, it really tells when watching ensemble) It is with these such pointers that I can develop further to make even better sharp, witty animation sketches in the future.

One thing I definitely need to work out is to get a 'victim' of my own, a puppet to perform the tricks -then I'll be able to take the snaps etc and not need to mess around with a one man show, which is very limited and has low quality results.

Over and out...
@

futuristic flipbook - whiteboard animation

In addition to pinhole photography, we also sampled whiteboard animation in Induction week. Again, very simple by nature: a pen, a whiteboard and some random ideas.

The criteria set was to get a box to move from the left side to the right side of a tree. Simple. Yet, with the added option of "be as freeform as you want" meant a plethora of humourous additions.

This being my first opportunity of the year to work in a team, we took it in turns to draw, take the individual snaps and throw in ideas on the progression of our box story. The idea we started off with was by no means the one we ended up with, such is the nature of group work and coming up with things on the spot - possibly one of the best way to make the most off the wall, zany creations.

For our animation, I really like the comedy in the form of the bird, which collides with the exploding rocket and falls to the ground as a cooked roast! Ending our sketch was a last spur of the minute, Rocky Horror Show plant monster and this is funny too, especially when you realise that our story started off with one box and one tree! The stills we were drawing linked together and flowed nicely, 1frame is 1/12th of a second. 2 hours in itself is a long time yet it flew by: we were having fun, trying something everybody was relatively new to, and we kept the ball rolling by having to come up with new content all the time as the story went on.


The detail we were putting into our ideas and then the subsequent drawings was impressive, but the time it was taking meant it was a downside. 1/12th of a second works well for the fact that small mistakes are not noticeable, yet this then proves a downside when intricate drawings with thought and effort put in, too go a miss in the blink of an eye.

Points fed in by myself and the other teammates sometimes fell to deaf ears, perhaps for the better, yet on the other hand it does make you think of how different you as an individual would like it to turn out, in comparison to how it eventually turned out from a group's effort.

When watching back and viewing other's works, it was clear to see that a tree and box story in origin had so much potential! The ideas were really witty, and constant, showing that group work has the ability to bring out alot of ideas! Even if they're not very strong, peers can help build on them and progress onwards from there. Nuclear wars, flying houses, spiders, Mrs. Pacman, all in no way connected, yet all making their way into the box and tree story! - such is the nature of Multimedia: the huge opportunity and potential of what can be produced. You seriously can make so much from so very little. In fact, it's one of the main reasons I signed up.

snappy happy

During Induction week, one of the more bizarre requests to bring along to the lecture was a can of beer... all be it an empty can of beer, but none the less this formed the basis of what would turn into a simple but still effective camera: PINHOLE photography!

The process of turning a 440ml can into a image capturing device turned out to be a relatively simple process. The most interesting part - my first experience of a dark room. On the funny side there were shenanigans to do with bumping into people, yet coming face to face with a process which can now more or less be deemed "something from the olden days" was almost like revisiting science class: learning which baths of solution did what, finding out how long would be required to develop the photo, not over stepping the mark and leaving them too long. Then the scanning: inverting your negative image on Photoshop to make some sort of sense of it all! I've never done it before, but really enjoyed the creative process, especially as I was able to watch it all from start to finish and pick up techniques to better my next occasion when processing a photograph.

The first shot came out quite well in my opinion: it wasn't blurred, you can see something in it and I hadn't gotten fingerprints etc all over it in the dark room! It has to it almost a brooding, ominous feel you could say - horror film type setting.

I didn't mess around too much with the settings on Photoshop-just having a quick nudge with the contrast settings because of the time constraints and urge to want to try again with another shot.

Admittedly I would probably try to lighten it/remove the strong sentiment of darkness in the photo if I were to sit down and look at it again. It certainly isn't a complete failure, but as always, in any creative field, you can always work on and adjust, to improve your work.

The second shot has a different feel. Firstly, the misty haze could have been due to exposure to too much light, and the vertical lines that split the photo into three sections were down to the curl/fold of the paper in the can. All the photographs taken by students were by no rule of thumb - 'shutter open for 2.5 seconds precisely!' for example. Depending on the strength of the light and placing of the sun meant that some sort of luck came into knowing exactly how long to keep the shutter open.

I do like the way the steps are in the forefront of the picture though and sort of lead you down into the centre of the picture (the pinhole eye shape encompasses the main subjects of the picture).

A second time around for this photo I think would have me looking for more interesting perspectives and different views of the world. Positioned at the bottom of somebody's feet and creating a giant effect would be quite obscure, but cool - a sort of 'worm's eye view!'

Overall, for my first attempt at pinhole photography, I'm pleased and surprised at how simple, but really effective the photographs can turn out. Even if the image was to be shady or blurred, a touch up on Photoshop can put that right and so this is one area that has opened my eyes - a beer can, a black piece of paper and a hole poked in the side can be just as fun and resultive, as the computer packed worlds we're all wrapped up in nowadays.

Signing out again...

@

"lets start at the very beginning"

Welcome week is all but done so now the last little thing to do (apart from catch up on much needed sleep!) is to create my first post.

On my Multimedia course I really hope to get involved and learn about all the technology there is available to use; hardware: cameras, video cameras, mics, projectors, but also the many pieces of software for photos, videos, sound, websites, games, design. -Not just to simply learn, but to be able to employ with great results, exploit to great effect - "all in the name of art!"

In addition, the potential to put all the ideas I have into a real form, due to the nature of the course, but also because I now have the time, and chance to, I am really looking forward to. Being with creative likeminded people means potential - collaborating with peers, where we can plan, work and then rework ideas to get the best final product. On the other side of this though, the chance to develop on my own, developing my individual potential, is a great attraction because I like doing 'my own thing'. - A help or a hindrance, I don't know yet, but will no doubt find out in due course. Lastly, and hopefully(!), the whole point of being here (apart from the fun) is to get a decent job at the end, so to further pinpoint the area to pursue a career; through my experience of the various topics on offer, finding my strengths and weaknesses etc, would be a real boon!

During the first week here at NTU, quite alot of it was spent, as expected, living a nocturnal life! Went out, dressed up in jungle fare, beach wear and Gill St branded t's, to the parties at the SU, the SU, and then again, at the SU! Oceana, Media Gatecrasher as well. The queues at the bar took ages though, walking home getting a drink and then coming back would have been quicker!

I joined the Film Society which stripped me of a tenner before I could sign my name on the dotted line! Picked up quite a few freebies from Freshers Fayre - great opportunity to stock me up on pens for the year! There was loads on to do, yet, I just didn't have the energy!! A 1 minute rest turned into a forty minute slumber! -Week two should be official rest week!

Well, that's more or less all for now...so until next time, OVER and OUT!

-@