David Walker's Journal

Adobe Live 2007

2007-06-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

I have decided to pursue the Web pathway and i have been thinking of ways i can prepare and improve my knowledge, so i can hit the ground running when we return in september.

So when i came across an advert for the Adobe Live 2007 exhibition i thought it would be a great place to start, get some insight into where web design is headed and check out the new cs3 software aswell.

Despite the main hall of the event feeling like a huuuge sales pitch for the cs3 stuff, the professionals giving talks made it worth while. My highlights of the show were as follows -

Kieron Matthews

This talk was about internet advertising. As marketing director for the Internet Advertising Bureau he provided valuable insight into this rapidly developing market. Something that particularly interested me was that he pinpointed advertising within online games (also console games) as an area that is currently under exploited but is showing signs of taking off within the next few years.

This is a screen shot from the game Second Life, with a Sony BMG logo in the background, just one example of how advertising within online games is starting to take off. Advertising is a big part of the internet and is something i am keen to explore in the future.

Rob Lawrence

"From functional to funky – online shopping is changing from a drill down, list based, task oriented, smash and grab dullfest into the most exciting thing you can do in your spare time.
Rob Lawrence looks at where we've come from in online shopping and shows where we're going as broadband, flash and hardcore e-commerce collide creating a rich, deep and immersive online shopping experience on a single page."

Watch Rob's talk by clicking the picture below

I found this to be a highly engaging talk, and it has really encouraged me to think outside of the box. To start taking risks, not just to stick to what is generally expected and accepted.

Neville Brody

One of Britains foremost graphic designers gave this talk on where he thinks the graphic design industry is at the moment and where it should be going. Graphic design is something i am becoming really interested in and it is highly relevant to web design. I found this talk to be really interesting, much for the same reasons as Rob Lawrence's. The overall message from Brody was that he feels people have become afraid to think outside of the box, and we have become submissive to societies apparent want for simple, dumbed down design and messages.

It is very easy to look at whats out there now and follow it too closely, risk taking is something that needs to be done to move things forward and has given me plenty of food for thought. I think i have been scared to take risks in my work this year and in hindsight it has limited me more than i realised at the time.

So thats my thoughts on the Adobe live event, i picked up some inspiring words from several professionals and got a look at all the shiny new cs3 software, it rocks and i want it!

Actionscript Task

2007-05-23T17:04:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks we have been learning the basics of actionscript. This culminated in us being set a task to create a actionscript based game.

I chose to adapt something i had done earlier in the year, a small flash animation about 5 a side football. Click here to see the original

This task has been a useful one, i intend to delve a lot deeper into flash and actionscript and now i have a grasp of the basics i can build on them and hopefully produce a lot more impressive work in the future.

Click on the thumbnail below to see the final result

Same But Different - Reflection on a failure

2007-05-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

Another belated update here, this time focusing on the Same but Different task. We were set this task earlier in the year, read about it here

When the time came to present this my group and i were left wanting, we didnt complete the task on time and to be honest let ourselves down. Despite the abject failure of this task i can still take a lot from it. Trying to quickly hash something together at the last minute as Jools was asking us to present made me feel a bit of a twat and is not really a situation i want to be in again.

With every group task i have done this year there has been difficulties with communcation and planning, something that i need to improve upon greatly in future group work.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

For the record, we did actually have a plan and were on the way to completing. The idea was to have a map of nottingham and to place hotspots on the map at the site of each abandoned kebab box. It was to be presented as some kind of crime investigation/database kinda thing.

Here are a few screenshots of how it was starting to take shape

So that was the same but different task, a shame that we didnt get it completed but some valuable lessons learned in the process.

Site Specific Performance Review ( better late than never!)

2007-05-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

You may recall earlier in the year we had a task of putting on a site specific performance about a famous person hailing from Nottingham.

You can read about this in my earlier blog posts here and here (excuse the shocking last minute attempts at flyers, they were awful)

Well i had intended to give a review of how the actual performance went right after we did it, we filmed the perfomance and i was waiting to edit the footage and post it up here. Sadly the person who recorded it never gave me the tape and as Idents arrived i totally forgot about this.

So better late than never, here is my summary of events!

Apart from a few organisational hiccups everything went very well, we delivered a good performance i feel and taught our audience some important historical facts.

Our performance took the shape of a guided tour around St Marys Church, at each point on the tour the audience were given a piece of a puzzle. Once the tour had been completed the identity of the subject was revealed as George Africanus and as we stood over his grave the pieces of the puzzle were put together to reveal a picture of him.

This was an interesting task, quite a difficult one to come up with ideas for but i was pleased with how the end result turned out. I feel with a bit more organisation and teamwork we could have enhanced the experience with more visual aids rather than just talking to people.

One last poster

2007-05-09T03:13:00.000-07:00

Throughout my project ive been thinking of ideas for an overall trent media poster, one that advertises all elements. But due to my design approach of being uncluttered and fairly minimalist its been difficult to fit all 3 elements together without compromising those things, so i settled for just using the individual posters.

But last night as i was looking at my website i thought i would try and have one more go, i have been experimenting with different ideas and have decided to go for a layout that is similar to the information pages on my site. With images hovering over the corners of a simple rounded box, and ive continued the theme of being simple and direct with the text. Ive played on a sub-theme thats developed throughout my project which is the use of the words 'Listen Read Watch' under the main logos by including 3 images that reflect those words.

Right that was quickly heading into the land of birdseye potato Waffle! So here is the design, not sure whether i will actually include it in my final submission as it isnt quite up to the standard of the others, but i shall make a decision once i get it back from the printers.

The Business Card

2007-05-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

Just 3 days to go now before its all wrapped up and handed in, so with that in mind i think its about time i update you on some of the elements of my package that ive yet to talk about on here.

First up, the business card. This can be handed out by any trent media representative when they are out filming/recording/reporting and is a quick and easy way of advertising.

After talking to several students the overiding opinion was that they would be more receptive to a business card than a flyer and would take it more seriously, but they key element in this is that it would be handed out after the people have seen trent media out and about and had spoken to them, or been filmed by them. Its not just designed to be handed out randomly on the street, as i dont think it would work too well as a standalone piece.

It is something that is already in operation by the current trent media team and it was one of the ways that i found out about them. I saw them filming and was intruiged and the business card with the relevant e mail and web addresses was given to me which i was then able to follow up. I beleive this is something that should be continued within my identity.

So here is the design, nice and simple as with everything else.

Front

Back

Podcasts part 2

2007-05-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

Whilst i was playing around with the podcast page for my website earlier it got me thinking about my poster design advertising the fly fm podcasts.

The original entry about that poster can be viewed by clicking here

It was the first poster i designed and i had kinda forgotten about it, and my design approach has moved on slightly since then so i thought it was appropriate to go back and revise it with the deadline so close.

I simply replaced the photo of the ipod with my fireworks mock up, changed the text and included the logo at the top of the page rather than just on the ipod.

I think this one fits in a lot better with the 'identity concept' than the original. It's clean and simple, if your reading this please leave a comment and tell me what you think

Podcasts part 1

2007-05-06T15:36:00.000-07:00

Today ive been continuing to work on my idents project and i have been concentrating mainly on the website, all the content is in place and the page layouts are sorted, just got to add a few little touches here and there.

This evening ive been specifically working on the Fly FM downloads page, i made a little ipod graphic using fireworks and edited a picture i took of a studio microphone to include next to some text informing the user what they could download.

The studio mic is still a little rough and ive been struggling a lot with tracing the outline in photoshop, this is about as clean as i can get it and ive used fairly heavy feathering to try and hide some of the scrappy edges, i dont think it looks too bad though.

Here is the page...

Web Design - Compatibility Issues Arrgghhhh

2007-05-04T06:01:00.000-07:00

I'm finally making some progress with my website, which is good because the deadline is less than a week away! However ive been quite naive so far in designing my site, ive been happily designing away looking at my pages on my nice 1280x1024 size monitor and it all looks splendid.

So whats the problem? Well i found out today that 49% of web users still use 800x600 size monitors, my question to these people is WHHHYYYYYYY! 49% is a hefty chunk of potential viewers to my site so i'm going to have to rethink some of my page layouts and try and get them to be viewable in smaller windows.

Here are the articles ive got my information from

http://www.jgtemplates.com/learn/web/browser001.asp

http://www.webmonkey.com/99/41/index3a_page2.html?tw=design

Although this could be a significant problem, it might not be as bad as i first thought. I'm willing to bet that although 49% of total web users still have stupidly small screens my specfic target audience is unlikely to have the same problems. The majority of university students will have a computer that is up to date and fairly new and i beleive most of the computers on campus facilities will be 1024x768 if not bigger. With that in mind maybe i can breathe easily and not completly overhaul the design of my site, however what ive just said is an assumption and something i need to verify,quickly!

With this in mind ive been changing the layout and size of my pages today and heres the results

Weve gone from this (suitable for viewing only in 1280x1024, anything smaller and you wont be able to see everything without scrolling, scrolling is bad)

To this (viewable in 1024x760 without any problems)

The E mail - Part 2

2007-04-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Ive been playing around with my e mail again, and its proving to be a bit of a headache. Essentially its just an image, that would be put into dreamweaver and either sliced up or hotspotted(is that a word?) and i'm starting to question its relevance.

However questioning members of my target audience has indicated that as long as the subject and sender is someone they respected they would open and read the e mail. Which is all i need, because once weve reached that point the content and design of the e mail will overwhelm them into visiting the website (perhaps?)

But its just feeling a bit flat, like a watered down version of the website at the moment.

I have also been trying to find ways of actually loading it to a server and sending it properly as an e mail, but that has been very problematic. Half the images wont upload correctly, and i cant seem to get it to format properly into an e mail.

Maybe i shouldve listened to all those web articles that said HTML e mails are a bad bad thing!

http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml

Oh well, in the hope that i do sort it out and get it working as an e mail then this is what it would look like

Website Design - Tables and Images

2007-04-27T12:54:00.000-07:00

With time running out until the deadline of my project ive been working hard on my website today. Ive had to rely on the use of tables and linking images together in dreamweaver, its not ideal and isnt good practice but for now it'll have to do until my CSS skills are up to scratch.

Design wise i'm sticking with the simple,direct style that is constant throughout my project

Here is the homepage of my site, its straight to the point and serves as a node where users can choose which of the 3 medias they would like to visit. The header is a png image created in fireworks and the 3 smallers logos across the middle of the page is a gif image created in photoshop, to make each logo linkable i just created hotspots over them in dreamweaver. All fairly basic stuff, but i think its ok from a visual point of view.

Next up is a potential page for the Fly fm section, displaying the different shows available to download as podcasts. This is one was layed out using a basic table and the boxes are png files created in fireworks

Website Intro

2007-04-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

Ive spent much of today working on a short flash into for my site. Its taken quite some time to get it right but finally it is ready.

I will of course have a skip intro button as i know lots of people can find these things annoying, but for those that do watch it it helps to strengthen the concept of 3 medias as one.

Click the thumbnail below to watch the movie, ignore the slight blurring in places thats because the movie gets converted from the original swf format upon upload and loses some quality. The final version on my site will be smooth vector paradise!

Oh not another poster!

2007-04-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

Its 12.20pm on Monday night and i have been sitting here all night struggling to get to grips with my website, currently it is in a right mess. So out of frustration and boredom i abandoned it and decided to create another poster/flyer design.

This idea came to me when i was playing around with the layout of my logos on my site. When postioned correctly the combination of my main logo and any of other 3 logos look a bit like a clapper board.

So this is what came out of that little bit of inspiration.

I dont like it much at all to be honest, but i guess its all trial and error.

At this point i think its appropriate to comment on my audience, naturally in a project such as this your audience should always be priority. Theres no point producing work that pleases me if my audience thinks its crap, however in this case i find myself in the posistion of actually being part of my target audience.

Does that mean i can just continue to produce matierial without asking anyone else if they like it? No of course not but it does give me some ingisht into the sort of things that will be popular or not and is a significant help as a continue to progress.

The e mail

2007-04-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

As part of my package i am also producing an HTML E mail, this is part of my concept of reaching out to more people and making Trent Media as a brand more pro active. I used a tutorial from those clever people at computer arts magazine to make this, the results are ok but i'm not sure they fit in with all my other design work that well. I will continue to experiment and will look to create one from scratch now i have the techniques, its all about slicing and saving for web in Photshop.

Click here to view the tutorial...

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/new_media/branding_online

So here is the finished results, ive uploaded it as an image file so you cant click on the links or anything but it isnt just an image, its an HTML page with working links.

Some more poster designs

2007-04-17T06:23:00.000-07:00

Ive been working on some more poster designs today, one for Fly fm and one for Trent TV.

These posters have been designed to encourage people to get involved with Trent Media and also to just view its output. I'm trying to keep a certain amount of continuity amongst my poster designs so they all have black text on white backgrounds and are largely clutter free, i'm consciously trying to be different to the effects laden brightly coloured posters that are everywhere on campus.

So below are the two designs ive come up with today, they are only first attempts and will be refined further over the coming days.

More Web Design

2007-04-16T17:27:00.000-07:00

I have been travelling further down the photoshop design route, i like where its heading but a part of me does feel like a fraud,ha!

Well this time ive been experimenting with designs for the podcast page which will be in the Fly Fm section.

Take a look at the pics below to see the refinement process so far...

Website Design

2007-04-16T03:10:00.000-07:00

I have recently been spending my time working on the design of my website for Trent Media. Its been a difficult process as i find it very frustrating at my skills not being as good as i'd like, i am learning a lot but its a slow process. You cant become a web design guru overnight!

I have been experimenting with different methods of design, initially i was going for a more traditional approach and creating the whole site in dreamweaver. I have also played with the idea of a CSS based design but that proved too difficult at this stage. Another approach that i have considered is creating the design in photoshop and just linking images together using dreamweaver, this approach is being used by Gav Cooper for his Idents project and after discussing it with him the other day i decided to give it a go too.

Each approach has its good and bad points, the dreamweaver approach is more technically sound and would make for a more accessible site. Designing it in Photoshop gives me more freedom over the aesthetics and can make for a more visually pleasing design, but would be a bit of a shortcut way of doing things.

I have not yet decided which approach to go for yet, which is probably a bad thing but i will have made a decision within a few days and will crack on with getting the whole site finished.

Here are the results of my experimentation thus far....

This is the design made entirely in dreamweaver

This is the design made in photoshop

Online Branding Tutorial

2007-04-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across this recently thought it may be helpful to people in relation to the idents module.

http://www.computerarts.co.uk/tutorials/new_media/create_a_brand_package

A word on why my blog has not been updated much recently, my crappy net connection at home does something weird to my pictures when i upload them and makes them go all fuzzy so ive decided to not post anything until i get back to uni where i can upload photos to go with my words

Farewell for now

Idents - Poster Designs

2007-04-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

Ive been playing with this poster design right from the earliest design stage of my project. It's for Fly FM and is designed to promote downloading podcasts onto your iPod or mp3 player.

I like the simplicity of it and the use of the i pod will instantly draw peoples attention, but those same factors might work against me. The use of the iPod and the simplistic apple like design it kinda makes it look too much like an advert for the iPod and not Fly FM. Another problem is assuming that everyone has an iPod, which is clearly not the case as there are a wide variety of mp3 players on the market but i think people will get the idea.

So here is the design, i imagine it will be tweaked and played around with before the final hand according to the problems i discussed above, but from a purely visual stand point i really like it

My Final Logo

2007-03-15T06:10:00.000-07:00

At last i have come to a decision on the final designs of my logos! Its been a drawn out process but a very rewarding one as i have done lots of research into what makes a good logo. I feel ive learned a lot from this process, its very easy to just choose your design too quickly and gloss over the details but i wanted to make sure i chose the right design for the right reasons.

I had been experimenting with 3d effects,glow effects,changing the shape of the background,different fonts and in the end i felt it all got a bit too much. So i decided to go back to basics and keep it 2-d as this will work best in print and equally well for the web.

So here they are

This is the main Trent Media logo. After experimenting with the Eurostile font i decided to revert back to Myriad Web Pro. You may also notice that i have used lowercase, i changed this because i think it looks more friendly and just more aesthetically pleasing than uppercase. The grey border rounds the design off nicely and gives me the options of placing it on a white or black background with it standing out on either colour.

This is my secondary logo for Trent Media. By taking out the red t:m from the main logo i can use it in conjunction with the individual logos for fly,platform and trent tv or i can use it on its own if neccessary. It will increase continuity of my ident constantly reminding that each part belongs to the trent media family. This will also work well when i dont have space to fit the full trent media logo, for instance on my business cards and bottle openers.

Here are the 3 logos for the 3 parts of trent media. Each one has a colon included in the design which will remind people of the main trent media logo and they all have the t:m in the corner which will again enforce the point that they are all part of the same family. There is the possibility of animation for the website, i'm thinking that each logo can appear from behind the t:m gradually on each separate page.

There are still a few issues to address such as the file formats and getting all the sizes to match each other. If the logo is constantly changing size on each page of the website then it will look poor. But the overall design and concept is finished as you can see. Now onto the small matter of the website and dvd, oh and the posters and the business card and the bottle openers, aaarrrrrggggghhhhhh!!!

An interesting discovery

2007-03-06T19:19:00.000-08:00

Its 3.21 am and i cannot sleep, i decided to try and do some work on my seemingly never ending logo process. I was doing some research and i found this site called Pimp my safari, something to do with a web app for macs. The interesting part was the typeface and colour scheme of the logo. Take a look, notice anything familiar?

Yes thats right they use the same font and colour scheme as i have chosen for my Trent Media logo, what a coincidence! I dont know whether to be encouraged by this, that i have chosen the same style as a professional organisation or whether to be annoyed that someone else got there first.

It's interesting to note that they use grey also in and around the logo. This is something ive been considering but think that it makes it look a bit to corporate and serious. I want my logo to be professional but it still needs to appeal to my target audience which is students, it cant be too corporate or i feel it will be dismissed as boring.

Photoshop brilliance!

2007-03-04T10:44:00.000-08:00

If you think your good at Photoshop then watch the below video and think again!

Same but Different

2007-03-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

Recently we were set a task to get into groups for a project called 'Same but Different'. This task involved choosing a mundane object and taking photos of it, and showing how different instances of a mundane object might initially look the same but can actually be quite different depending on the environment its in.

Not sure ive really explained that too well, as i update you on the projects progress in the coming weeks i'm sure it will become more evident to you. Anyway i bet your wondering what object my group chose? Well we went for that staple of student life that is the 'kebab box'. The small polystyrene boxes you get your doner meat and chips in of a night out.

Below are some of the pictures i took for the initial stage of the project.

The next step of the project is to gather all the groups photos and construct them into some sort of order. We are considering doing some kind of interactive map of the city, looking at the relationship between the student areas and the amount of discarded kebab boxes and also whether it has anything to do with a lack of bins.

Store Wars

2007-02-28T10:23:00.000-08:00

I was shown this link by my girlfriend, who apparently saw this on Richard and Judy, and i thought it was hilarious. Thats all ive really got to say, just sit back and watch the 5 minutes of magic that is 'Store Wars'

Ive had Surgery

2007-02-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

No i'm not injured or ill in anyway, but i earlier this week i intended a graphics 'surgery' with Roma Patel. It was pretty helpful and i showed her my logo designs to see what she thought and to gain some feedback.

The main thing that came out of it was that i should continue to explore the curved border for my logo as it reflects television/computer screens which is of course related to media.

The square design for the border has been commented on by a number of people and they have all likened it to a number plate or car logo. Not neccessarily a bad thing but still probably not the effect i'm looking for. So with those comments in mind i went back to the design drawing board and below are some of the latest refinements of my designs

Here i have gone back to a curved shape and i have added a glow behind the text. I have also toned down the border of the logo, the previous bevel effect was a bit too heavy and overbearing i feel.

This is the same as above except with a different colour for the glow and its a fuller glow too.

Yet more bloody logos!

2007-02-24T08:41:00.000-08:00

I am still experimenting with logo's, its a frustrating process when your searching for the right look. I made a breakthrough today though, ive started to use Macromedia Freehand as i like the effects it offers you and its relatively easy to use.

Anyway so my latest ideas look something like this, i really like them and for now they are in my opinion the best version yet, please leave comments if you read this and let me know what you think

This was the first attempt, i used the Bevel and Emboss effect to give it a sort of 3D effect and to create a nice border around the edge. I also used the fish eye lense function to change the shape of the box.

Then i refined the design on this idea, went for the original rectangle shape and used an inner emboss rather than an outer emboss for the border. I think this is more effective, but it will be tested on an audience sample before finalised.

Website Usability

2007-02-23T07:16:00.000-08:00

In our seminar today we learnt about website usability, this was a very interesting seminar. Highly relevant to the Idents module, i hadnt thought about any of the usability issues relating to websites before this session so its definetly something i'll be considering when constructing my website

If you are making a proper accessible site you must consider people that use text only browsers, people that are visually impaired such as blind people or colour blind people, or even just the elderly. Also people that use screen readers need to be considered, if your website isnt properly coded then someone using a screen reader will not be able to understand your site.

I have tested the usability of a few sites and evaluated them in the report below, click the link to download the document.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/2/2/725270/Website%20Usability%20Seminar%20Evaluation.doc

Forget Trent Media,what about my Identity!

2007-02-22T13:12:00.000-08:00

Hello reader, as you are probably aware by now i'm heavily into my idents project and i am actually quite fascinated by the whole issue of 'Identity' it can be taken in a number of different contexts and when you think about it it's so important. Identity defines who we are, defines who a company are, what they stand for, without Identity then you are nothing.

This got me thinking about my own Identity, what is it? What do i stand for? What do i represent? What do i beleive in? Where am i going, where have i been? How should i present my Identity to the world?

This train of thought led me to think about creating my own Identity, in the same way i'm creating one for Trent Media. I want to eventually move my blog to my own independently hosted site and i want that to be the basis for my new Identity. I want a place to showcase my work and who i am, and i want that place to be synonomous with my Identity.

I have been doing some research and have found some cool blogs which relate to what ive just been saying, take a look at these

This a blog i randomly stumbled across by a web designer called Christopher Scott. His blog is really nicely designed, and it contains lots of useful links for web design related stuff. It was of particular interest to me because he is currently in the process of re-designing his own logo and I.D and i found it helpful reading some of the commentary on that process.

http://www.christopher-scott.org/

This is the site for a company called Hicks Design, an oxford based web design company. I found this through a link on Christopher Scott's site, and the blog entry that interested me in particular was the one about the re-design of the company logo. He detailed his design process and gave reasons for his eventual decisions, this again was a valuable reading exercise. It made me see how much thought must go into things like this on a professional level. I really like the new design of the Hicks brand, to see more visit the site.

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/tag/logo/

Thats just two sites of the millions of bloggers out there, i just happened to stumble across these two as i went on my everyday journey through the web. Which makes me think about what else is out there that i havent even seen, that i may never see. Anyway, it has all got me thinking about whats possible for the future. In the meantime ive got the small matter of my Identity Project to be getting on with so farewell for now.

Flash Experimentation

2007-02-21T05:48:00.000-08:00

Ive been experimenting in Flash lately as i want to use it for part of my Ident website, but ive found its quite a frustrating process at times. The animation below took me the best part of 2 hours, but i'm working through a textbook and slowly everything is starting to make sense.

Anyway, what you see below is a top down view of a game of 5 a side football, me and my mates play every friday in the uni league. We keep conceding goals because of poor marking and i made this to demonstrate where we are going wrong. My team is the red circles, notice how two of them are not in posistion at the start which leads to the rest of the team having to move out of posistion to compensate, which leads to the opposistion scoring. Hmmm, if that made any sense then watch the video below....

Identities - Yet More Logo Experimentation

2007-02-20T16:33:00.000-08:00

Hello all, ive been continuing my work on my Trent Media logo, i'm still not satisfied with it. From the previous post it seems logo D is the most popular,however thats only from 11 people. I plan to take to the streets of nottingham and ask some random students for their thoughts.

For now have a look at some of my experimentations....

I used Macromedia Freehand to create a 3D effect for this idea, i like it but not sure how good it will look in print. I think this would be better suited to an animation for the website

For this design i simply changed the font from Myriad Pro to Eurostile, not sure which one i prefer at the moment.

I received a helpful comment from Rimante on my last post. She mentioned i should try putting a white border around the logo to make it stand out a bit more, i had not considered doing that but i think it could be very effective so i'm gonna try different variations of that.

Thats all for now, i'll be posting more frequent updates on Identities from now on so keep checking back to follow my progress ( i bet your excited!)

Trent Media Logo - Cast your votes

2007-02-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

Ive been thinking of ways to gain public opinion on my Trent Media designs so i decided to conduct a poll on my blog. This will also serve the purpose of showing me if anyone actually reads this thing too!

Please bare in mind that image quality will not be at its highest due to the constraints of this page, but you can still get an idea of how the logo will look when finished.

So take a look at the 4 logos below and vote for your favorite

B

C

Identities - An update

2007-02-02T09:40:00.000-08:00

Hello all, ive been working on my Idents project for some time now so i thought it was about time i gave you an update on my thoughts and progress (or lack of as the case may be)

As soon as we were first given the brief i decided almost instantly to choose Trent Media. As i am already involved with Trent Media, in particular Fly FM and to a lesser extent Trent TV i knew there was massive room for improvement on the whole image/brand of Trent Media.

So over the last month or so ive been steadily researching and thinking about designs, ive found this quite a frustrating project, yet strangely enjoyable at the same time. Its very hard without ever having tackled a project of this nature before to figure out the best process to use. No matter how much research i do i always find something else which changes my thinking completely and brings me back to square one. I am creating a separate journal document which will cover in much more detail my progress, i'll try to keep it fairly brief and to the point on here, keep an eye out for that soon.

I am writing this in the middle of a mini panic about my design board presentation on monday, i have plenty of matierial and ideas but trying to mould it all into a coherent presentation is proving to be a big challenge, but i will get there in the end, i have to!

Thats it for now, i'll leave you with one of my designs for flyers, my logos still need work so ive decided to keep the exisiting logos for these designs...

Flyer

Site Specific Performance

2007-01-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

Hello there,

It is the eve of our Site Specific Performance, and i can exclusively reveal, that it is about George Africanus ( i doubt anyone will look at this between now and tomorow so the suprise hopefully wont be spoilt)

I have completed my preparations for it tonight, i have finished the script for my section and have also made some flyers and printed them off to hand out at the end of our performance. They are just a bit of fun, and will hopefully give people something to think about after they leave.

The idea centres around finding Georges bloodline, its yet to be traced to this day so i came up with the notion of doing a film like poster, as a sequel to the Da Vinci Code.

Sadly i didnt think of this till it was too late to use it as an advertisement, otherwise it would have been a good promotional tool

Anyway here are the few designs i created, i went for the black one in the end as i feel it stands out head and shoulders above the white versions (poster positive descrimination alert!)

I created these using Flash, i traced over the picture of George and then just added some basic text, i played around with different colours and fill effects until finding results i was happy with.

So tomorow is the day of reckoning so to speak, i hope all goes well, its been a good experience thus far, i'll update you on the results tomorow

Farewell for now....

Christian Marclay - Video Quartet

2007-01-19T13:50:00.000-08:00

Evening all, over the christmas holidays i decided to visit the Tate Modern gallery in London with my girlfriend. It was an interesting experience, i find the majority of displays there to be completly ludicrous and pretentious beyond belief however in a darkened room tucked away at the back of one of the halls i stumbled across a tremendous piece by a man called Christian Marclay.

Entitled 'Video Quartet' it is 4 large screens each playing footage of music performances from popular films. Each screen has different clips and no two screens ever have the same clip running at the same time, its kinda hard to explain but sitting there in front of these giant screens i was mesmerised for 10 minutes. They are so well edited together that its almost as if they were designed to be heard that way, the mixture of sounds is awesome one minute you'll have 4 quaint slow piano solos then all of a sudden like a wave of noise crashing down the images will turn to full orchestras booming out majestically. It really is a fascinating piece and i urge anyone with an interest in music and/or video editing to seek it out and watch it if they have the chance.

Site Specific Performance

2007-01-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

Greetings, back to normal course related stuff now. Weve recently been set a task by Arty/Performancy/Media man Dominic Shaw to produce a site specific performance. We have been put into groups and each given a person to base our performance around. The person we have been given is George Africanus.

Today we had a meeting to bring together our research findings and decide on an idea. We came up with a pretty cool idea for our performance but i dont want to give anything away so you'll have to attend to see what it turns out like!

After the meeting Glyn and I went on a location hunting trip, we looked at two churches that were relevant to George, St Peter's Church is where he was married and St Mary's Church is where he is buried.

Here are some images of the churches that i took today...

I'm enjoying this project and am pleased that all of my group is enthusiastic about it. Hopefully our idea will come to life just as we plan and it will be a successful performance. I think things like this are really helpful to me as they encourage me to think outside of the box and just be as creative as i can, its always been something ive found hard thinking of ideas but tasks like this can only help me. I'll update you on the progress of our performance after the next meeting, farewell till then!

Educating the Masses Part 1 - Lewis Taylor

2007-01-14T09:27:00.000-08:00

Hello, for my next installment i have decided to focus on something thats not at all related to my course. Its just part of me, in the faint hope of anyone reading this blog i thought it would be a good oppurtunity to educate readers in what i beleive to be the finest music known to man. Hopefully people will like it, be open minded and just give it a try you never know!

I'll start by presenting a run down of my favorite albums week by week, the first installment in this musical lesson is......

Lewis Taylor - Lewis Taylor (1996)

Lewis Taylor is a multi instrumentalist and singer/songwriter from Barnet,England. Quite simply this man is a genius, his music is rather hard to describe its extremely influenced by soul but equally by classic rock and even the beach boys have been cited as a key influence. This album released in 1996 is his self titled debut, critically acclaimed and a commercial failure. Lewis plays every instrument sings every vocal track and has a hand in the production of every aspect of the album. Its a magnificent piece of work, dark and atmospheric with heavy baselines and complex layered harmonies. I cannot find words to describe just how highly i rate this album, unclassifiable yet incomparable genius, this album is quite hard to come across these days so i have provided a link below for one of my favorite tracks on the album, entitled 'Damn'. I hope you enjoy

Damn

GooTube Conspiracy

2007-01-05T08:30:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone and wishing you a happy new year!

For my first post of the new year i thought i would take a break from the academic related things and inform you of this interesting channel ive found on YouTube. It is called the GooTube Conspiracy and it all started with a man called 'Nalts' posting a video comment about YouTube being sold to Google, he was quite critical about this and it lead to a series of follow on movies of how google and youtube had teamed up and were out to get him, the interesting part of it all is that other YouTube users have contributed along the way creating a sort of interactive ever changing story. I think this is a really creative use of YouTube and the potential for similar projects in the future is huge.

Take a look at this season one recap, season two is about to start shortly and anyone can contribute so if you enjoy what you see maybe you could be part of the ever evolving GooTube Conspiracy...

Ere Be Dragons!

2007-01-03T08:55:00.000-08:00

Towards the end of last term we had some seminars from the people behind a game called 'Ere Be Dragons'. It is an interactive game that utilises GPS technology to give its user a unique experience. I found it a very interesting and encouraging experience to actually talk to someone who has left university and found relative success in their chosen industry, theres hope for me yet godammit!

Here is a link to the group behind 'Ere Be Dragons' website

http://www.i-am-ai.net/home.html

Theres some fascinating stuff on this site, the company Active Ingredient have many projects on display and are clearly a very talented bunch of people. I like the general style of the website, they way everything is drawn with a pencil before your eyes. Check out the play section where you can draw onto a background and save what you come up with for other people to see, very cool feature!

In the seminars we had with the people from this company we were encouraged to create ideas for our own interactive game. Myself and Will came up with an idea for a kind of treasure hunt game that you can play in your own house using GPS technology in the same way as 'Dragons'. I found this quite a useful lesson as it was good to sit down and just come up with something off the top of my head and then talk to someone who has actually done this for real. We were told how this would be possible to implement properly and its good to know that technology like this is out there and getting better all the time.

National Space Centre - Leicester

2007-01-03T08:48:00.000-08:00

Recently a course trip to the National Space Centre in Leicester was organised, it was a good oppurtunity to observe multimedia exhibitions working and to see how people interact with them.

There were many different kinds of multimedia on display but the common denominator was that it was all interactive in some way. Whether it be as simple as pressing a button for an informative video to play or as complicated as a device telling you how scared you are of certain images by you placing your hand on a sensory pad, you could interact with pretty much everything in the centre.

The main attraction at the centre is a 360 degree cinema which shows 3d animated movies, this is an extremely impressive feature and at times the 360 degree environment can you make you feel as if you are actually staring right into space or looking back at the earth. I enjoyed this very much and would recommend anyone to go and see it, not only is it really cool i actually learned quite a bit too about a fascinating subject that is space and the universe.

An interactive display that i liked was one where you had to put your hand on a sensor pad and then look at a series of images. Once you had looked at all the photos it gave you results and told you which image you reacted to most strongly. I thought this was quite interesting and used a nice mixture of technology and human interaction.

Now moving on to a display that i disliked, this was a game where you looked into a webcam which took your photo then imported it onto the screen in front of you. After pressing a series of seemingly meaningless buttons you were sposed to be transformed into an alien, but when that happened it didnt appear to have any relation to original photo. Basically it just stuck a random comptuer generated head of an alien where my picture had been, i thought this was poor and i went away feeling that it was a poor display that i wasted my time on, it tried to be too complicated and just generally didnt work.

So that concludes my feelings on the space centre trip, an interesting day out. If i'm being honest i didnt learn that much about Multimedia but i did learn some fascinating facts about the universe.

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

Pinhole Photography Workshop

2006-12-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

A beer can, some photographic paper and a reel of masking tape. What do these objects have in common? When combined in the right way they are transformed into a fully working camera. This concept fascinated me, so i decided to attend the pinhole camera workshop that was run on the last two days of term.

There were a few technical difficulties on the first day which meant the photos i developed were very cloudy and distorted, but that lead to some interesting results and made the photos quite atmospheric. The beauty of this process is the not knowing and randomness of it all. If you take a photo with a digital camera you have instant results but with this you have to take it back to the dark room and wait to see as your image slowly reveals itself.

Here are some of the pictures i took on the first day...

On the second day Roger had replaced the dodgy lamp in the dark room with one that worked properly and the photos i took were much clearer as a result. As you can see from the examples below

I found this workshop fascinating, the simplicity of it was refreshing. I didnt need to learn any new software or buy a memory stick or recharge the batterys for 24 hours to get only 2 hours use from them! I had my beer can and my paper and i was ready to go, fantastic! I would like to thank Roger and Danny for putting this on, it was a good end to a great term.

Multimedia hits Broadway....

2006-12-13T08:20:00.000-08:00

Today most of the students on our Multimedia course converged at Broadway cinema to attend the first ever screening of all of the narrative coursework films. I was very excited to have my film shown to such a large audience and in a real cinema and was very much looking forward to seeing what my coursemates had produced.

As a whole i thought the standard was very good, i must admit i was expecting a few shockers but i was pleasantly suprised when pretty much every film was of good quality. There were some that stood out more than others of course but i dont think anyone can be dissapointed with how any of them turned out.

A total of 15 films were shown and a variety of different styles were showcased, i found it really interesting to see how each group had decided to portray their narrative story. A few groups used the technique of tracing over photos and animating them in flash which was a very visually pleasing style and made an immediate impact with the audience. A prevalent theme seemed to be death or alcohol/drug abuse, incidentally i thought that whilst they were well crafted, in terms of narrative and making a connection with the audience these films didnt do so well. I beleive its quite easy to take that route of doing a dark,sad themed story but i just thought they concentrated on the images rather than the narrative.

I really enjoyed the films which used flash to trace over photos and animate them. The film about a man falling asleep at work and having a dream about university, this was done in the form of a comic strip, we followed the scenes frame by frame moving across as if it was us the audience reading the comic. This was a powerfull effect and it was very vibrant and colourful. There was another film using this technique but they used an effect to make it look like each shot was a turn of a page, initially this was impressive but i felt that by about halfway i was getting bored with the continuous page turning and the noise was annoying me, it was too repetetive and in my opinion brought down the overall quality of the film.

One group chose to animate their entire film, using flash i presume, and it looked extremely impressive. However their film was pretty much ruined by the fact that the sound didnt work. This left the images looking impressive but was very difficult for it to feel like a completed narrative. This is an important lesson in the perils of not being completly prepared. All their hard work throughout this project has pretty much been for nothing as when they came to showcase there film it failed to work properly and just didnt come across as they intended, a great shame but i will use there misery as a reminder to always be 110% prepared in the future.

Two films that stood out in particular were films that came at the idea of narrative from a totally different perspective. They were more informative documentarys rather than short films. This instantly made me stop and think because i never once considered doing anything like this. When we got the brief i was just thinking about making a traditional film and making it as 'cool' as possible. One of these was about the history of french lounge chairs, it was interesting because it was totally out of left field but i feel they could have made it a lot better by having more images instead of just a moving timeline and a french voice over.

The other was about Discrimination. Instantly this hit home with me, it was strong message delivered excellently. Part of its appeal was the authenticism of it, the people in the film being discriminated have most probably experienced the situations depicted on the screen in real life. This gave the film a strong feeling of realism and made me appreciate what they were saying much more. It also showed that with no sound effects, no animations or any of that stuff they were able to gain everyones attention and produce a great story. Simple is better, i'm learning that more and more as i discover things within this course and this was just another example.

I enjoyed the film about the trainers and loved the way they used the trainers laces as its hands, i also enjoyed the brief moments of stop motion animation in this film. I would have liked to see them use more of it but i imagine its very hard and time consuming. In some ways this film was similar to my own groups film which gave me a different kind of appreciation for what they had done.

There was one film which included photos interacting with animated drawings, entitled ' Cinderella does it again' i loved the idea of what they were trying to do here but i think they didnt really pull it off. Perphaps with more time they wouldve made it a lot better and they did mention that they had plans to use blue screen but had to abandon them. If the drawings were of better quality and more care was taken over the way the photo interacted with them i think this would have been really really good, but still i thought it was a good effort.

A few words now about my own groups film 'Post It'. I was delighted with the reception it got, we had people laughing along enthusiastically. Upon watching this with a large audience, i feel maybe we could have made the ending a bit more dramatic particularly as it follows a humourous sequence of music which everyone laughed at then it fell slightly flat. Saying that though we did receive feedback from one audience member who said they felt really sad for the post it when it died. This is exactly what we intended to and made me feel proud that people connected with our work and understood how we wanted them to feel. Check previous posts to view our film in its entirety.

Thats just about all my thoughts and feelings on todays events, to end heres my top 3 favorite films from today.

1). 9 to 5

This film's use of an animated comic book strip was extremely effective. The sounds and moving camera within the comic books frames combined with the overall colour and style to make for a superb end result.The story actually is very similar to what happened to me and why i came to uni so i liked it because of that too. Well done to Kam,Adam,Gavin and Mia for this, i loved it.

2). Discrimination

Ive commented on this earlier in the post, but once again i must say how impressed i was with this. It was a simple idea executed very well. It left a lasting impression on me about the effects of discrimination and has given me food for thought when attempting similar projects in the future, narrative does not have to be just about making short movies, documentary style pieces can be just as effective as shown here. Well done to Les,Hannah,Rimante and David.

3). The story of the Trainers

I liked the use of stop motion animation in this film, i thought the story was strong and came across very well. The romance seen was superb, loved the way the trainer used its laces as hands and clung onto the high heels, funny stuff! The use of photoshop was also impressive, the way certain elements of objects were coloured in and some were greyed out, i liked that. Overall an entertaining and well produced story. Well done to Paul,Sophie and Neil.

Thats all for today folks

Farewell and Have A Nice Day

My first ever radio interview!

2006-12-12T04:47:00.000-08:00

Hello to everyone,at the start of the year i decided to get involved with Trent media, in particular the radio station Fly FM as i have a strong interest in music and audio. Its been a quiet term and there hasnt been much to do for the station as its relaunching in January. However the first thing i was able to get involved with was interviewing Hip Hop artist TY and reviewing his gig when he performed at Rescue Rooms.

This was a great experience, i found out first hand that its actually quite hard to interview someone, as soon as you know your being recorded you tend to get very nervous and its very different from just having a chat to someone, although ideally thats what it should be like. But this was only my first ever interview and considering that i thought i did pretty well, despite trying to be clever and showing my musical knowledge only to be cut down to size by TY when he noticed my innacuracy, lesson learned!

A bit of background info on TY, he is a hip hop artist from the UK. In 2003 his album 'Upwards' was nominated for the prestigious Mercury music prize and the release of his latest album sees him collaborate with some of hip hops biggest names, most notably De La Soul. For those of you reading this who dont listen to Hip Hop i imaginge you have an image of 50 cent in your head with the stero typical 'gangsta' image. This is not what TY is about, his music is intelligent and well crafted and well worth a listen as he has some important things to say.

For more info on TY check out these links -

http://www.myspace.com/tyandupwards

www.bigdada.com/artist.php?id=33

So now the important part, the actual interview. Click play below to hear the whole interview, its an interesting listen i hope you enjoy it......

Farewell and Have a Nice Day!

Our film is now on YouTube! Watch it here!

2006-12-08T05:51:00.000-08:00

Thats right folks, my groups narrative film is now on YouTube, its live for all the world to see! Click on the player below to watch it and please leave a comment

Report on my Narrative Project

2006-12-07T08:17:00.000-08:00

Hello all, this is my report that i have written on my narrative project. Its fairly long and boring, but if any of you are interested i hope you enjoy.........

This is my report on my narrative film project; I think it is important to establish what I have learned during this project, how ive learned it and how I can implement it into my future experiences to enhance future projects. Throughout my report I will be referring to my group members which were William Woodgate, Hannah Turner- Uaanja and Paul Wimpenny. One final point before I begin, as a general overview of the experience it should be known that I have no prior experience in any of the techniques used in this project so consequently I have learned a great deal but also probably made more mistakes than that of someone with experience, and it is with this perspective that I will be evaluating my narrative.

Starting with the phase of pre production, it is this phase that I feel I paid least attention to. In hindsight this was a costly error and was it not for plenty of hard work during the latter stage of post production it could have been a fatal. Despite my best efforts our group was slow to meet and decide on an idea, once we met we did very little research into the project. Apart from two films that myself and Hannah found (see Appendices 5a and 5b) that influenced us no real research was done until the last minute before our presentation. I have definitely learnt from this experience, at the time I thought everything would be fine and that we’d just decide as we went along with filming. However I see now that the more effort you put into pre production the more smoothly run production and post production will be. We would have had more time to concentrate on filming and editing rather than constantly having to re-jig our schedule around due to poor planning. A key example of this would be the problems with studio lighting during our filming, if we had researched into lighting and perhaps read the books from the reading list or even consulted a member of staff then we would have had a significantly better understanding of what we needed to do. With the use of correct 3 point lighting some of the shots we had to abandon due to excessive shadows would have been saved. Another aspect of preparation and planning is set we used for the bulk of our filming, I was very happy with the set we produced but it was designed and constructed very quickly, due to us not having a proper back up plan in place after our first option wasn’t possible to use. Again if we had researched this more and looked into the conditions of the studio we could have made our set even better and been fully prepared. I take responsibility for this as In our proposal we made it clear that I would be responsible for arranging locations for filming and I realize I let myself down on this occasion, due to naivety and inexperience but rest assured it wont happen again.
That’s not to say our research was all bad, I must give credit to Hannah who showed initiative by posting this on the group forum “I will contact the tram company for nottingham this morning to see if its gonna be alright to film on it”(please see Appendix 1), it was quite a drawn out process and has made me realize that things like this need to be handled as soon as possible as if they are left too late potentially your shoot could be in jeopardy and time and money would be wasted. So I cannot say I have learnt many research skills in this project but I can say that I have learned that it is a very important stage and one that extreme care and attention must be paid to if you are to achieve the best possible end product that you can.

Now let’s move on to the process of teamwork, this was a major factor during this project and the group dynamic had a direct result on all aspects of our work. I have learned a massive amount from this process, some good things some bad things, both will be invaluable experiences for me in the future. As mentioned before our group was slow to meet and took a while to get going, also two of the original line up have not attended this year so straight away we were down to 4 people. The approach we chose to go for was to involve everyone in everything, all decisions were made as a group and by and large carried out as a group, and at the time I believed this to be the fairest and best way to do things. In retrospect I would do things very differently. I have learned that having too many people involved in one process can lead to confusion and can slow down productivity a great deal. For example the editing process, Paul and Will carried out the lion’s share of this whilst Hannah and I sat behind them giving our opinions on everything that was being done and constantly suggesting changes, this lead to frustration from Paul and Will at times as it was difficult for them to get on with the work. Of course it was important for Myself and Hannah to have input into this process as we both had our ideas for how the film should turn out but I believe this would be better implemented by a system of having meetings were edited footage is shown to the group then having detailed feedback that the editors can go away and work with again until a final cut is produced and agreed upon. The reason I feel that this would be so effective is that myself and Hannah did make some notes after seeing one of the first edits and posted them on the group forum (please see Appendix 2) “the sex bit needs to be cut out looks to messy and when she dies the reaction shot needs to be reversed for a better effect” was an observation made by Hannah which proved helpful for Paul to understand what he needed to do, this scene was taken out as suggested and it greatly aided the film. This would have saved a lot of time and still every group member would have felt involved. Communication is a vital issue for any team if they are to be successful then communication must be good. To help us with this we had the use of the online forum, this proved particularly useful as we were able to check on notes from meetings and were able to arrange times to meet and lay out future plans and schedules. For example “We need the office scenes storyboarded by Thursday as that’s when we are filming them.So we need to get together by Tuesday really to get a decent shot at storyboarding together for Thurs.” (Please see Appendice 3) This was helpful for the other group members to view and think about before we met next, it was a helpful organizational tool and one that I would definitely try and make use of in the future. Another aspect of communication we could have used was our online journals, as a group we chose to concentrate on the forum and other more convenient forms of communication. The thing I found the blog useful for was just as a medium to express my thoughts, not for anyone but myself. When talking about the upcoming editing process” I aim to learn a great deal from my group colleagues who have more experience in this than me.”(see Appendice 4) simply by writing down what I felt and how I wanted things to go from here was a useful tool and one that I think enabled me to gain a clearer understanding of how the project was going.

I have learned a vast range of technical skills during this project by taking the teaching given to me in my lectures and seminars and using them to produce the narrative, I feel this is the best way to learn, to actually put the teaching to practical use as if it were the real world. I had never operated a DV camera before attending this course and now I am confident in using one. I have learned how to set the white balance, and to change the settings of the iris to improve the lighting of the shot without changing the actual studio lighting. When it came to the actual filming with us having very limited experience of these conditions we were unsure as the best way to plan our shooting schedule, again some research would have been extremely helpful. Myself and Will took it upon ourselves to compose a list of shots we needed to tell our story (see Appendice 6) and it was helpful to us. However I think in future emphasis must be placed firmly on getting the shots required to tell the story, the story must be in thought at all times and what the audience is thinking. I think we forgot slightly and everyone was just trying to film the ‘coolest’ and best looking shots they could. As a result of that process though I have learned a lot about placement and positioning of the camera when filming and the composition of shots, I believe this is backed up by looking at some of the shots I personally filmed for the narrative and the effectiveness of them. However I do realize that it is only my first real attempt and I have a long way to go before I can consider myself a proficient cameraman. I was able to learn a great deal about video editing by observing Paul and Will using premiere. I had a go at editing a few shots and in particular am proud of the scene where our character ‘Post It’ (affectionately known to the crew as Nige) first lays eyes on his love interest and a short burst of music plays in tandem with the snap of the camera focusing on the object. This scene gained a positive reaction from the audience when we held a test screening so I believe it to be effective and was proud of it seeing as it was my first real go at editing. I now have a fairly good idea of how to use the Adobe Premiere interface and while there is a great more detail to learn I am confident in the basic techniques. A skill that would have been helpful to have known of during the filming would be that of studio lighting, as I mentioned earlier in my report we did not know what we were doing with regards to the lighting and as a consequence had to abandon some potentially good footage. A combination of seminars and independent research has since improved my knowledge of lighting and that allied with the experience of relative failure in this area during filming means I will definitely be prepared should I need to film in a studio and light it in the future.

Looking at the finished article, I have to say that the overall feeling is one of satisfaction and optimism. I’m confident that we produced the best film that our preparation allowed. In the end we managed to get all the shots we wanted and editing was generally a successful process. The music we used really works well with the visuals as was always ours intention. I feel the emotions that the audience will feel when viewing this will be the same as the ones we intended them to. Before we completed the absolute final cut of the film we asked some of Paul’s housemates to view the film and asked their opinions. They laughed when we wanted them to, were sad when we wanted them to be and smiled when we wanted them to. This brought me great satisfaction and was a brilliant feeling to know you’ve affected an audience in that way. However that’s not to say there are many things with the film that we could improve. The script we had for the story was far too ambitious and complicated and suited that of a much longer film than 2 minutes. But we didn’t realize this until we had gone too far to change it, part of the learning curve but still disappointing nonetheless. A point was raised after our proposal presentation that we were not challenging ourselves by saying we weren’t going to attempt to animate our characters. I stand by our reasoning for not doing this but at the same time understand the criticism. Without question the film would have been more impressive if it were to include animation however at this moment in time I feel that the challenge would have been one far too great for myself and my group mates also agreed with this notion. However it is something I kept in mind and will definitely be careful to consider in future the balance between challenging myself and being realistically aware of what I’m capable of. In reflection on the rhythm and pacing of the film I would take out the scene were a post it is killed early on and the camera pans to our main post it attempting to convey feelings of relief and fear. I feel this scene does not come across the way we intended and is slightly out of place with the rest of the film. By cutting that scene out I would extend the tram sequence to include some of the point of view footage that we shot on the tram while it was moving. Doing this would enhance this already effective sequence and would really intensify the feeling of panic and speed that the post it is feeling. Also if we were to go back to the beginning and make this film again I like to explore the possibility of giving our post it a voice as I believe this would really enhance his character and make the audience relate to him a lot more. I think some of the home office shots could be cleaned up a lot, removing objects that are in the background that shouldn’t be, again this comes down to planning and preparation and attention to detail that I feel was slightly lacking at times in our project. But I would like to make it clear that when you consider the inexperience of our whole group I believe we have produced a solid effort. We have achieved our main objective of getting our audience to feel the emotions of the post it and become attached to him, and hopefully this will only be strengthened when shown shortly at the cinema exhibition when it is shown to its largest audience yet. Throughout this project it has become progressively clearer to me that audience is one the most important aspects of multimedia. Not only relating to our film but in every aspect of media I have come across thus far the focus has been on what the audience will feel when watching or interacting with your work. If the audience does not feel the way you want to or does not understand the story you are telling then your efforts have been in vain. I feel at times we were so concerned with what we thought of our work and how we wanted it to look that we lost sight of the fact that we were telling a story to an audience. An audience who do not have prior knowledge of our story, we have a very short time to tell them this story and in future I would very much keep this in the forefront of my mind when making a film, which leads me nicely on to my next point, learning outcomes.

In the brief given to us we were given a list of learning outcomes that we were expected to achieve; I feel ive succeeded in all of those areas. Firstly, my group mates and I successfully produced a presentation; it did not include sound but did include some nice visual elements, and was praised for being coherent and well presented. This was a useful learning experience as I will need to present many more things in this way as I progress through the course. I can confidently say I have shown an understanding of the basics aesthetics of elements of a multimedia object, in this case a film. It is visually pleasing and well structured, we have used a variety of different camera angles to create the perspective of everything being big and the post it being low down. This process has taught me however that quite often the more the simple the layout of the shot is the more effective it can be. I have clearly demonstrated the process of how we worked as a team at several points during this report. One thing that has left an impression one me is how powerful the use of audio and visual is, just looking at our un-edited footage was slightly disappointing and flat however as soon as we edited in the sound effects and music the images were transformed. This observation will stay in my mind and I will certainly look to use this technique in the future, by using sound to direct the emotions of our story we eliminated the potential tricky problem of dialogue and acting. The music impacts instantly as they are recognizable songs and our audience should all have a prior knowledge of them and associate an emotion with them, instantly making them feel how we want them to feel. As ive said before we worked very well together as a team and got along splendidly. Greater delegation should perhaps have been used in certain areas but we certainly cannot complain about how we worked together and we all helped each other along the way and have learned a lot from each other during this project. I have been involved in every single step of the production of this multimedia project. I have taken part in planning, filming, set design, research, presenting, visual editing, audio editing and I was also responsible for exporting the finished product into its final format of DVD. Each one of these has been a new experience for me and each one has been very rewarding. I will be able to use all of these experiences in the future as guide points and as a platform to improve my work.

Having now looked at all aspects of the film, I am of the opinion that this should primarily be viewed in terms of what ive learned rather than what ive produced. I am happy with the quality of the final piece but if I were to start the module again now using all the skills I now have I would be able to make it to a far superior standard. Overall this project has given me an excellent grounding in the basics of narrative story telling and film making; it has also inspired me to challenge myself and to explore the possibilities of making my own short films outside of the academic system. Above all the things I will be taking away from this are a solid foundation of technical skills, a clear understanding of narrative and just how difficult it can be to balance telling a story and being technically proficient whilst working to deadlines. After all the key is in the module’s title, Narratives, the story was priority and unfortunately I only started to realize that towards the end of the project but nevertheless I’m happy with our story and I’m happy that the audience will understand it, if not then I guess you can say ive failed. Success or failure, that’s not for me to decide, whatever the outcome maybe I have had great fun on this project and ive learned a tremendous amount and I now move on to the next challenge in a far stronger position than when I started.

Appendices

Appendice 1

http://webboard.lsz.ntu.ac.uk/wb/default.aspaction=9&boardid=482&read=6791&fid=1635

Appendice 2

http://webboard.lsz.ntu.ac.uk/wb/default.asp?action=9&boardid=482&read=6974&fid=1635

Appendice 3

http://webboard.lsz.ntu.ac.uk/wb/default.asp?action=9&boardid=482&read=6672&fid=1635

Appendice 4

http://walkerjournal.blogspot.com/2006/11/narratives-both-interactive-and.html

Appendice 5a

The Life and Death of a Pumpkin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuCJyth0Ufo

Appendice 5b

Blur – “Coffee and TV”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYJOF8drAkw

Appendice 6

Production Notes

That's a Wrap!

2006-12-03T09:03:00.000-08:00

Yes production is finally complete of our short film "Post It!", after a gruelling 11 hour day on wednesday we completed the project and handed it in on thursday. Its been a tough week and we all worked very hard to get the job done on time. I am happy with the finished article and cannot wait to see it on the big screen! I think now is a good time for reflection on the whole process of making a film, in the past 7 weeks weve taken an initial idea and seen it evolve into a finished film, its been a great learning experience and ive had a lot of fun.

Looking back we got off to a slow start and initially struggled with the group process, meetings were few and far between for the first couple of weeks and in hindsight i beleive we paid the price for this as the deadline drew closer. From the time we came up with the idea to the time of our first presentation we didnt put enough effort into research and preparation, hence most of the things we did from there on were done off the top of our heads as we went along. This approach lead to a somewhat disorganised feel although it must be said we improved as we went along and by the end were all working very well as a team. I feel we should have carefully considered some of the potential problems that could, and did, arise. For example the office scenes, we thought at first we were going to shoot in the staff office and didnt plan any alternatives. This meant when we had to shoot in the studio and create our own office from scratch we had no designs to go off and hadnt put any thought into the lighting required in a studio setting which lead to some footage being un-useable which in the real world would be a complete waste of peoples time and money. In the future i beleive that pre production needs to be completed as thoroughly as possible to allow production and post production to run smoothly.
When it came to filming this was something i had very limited experience of and i have had to learn a lot in a short space of time to get up to the same speed as my group members. I feel i did well in this area and this is proven by some of the shots i filmed being in my opinion the best in the film. I enjoy working with a camera and at the moment its definetly something i want to do more of as the course progresses.

Finally we reached the stage of post production, we probably didnt give ourselves enough time on this as we should have and if it wasnt for the fact that Paul was experienced with Premiere we may not have got the job done in time. I learned a lot about editing through observing Paul and Will and the techniques they were using, i also had a go at editing a few scenes myself and as a result my understanding of this process has grown massively. I think the best way to learn is to just have a go and pick things up as you go which is what i did. The most annoying thing about this was that we had 4 of us around one computer all suggesting different ideas for how the shots should be cut. Each one of us wanted our own ideas to be input and in a way thats good because it shows we all cared about the finished product but in hindsight it may have been better to just have a meeting before the edit and discuss what direction we wanted to go in then just leave 1 or 2 people to get on with it. This would have been a far more efficent method and is something i will consider in the future.

So thats just a brief run through of the main things i learned from this module, i will now set about the task of writing my report. I havent had to do any writing like this for nearly 3 years so its a bit of a daunting prospect now but i have plenty of things to say and once i'm going i'll be fine.

I'm working on reducing the file size of our film so i can display it on here, so check back soon to see the finished version of "Post It!"

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

The Great Wall of Flyer's - My Interactive Narrative Analysis

2006-11-26T15:17:00.000-08:00

This week i finally completed my interactive narrative, the final finished article is entitled ' The Great Wall of Bars' and is essentially just an interactive menu list of all the bars and nightclubs that ive been to so far in during my time in Nottingham. It is presented in the form of a picture of the flyers on my bedroom wall, each flyer can be clicked on and your taken to a page with a picture of that bar that i took using my digital camera, at this point the user can click on the image to be taken to that bar's official website.

This task has been an interesting learning experience for me, website progamming/design is the only area of the course in which i had prior experience so for once i had confidence in what i was doing. However it has been over 2 years since ive actually used these skills and they were very rusty so it was good to go over the basics again and refresh my memory. I also learned quite a few new things during these seminars. For example the Javascript for alerts and for rollover text boxes are something i didnt know how to do but i know have learned and implemented them in my project. Over the course of the project i encountered a few technical hitches, for example when my project was uploaded to the web initially the photo on the homepage didnt display, upon looking at the code i discovered this was due to the file extension of the image being in upper case when it should have been in lower. A relatively easy mistake to make but something as simple as that can cause your whole site to be innefective, an example of how tricky javascript can be if you just get one small detail wrong. This is good though because through troubleshooting you learn, you learn new ways to script and are quickly able to deal with future problems. I was also having problems with the way my text and images were not lining up correctly when displayed in different browsers. To fix this i made a frame and put the text box and the picture inside it and then made the frame's posistion absolute. This meant that regardless of what browser the page is opened in the text and the images line up together.

So thats the technical side of things, and i like to feel i handled it very well. The creative side of this project though is something i had more problems with. Ive spoken before about my struggles with being creative and although i am improving its still not my best area, it took me quite a while to come up with an idea that i was happy with and to be perfectly honest i'm not entirely happy with it even now its finished. There is no narrative element to my project, if i could do it again i would take more time to think of how i could incorporate a narrative story into my work. Instead this time i preferred to concentrate on the interactive element of the project and i'm happy with what ive acheived in that aspect. Of course there is always room for improvement and i wil get better as i progress. I still am a long way from being as good as i want to be and as good as i can be in this area. Website design is something i'm very much interested in and its definetly something i will pursue in greater depth next year and beyond.

During this project my idea evolved and changed direction, my initial idea was to take a picture of my room and have the user interact with indvidual objects placed in my room but i decided quickly just to concentrate on the wall with my flyers on, i thought this would be easier to do with the restrictions we had on image size.

If i was to approach this project again then i would certainly take more time to consider the direction i wanted to go in.I would also think more carefully about the size of photos i was told to produce, the photos i took were all pretty close up and hence i lost a lot of the detail when i cropped them down to web size, i could have solved this by taking wider shots. I would try and come up with an idea that easily worked within a narrative context. This is something i'm interested in and throughout the module ive seen a lot of interesting examples in Simon Perkins' lectures, these have intrigued and inspired me to try and make a convincing narrative story and make it truly interactive at the same time. You may wonder why i didnt choose this approach for this project, but i didnt think i would be able to do something like that justice at the moment. Once my skills are a little improved i will be back with an interactive narrative/story for all to enjoy!

The main things i have taken from this project are a refreshment and improvement of my Javascript/HTML programming skills and it has re-awoken my passion for this area of Multimedia. It has given me the confidence to seek oppurtunities to use these skills outside of my course, i will be assisting in the updating of the uni's radio staion Fly FM's website and have also looked into the possibility of creating a website for the Tennis Society of which i am a member of. Above all i have enjoyed this project and i very much look forward to pursuing this in the future.

Here is a screen shot of the homepage to the site, click on it to be taken to the site......

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

Urbis exhibition centre, Manchester

2006-11-21T02:34:00.000-08:00

Hello all, recently on a visit to my girlfriend in Manchester she decided to take me to the Urbis centre. This is an exhbition centre focusing on city life and all things city related. This was an impromptu visit so i did not have my camera with me and therefore have no visual examples of what i saw, i'll do my best to explain them to you.

Before i go into more detail, here is the link for the Urbis Centre's website, visit to find out more and to see what events are coming up....

http://www.urbis.org.uk/

At the time of my visit there was a Multimedia exhibition about the Manchester bombings of 1996. I found this very interesting not only because of the subject matter which is very powerfull and cannot fail to hav an effect on you but also because of the multimedia aspect of what i was seeing.

A few things that stuck out to me in particular were a wall of tv screens that when you clicked the button beneath them a video played, each video was a different persons perspective and experience of the bombings. This was a very simple piece but extremely powerfull, the use of technology was quite basic yet effective just a simple close up shot of each person shown on a small tv screen.

Another thing i was impressed with was an interactive piece. You sat down at a computer screen and were faced with a form to fill out, just a few questions about yourself like name,where your from likes and dislikes etc then you are asked to look at a camera in the wall above you and it takes a picture of you. Then at the click of the button it is printed out onto a sticker and you can stick it on the wall behind you. There are a huge amount of stickers on this wall and it is quite fascinating seeing all the different people who have visited this display and what information they have decided to put on their sticker. Here is a picture of mine......

Also there was a small room where you sit on a chair and look at a webcam, this webcam then transfers the image to a large projection screen infront of you and re-draws you in a very cool way which i cant really explain, its like someone scribbling a pen randomly and coming out with a distorted picture of you, it was very impressive and i would very much like to find out more about the technology used within the display.

There were plenty more interesting examples of interactive multimedia on display and rather than go on listing them i'll just make an observation that really stood out to me. All the displays i saw were very simple ideas and because of that i thought they were very effective. They were all easy to interact with and required minimal instruction to get working. Now i'm sure the process behind the creation of these displays was quite complex and time consuming but the concepts were all very simple and i think that will be important for me to remember as i go through this course and possibly create similar pieces of work.

Thats all for my post today, if anyone reading this ever finds themselves in Manchester city centre i urge you to visit the Urbis centre as it is a very interesting experience and one that i enjoyed very much.

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

Post It - The Filming of a Masterpiece (?!)

2006-11-16T12:03:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone, time for another update on my progress.

Today was an exciting and important day for me. It was the first day of full filming i have taken part in and i enjoyed it a lot. I am very interested in this aspect of the course and i'm anxious to improve in this area as quickly as i possibly can. As with everything in life there were plenty of lessons to be learned from this experience, we were slightly under-prepared and because of that it took a lot longer than anticipated to set up our set. Once we had all that sorted the filming began and between the 4 of us we managed to get some really good shots that will look fantastic once weve got them into the edit suite and applied the audio soundtrack.

Due to the length of time we took to set up we werent able to get all of the shots we needed on the day so we now need to re-book the equipment and film again. Hopefully next time we will all benefit from the previous experience and be able to start filiming much quicker and get more done in the time we have recording.

Thats all for now i must get back to work on our film, no time to sit here and chat!!

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

YouTube Video Response

2006-11-09T16:39:00.000-08:00

Hello all, this blog entry is about my YouTube video response task. I have been asked to choose a video on YouTube and post a video response to it, this has actually been a very frustrating task as it is rather hard to choose something to respond to and to think of what to say. Now originally i was going to comment on a video where a man called Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years and puts it all together in a film with some cool music. For those of you interested you can view that by clicking the link here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6B26asyGKDo .

However before i filmed my response to that i stumbled across this little beauty, its a video of a drunken George W. Bush at a wedding talking to an interviewer and taking the piss out of some american people. I could not pass up the oppurtunity to poke fun at our friend President Bush. Me and fellow Multimedia student and all round top man Will decided to film our own 'drunken' conversation in response to this video*.

To view the original film please click on the player below....

*Please note this video response is just a bit of fun and in no way reflects our own personal opinions, if anyone important in america views this, i like George Bush!

Here is my response to this video, in my head it seemed a lot better and with a bit more planning it could have been better but the general point still comes across as i hoped. Hope you enjoy it

Farewell and Have a Nice Day

David Walker

Narratives- Both interactive and traditional

2006-11-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

Hello again, its been a week or so since ive last been in touch so i thought it was time to get back into the swing of things and let you know whats going on in my world of Multimedia.

The two main things dominating my time at the moment are playing Pro Evo and Football Manager. No only joking!, the two things are my narrative film project and my interactive narrative project. They both have provided problems and headaches but ultimatly i am enjoying them both and learning a great deal in the process.

Narrative film

Last friday my group had to present their final ideas for the film before production commenced. This was my first experience of presenting in such a serious manner and i was quite nervous going into it but i was pleasantly suprised with how things turned out. The feedback we received was largely positive and the negative feedback we did receive will only help us in the future and we'll definetly learn from our mistakes. We are now in the stage of producing our film. We are meeting tomorow to decide on the final details of this process then its down to business. I am personally quite excited about this as its the first time ive really had the chance to get to grips with filming something and editing the footage we get. I aim to learn a great deal from my group colleagues who have more experience in this than me. Check back soon for updates on the progress of our filiming, i may even put a sneak preview for the film on here for you all to watch and get excited about!

Interactive Narrative

I have really enjoyed the seminars on this subject, i have a great interest in website progamming and design and its been really good to polish up my skills in this as its been quite a while since ive had to use them. My chosen idea was to take a picture of the wall of flyers my room and then to have the user click on each one and be taken to a page with a picture of that bar and some information on it. At first i thought this would be sufficent but after i started construction of this and after looking at previous examples of this work (Which can be found at www.coalesce.eu) i have had a change of direction.

I have decided to try and think of a more interesting way to guide the user through my narrative. I want to try and incorporate more of a story, i touched upon this in my previous post about interactive narratives. I dont want this to just be interactive for no reason, tis all well and good clicking on the pictures and seeing a nice picture of the bars but really whats the point of that? I am going to think up a story, maybe based on a bar crawl type scenario where the user can choose multiple ways through the story and can end up in a variety of places.

One of the frustrating things about this project is that weve been given a specific size that the pictures have to be. 800x350 in width and height. This has caused me problems as its very difficult to get good shot of a building in a picture that size. However those be the rules and i have managed to work within them and hopefully the end result will be a good one.

Thats it for today, hope you enjoyed my thoughts and experiences

Farewell and Have a nice day!

David Walker

Image Meaning -

2006-10-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

Hello all its time for another wonder into the world of my course.

We have been set a task to evaluate on of our own possesions and what it means to us. I have chosen my picture board. It is a large picture frame filled with pictures of my friends and family from home. This is of great importance to me as it reminds me of home and of some of the greatest times of my life. It also gives me perspective on the future, i can look back at the good times but i can see how much i have grown since some of the pictures and realise how that is still continuing. From a visual point of view the object has value to me as it makes my room look nicer and brings it more personality. In terms of functionality it could perhaps be a bit better as the photo's often slip out of place and it is difficult to move them without taking the whole thing apart.

We have been asked to look at other students images for this task and choose one we like and comment on it. I have chosen Richard Parr's image, he has a picture of his I Pod( is it reaally your own i pod though Richard????) and i like this because as soon as i saw it i could relate to it. You can find out a lot about a person through the type of music they listen to and this would make an I pod a very interesting object to look at. It also brings into question, as Richard has touched upon, our need for aesthetic beauty. There are many many Mp3 players on the market but why is the I pod the best selling when it has one of the worst battery lifes and can be prone to failure? Because generally people, particularly the younger generation, will go for style over substance and have a desire to look the best and have the 'in' thing of that particular era. Well Done Richard, good choice sir.

So thats it for my Blog on Image Meaning, i hope you enjoyed reading it and check back soon for my next update

Farewell and Have a Nice Day!

David Walker

Gamecity 2006

2006-10-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post. I went to one of the exhibitions that is part of the GameCity festival. It was an exhibition of art taken from video games. I particularly liked this picture from the oddworld series of games. I am a big fan of those games and i think this is a great image.

Below is the picture for you to enjoy in all its glory....

Interactive Narrative's

2006-10-26T04:52:00.000-07:00

Hello all, weve been learning about the weird and wonderful world of interactive narratives. This is an interesting module for me because at the core of it is web programming, mostly in the form of Javascript and HTML. I have prior experience of this and enjoy it very much but am very rusty with scripting as its been a few years since. I was encouraged by how much i remembered though so hopefully i'll be churning out websites left right and centre before we know it.

The other part of interactive narratives i find interesting but i also have a few reservations about it. Let me show you what i mean.....http://www.abc.net.au/arts/strange/workshop/flash.htm

Look at the flash animation on this page. Its very well done, nice animation and you can move the characters around by clicking on them but i feel this typifys the pointlessness ive come across so far when looking at interactive narrative based projects. It seems to be interactive for the sake of it, there doesnt seem to be any purpose to that flash animation than to give the user the chance to make a little man move from one box to the other. What i would really like to see is something that was interactive but still carried with it a clear sense of story and narrative and felt like that it had a purpose and significance to it. I beleive this would still be possible to do without conforming to a linear structure. I will search for something like this and if i dont find it maybe i'll try to create it myself.

Thanks to my fellow student Rumante Kupaityte who brought that animation to my attention via her blog http://rioreflectivejournal.blogspot.com/

Weve been set a task to create an interactive narrative about a place in nottingham using digital photography and javascript. I think this is a really intriuging project and its one i cant wait to get to grips with. Ive had a few ideas as to how i will go about this but i will save that for a later post as i'm really trying to keep this short and sweet.

Thats it for another few days, i'm off back home to Watford to celebrate turning 21 on Friday! Woooooo any readers who want to send me presents or indeed just wishes of goodwill are more than welcome!

Farewell and have a nice day

David Walker

Journal Entry - 18/10/06 - Short Films

2006-10-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

Welcome folks to yet another exciting installment of my journal!

Let us take a moment to sit and think about short films...................

Thought about it? Good. The reason i have asked you to do this is because i have been assigned the task of making a short narrative based film with my group mates. When you sit and think about telling a story in just 2 minutes you realise it is quite a hard task so i have been watching some award winning examples on t'internet. Some have given me inspiration, some have confused me and some have just bored me. Later i will elaborate on which ones, but for now lets ponder some more shall we?

After being given this task i went away feeling as if it would be fairly simple, upon some reflection i decided i was actually very wrong. This is a very challenging task. The fact that i have to work in a group has presented some frustrating problems, for one reason or another people have not responded to my e mails too quickly and ive had problems getting all my group together which obviously means less time in which to come up with an idea. But despite these teething problems i am confident once weve all sat down and banged heads we'll come up with a splendid concept and will deliver a decent film.

Another difficulty for me with this module is that my creativeness is perhaps not as developed as i would like, i find it hard to just come up with ideas and get easily frustrated at that fact. I have always been a very technically minded and somewhat efficent person, its hard to make the transistion into being a bit more artistic and creative but it is one i'm enjoying learning. The seminar we had with Dominick Shaw was an intriguing insight in how to improve this skill.

Now back to the films, my first port of call was www.depict.org this website features short 90 second films that were in a competition.

One of the films that i watched is entitled 'Pemba'. It is a short film depicting an african child making a football out of a condom and string. I like this film because it shows how something we take for granted in the western world brings happiness and joy to the children in a way we cant imagine. It is a powerfull message using very simple images. The use of the condom is quite a powerfull image because it immediatly gets your attention and raises curiosity as to what the boy will use it for, when you see that it is a football it brings home the message of the abject poverty these people live in and how such a small thing can make them happy.

To watch this film please click the following link : http://www.depict.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Depict.woa/wa/representation?object=5830

Another short film i will talk about is quite a famous example, in fact it won an oscar for best animated short film in 1997. It is entitled 'Geri's Game'. This film is a joy to watch from a visual perspective, it is entirely 3d computer animated. In terms of message and narrative it is a nothing more than a bit of light hearted fun. It depicts an elderly man playing chess in a park, seemingly with himself. It is a fun little film and in terms of the animation is extremely well constructed. For my own short film i like the idea of a fun light hearted story as i beleive it is hard to generate more deeper and meaningfull stories in just a few minutes. So this may well be something i bare in mind when thinking of my own short narrative with my group.

You can now sit back and watch the film by clicking on the player below.....

Thats it for my blog on short films, thanks for reading and continue to check back as the blogs come thick and fast over the coming weeks as i delve more and more into my course

Farewell and Have A Nice Day

David Walker

Journal Entry - 15/10/06

2006-10-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the latest entry in my journal, today i am going to talk a bit about blogs and what i think of them from my limited experience thus far, i think this is relevant because as you know by reading this, i have to keep my own blog as i go through the course commenting on all aspects of my learning.

Before my seminar on monday i did not have my own blog or know how to set one up, however, i had come across a few blogs that i reguarly viewed and had found them to be of great interest and use to me. I think they are a great way of interacting with people through the internet, they seem to have a personal touch to them that is not always present from say just a normal website. It is like the author of the blog is actually talking to you and involving you in their day to day life, or week to week, month to month etc depending on how frequently they are updated.

An example of this would be the website NS4life.com, this is a video blog website from a record label called 'Next Selection' viewers are regularly updated on goings on with the company and it provides a fascinating insight into a world not usually seen by the consumer. This is a great example of the interactivity a blog can provide, in this instance the media is in the form of short videos usually about 1 minute in duration.

This is a very simple yet effective way of communicating with the record labels target audience. This has clearly been a success as the record label have gone from an independent outfit with no releases to having a subsidiary deal with Bad Boy Records and having the number one Artist on Myspace music and having the most played song on US radio.

To view this website and see for yourself why i am impressed by it click here : www.ns4life.com

So to conclude my ramblings, i am enjoying keeping this blog and learning ways in which i can improve it, i want this to not just simply be a day to day diary of my course as that would be rather simple and probably quite boring.

I want to continually improve my blog and look for new ways to relay my thoughts, feelings and opinions across to my tutors, classmates and, god forbid, any member of the general internet public who should be reading this.

One of the things i am finding most challenging is keeping the length of my posts down and i'm also aware that most of this quite essay like. But for now i'm going to bask in the comfort of inexperience and just keep it this way, but rest assured i'll be taking steps to make it more snappy and accessible as time goes on.

Coming soon on David Walker's Journal........

We take a trip into the world of short film, i will soon be producing my own short film along with my group mates and to prepare for this escapade i will detail a few of my favorites and i'll ponder my upcoming project.

Farewell and Have a Nice Day!

My First Post

2006-10-09T03:49:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to my first blog, my first blog was composed in my first seminar of my first year on the first day of term. Today is a day of many 1sts, hopefully i will finish my course in the way it began, with a 1st!!

Perhaps i should start with a little about myself, (yaawwn!) so if anyone out there is for some reason reading this they can appreciate who i am and where i'm coming from.

Right, where shall i start? An obvious place would be my name i guess, its David Cameron Walker. I hail from the town of Watford in the county of Hertfordshire which for those of you who are somewhat geographically naive is just north of London. I am 20 years old and am studying Multimedia at Nottingham Trent University, which is the reason i am writing this blog.

I have taken a route to university that is perhaps a little different to most people's, i finished my A levels two years ago and was sick of the bombardment from my teachers about how important it was to go to uni. I wasnt ready for uni and saw no reason at that time to take a degree in anything, i had frankly had enough of education and wanted to see what the real world was like, little did i know i would come scurrying back to warmth and comfort of education when i found out the working world was actually quite mundane and hollow.

Somehow i ended up working in the accounts office of Norwest Holst Construction Ltd, my job was to pay the subcontractors that carried out the construction work for my company. Whilst i learned a great deal from this experience and met some great people during it, ultimeatly i found myself unfullfilled. I went back to the drawing board of life and decided i wanted to pursue a degree in Multimedia, much of my inspiration for this came from my time studying web design in the 6th form where i met a remarkble man called Mike Harber, his brilliant teaching left a lasting impression on me and i never forgot his words of advice to go to uni one day, but only do it for the right reasons with the right course for me.

Which brings me to the present day, enough waffling on about me and my past, lets get down to business. This blog is a journal of my experiences on my course and will be updated on a regular basis with my reflections and thoughts on all things related to my course.

Reflecting on my first few tentative steps into the world of Multimedia i must say i am feeling a variety of different emotions, i am excited at the prospect of learning and i am also apprehensive as to whether i will be able to handle the rigours of my chosen course. I have a determination born out of the apprehensiveness to do challenge myself and succeed. I will look back on this first blog at the end of year 1 and am very interested to see how my feelings compare to now.

Thats it for my first blog, just a little introduction into who i am and what i'm doing. My next post will delve into more depth my experiences of blogs so far and what i like about them and what i dont like, and also how i hope to use some of the ideas ive seen already and implement them into my own blog.

Farewell to all readers and have a nice day!

As a goodbye treat i will give all readers the pleasure of viewing a picture of me below :)

David Cameron Walker

David Walker's Journal

Adobe Live 2007

Actionscript Task

Same But Different - Reflection on a failure

Site Specific Performance Review ( better late than never!)

One last poster

The Business Card

Podcasts part 2

Podcasts part 1

Web Design - Compatibility Issues Arrgghhhh

The E mail - Part 2

Website Design - Tables and Images

Website Intro

Oh not another poster!

More Poster Designs!

The e mail

Some more poster designs

More Web Design

Website Design

Online Branding Tutorial

Idents - Poster Designs

My Final Logo

An interesting discovery

Photoshop brilliance!

Same but Different

Store Wars

Ive had Surgery

Yet more bloody logos!

Website Usability

Forget Trent Media,what about my Identity!

Flash Experimentation

Identities - Yet More Logo Experimentation

Trent Media Logo - Cast your votes

Identities - An update

Site Specific Performance

Christian Marclay - Video Quartet

Site Specific Performance

Educating the Masses Part 1 - Lewis Taylor

GooTube Conspiracy

Ere Be Dragons!

National Space Centre - Leicester

Pinhole Photography Workshop

Multimedia hits Broadway....

My first ever radio interview!

Our film is now on YouTube! Watch it here!

Report on my Narrative Project

That's a Wrap!

The Great Wall of Flyer's - My Interactive Narrative Analysis

Urbis exhibition centre, Manchester

Post It - The Filming of a Masterpiece (?!)

YouTube Video Response

Narratives- Both interactive and traditional

Image Meaning -

Gamecity 2006

Interactive Narrative's

Journal Entry - 18/10/06 - Short Films

Journal Entry - 15/10/06

My First Post