Monday 20th - Friday 24th November - Sound design

The first few days of the brief were used to catch up on bits and bobs, I used the time to work on my individual reflective commentary on the Dreamweaver brief. I also clean up some of the group work. It was good to have a few days of more relaxing work but by the end of the week I was ready to start something new.

On Thursday and Friday we had John-Paul Jones in to teach us about sound design, The first day was Audacity and the second day Reason. Audacity can be downloaded free at:audacity.sourceforge.net. Its a great program which I was introduced to a couple of years ago, I used it to record audio streaming from the net. The program is easy to use and quick to learn, on Thursday we used it to record the first paragraph from "Moby Dick" and then chop it up and alter it .It was quite good fun but as we had all used audacity in our digital stories and our 3D work I didn't feel that I learnt much I didn't know about the software. I did learn a lot about sound formats that will probably be very useful.

Monday 13th - Friday 17th November - Industry Brief continued

The final week of the Dreamweaver brief went well, getting and inputting the content took more time than I thought it would but I had made a good template so there were no problems. The content was fake anyway so it didn't really matter that it wasn't quite all there.

the project was hard work, I put in a lot of hours but im happy with the result. It needs a redesign but it looks better than the last site I made so hopefully the next site will be an improvement again.

Handed in the Dreamweaver brief and my Mock up on Friday. The mock up went well, my sketches were a lot better than I thought they would be. Also, im getting the hang of illustrator though I still prefer corel draw.

Monday 6th - Friday 10th November - Industry Brief continued

we discussed a lot last week but this week was got on with the fun bit, I really enjoyed coding CSS and XHTML and although it was frustrating getting the pages work across browser it was very satisfying when they finally did. Used Google Map Api to stick a nice map with some markers into a page, it was fairly easy. But I did face a problem with my address, goggle map keys only work within one directory on your site, this can be easily over come by getting different keys for different directories. The problem arose because the site is currently on the same server as my portfolio and the linked path has capitals on TomGarne. The google key only works on tomgarne:

www.d10dev-studio.com/tomgarne/location.asp

www.d10dev-studio.com/TomGarne/location.asp

I tried to fix this problem by redirecting to the lower case version using JavaScript at the top of the page but I couldn't get it to tell the difference between upper and lower case. In the end I fixed the problem by making sure every link I had to the page was lower case and although that hasn't fixed the problem, the only way now to get to the upper case page is to type it in, which no one would do.

Monday 30th October - Friday 3rd November - Industry Brief

On Monday 23rd we were given our Dreamweaver briefs from industry. The idea was for us to build upon the dreamweaver training we had from steve fones the previous week. My patner for the brief was Gareth and the brif we were given was from Sequence, a large company who have done quite alot of Dr Who work for the bbc. The brief we were set is for a tourism website promoting Cardiff Bay, it seemed like a fairly dull brief , but also hard to get too wrong and considering this is our first real brief i would prefer to something simle but well done rather than a half finished site with nothing actually working.

We also have to finish our interacive media mock ups. I chose to do a flash game based on "whats the time mr wolf" the classic play ground game, i thought it would be easy to link it too an educational element. There are not many telling the time games for chilldren and i think its an important skill (analogue watches look much better than digital watches).

The first week was mainly planning and discussing what the client (sequence) actually wanted, the brief was fairly self explanitory but we didnt want to assume anything or limit our options later on. To start with it was hard going, The more we discused the brief the larger it became and i was worried we wouldnt have time to include everything we wanted to. Also, i had no experience of back End systems and althought i had heard of a content management system and didnt know how much work it would take and asumed it was beyond the scope of this progect. Gareth however was adimant it would work and as he had experience at writing back end systems i had to trust him. If it worked it would be great, but when you are used to working on your own you know what you are capable of and can therefore plan much easier.

With this project i large problem for me was the fact that i didnt know how long it would take me to write the XHTL and CSS, I had used both before but never so intensively to a strict brief.TBC...

Didn't realize you could embed you tube videos. I do now so here is my digital story. I found this brief very hard, although it was useful to learn Adobe premier I didn't enjoy using the package. I found it to prescriptive, a bit like power point for videos, but im sure there were loads of features I didn't use. Also, I had to make my film twice due to premier being very slow and I couldn't render my project.

Im happy with the result, the hardest part was writing the script, I found it very frustrating and spent a few late nights working out what I wanted to say. We had a script writer in for a day and she was very good, and incredibly interesting but I felt extremely frustrated at the end of the session. I didn't have enough time on my own to and I couldn't concentrate on writing in an busy open room, I would have preferred it if she had of come back the following day after I had had time to think about the advise she had given.

In terms of the voice over, as always im speaking too fast and its a bit unemotional but you can here the words although the final cut is a complete mash up of 4 versions I recorded.

So overall, I found the brief very hard and it caused me a week of stress and late nights but I learnt a lot and if I had too do it again I know I could create something better.

Here is my finished Maya ident. Im happy with it , I achieved much more than I thought I would at the start of the project. I really enjoyed using MAYA and some of the things it could do were amazing, I hope to use it more in the future.