Change of Plan

So I was supposed to be filming my anti-racism campaign video this afternoon, however due to other commitments, the actors I had originally planned to feature in my video unfortunately dropped out. As frustrating as this is, I have been left with no choice but to come up with an other idea as there is only one week left until the final piece has to be completed, therefore relying on others to help me out is no longer an option.
Instead of doing a YouTube annotation video I have decided to use QR Codes in order to make a factual piece on the history of Halloween seeing as it's that time of year again. I will be using videos and audio to assist me in producing each QR code to give people the opportunity to find out little bits about Halloween that they may not have known about before. Doing research on how the Pumpkin became one of the main factors contributing to Halloween and how trick or treating came about and evolved into a fun experience for families around the world to enjoy will be a few of the informative elements I will include in my project.
I am hoping to gather the majority of the information linking to my QR Codes today then in tomorrow's lecture record my peers as I ask them what they know about the history of Halloween and slowly piece my project together.

Developing my Idea

Today I spent a lot of my time writing up the script for my final production piece for Creative Media Practice. As I have decided to use anti-racism as the base of my YouTube annotation video I wanted to make the script as realistic as possible therefore occurances of very mild violence and strong language has been included to give the piece more of an edge and most importantly make viewers aware of the seriousness of racism.
I involved directions for the characters so when it comes to filming tomorrow everyone is aware of what they will be expected to do. However I am keeping in mind that the actors may want to improvise in order to give the video that extra bit of realism. To avoid any awkward situations or hostility between the actors, I will be introducing all the actors and ensuring they are working together on a friendly vibe before I begin filming.
I will keep you updated on how tomorrow's filming session goes, fingers crossed it all goes to plan.

Final Project Proposal

After thinking for a long while what my final project for the Creative Media Practice module was going to be, I managed to finally come up with an idea. The concept I have chosen to use is a YouTube annotation to assist me in producing a video that promotes anti-racism. As this issue is still an on-going problem within our society I wanted to make a video that engages users and reinforces the fact that violence doesn't solve anything and neither does ignoring the issue of racism. The chosen narrative will involve a group of young white males walking down the street and approaching a black male, the group mutter racist abuse to each other about the man which then leads to the viewers being given a choice; does the man say something to the boys or ignore them? If he decides to respond to the abuse they will end up in an altercation but this time a member of the group tries to stop the fight angering his friends who force him to make a decision "them or us?" If the viewers choose to ignore the abuse, will the same situation happen again? And does ignoring the situation always help? I'll keep you posted on how my idea progresses.

YouTube Annotation

As i wasn't in last Friday's lesson I had to catch up on what we had done, which was based around Youtube annotation. I am quite familiar with this concept as Youtube is something that i use on a regular basis so I was quite interested in getting to know how exactly i would be able to create a narrative through the notion of annotation. However as there wasn't much time for me to form a new group and plan and create a video clip, I observed how another group worked their way towards creating a narrative. The concept they had was very simple but effective as it involved entering a lift and giving viewers the choice to choose which floor they would go to, each floor opening a door into a totally different location than the last. Their locations included a mountain, a desert, a busy city and a field.

This inspired me to choose this format as my final production piece as I found the concept fairly easy, however I will have to familiarise myself with how to create an interactive video.

Completion of Isadora Piece

This morning we attempted to complete our Isadora composition however we encountered a few problems. As we decided to use still images, it was difficult to get each image to move exactly how we wanted to like it would with moving image. We had problems limiting the movement of the bat so it would only move at the top of the projector, even after asking our tutor, it was clear we weren't going to be able to complete the task with all our images moving how we intended them to move.
The candles behind the window were moving image therefore when we hovered our mouse over any of the candles, they would flicker as we hoped they would. It was difficult to source moving image for our particular theme as i personally searched YouTube for a family walking with a silhouette effect but was unfortunate in finding such clips. Overall i was happy with how our Isadora composition appeared but would have preferred for it to have gone how we intended as our idea was simple but effective for the Halloween theme. In future when using Isadora we will think more ahead in terms of what images we use, ensuring that they are moving image or film our own clips for the Isadora. From the tutorials it seemed that Isadora was fairly easy to use but this wasn't the case when using still images, as it made it a lot harder to give our composition the traditional Isadora effect.

Here are a couple images from our Isadora project...

Next Steps of Isadora Task

After our Production Project lecture, my group and i met to progress on our Isadora task which is due in tomorrow. Unfortunately we had a little trouble importing the images onto the 'stage' as the files were saved as 'png' not 'jpeg' meaning that a black background appeared after every image, leaving us confused and kind of lost. Luckily our tutors for this module were around this afternoon so we managed to get help and realised that we needed to set the opacity to 'transparent' in order for us to see the images visibly on screen. Not long after this we imported the rest of the images in their adequate position and so tomorrow just requires importing the remaining images and adding audio and some possible effects!

Isadora

In today's lecture we were taught about the concept of Isadora, a software named to realize the performances of Troika Rach, a media intensive dance company. Isadora allows users to manipulate images in many possible ways to create 'media intensive theatrical experiences' (Tronix), often in synchronisation to music as shown in concerts and nightclubs.

The link below shows an example of someone using the Isadora tool 'Projection Mask' to manipulate a single moving image...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spd77d6yZ-s

Our brief involved deciding on a short interactive narrative experience allowing users to guide their exploration in traversing the narrative. A Halloween theme was set for the task and as a group we discussed a range of ideas to choose from. A few of our ideas involved trick or treating, with the user having control of knocking on the doors and placing the treats in the child's basket, along with a haunted house with eerie objects and people moving behind the windows accompanied by audio to enhance the narrative.
It was decided that we would go with the haunted house idea as we would have more elements to play around with such as bats, ghosts, a family walking into the driveway of the haunted house and a witch flying across the moon to add to the Halloween theme.

As my part of the research stage i gathered a range of images to use in Isadora in order to manipulate at a later date. I also gathered a few audio clips off freesound.org that were Halloween related such as a witch's cackle, a creaky gate opening and the sound of a baby crying in distress.
 Next week we will begin to create our Isadora composition as today was more about researching into the software and watching tutorials to become more familiar with how it worked. I will keep you posted on how we progress!

QR Codes

Today we began looking at the notion of QR Codes and how they can be used to tell a narrative. After being shown a few examples of how QR Codes can be really effective in storytelling, we were set a brief which asked us to 'concieve plan and build a narrative using a minimum of five QR Codes that can be placed in location and may link to either a Website URL, YouTube, Google Maps location, Twitter, Facebook etc...'. Me and my partner decided to go with the concept of a desktop narrative to tell the story of a young woman being attacked on her way home from a night out. We chose the concept of desktop narrative simply because going into town would have been very time consuming and using a desktop narrative would have saved a lot more time and given us more opportunity to work on preparing for our presentation.
Unfortunately Google maps wasn't allowing us to show a preview of the images we had found on the internet, which forced us to make a Prezi showing a map of where the attack on the woman happened. Each QR Code pointed to a different part of the map to indicate what happened at which area of Liverpool. The individual QR Codes were linked to my partner's FlickR account which was set up for the purpose of this task and showed the images in chronological order to tell a story.

Here is a link to the Prezi we created...
http://prezi.com/kabotwiu2hz_/copy-of-untitled-prezi/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Editing & Presenting our Triptych

After yesterday's start on filming our Triptych, i decided to look through the clips we had filmed on my phone and see which ones were going to be useful for editing earlier on today which would make it easier to compose a Triptych sequence without wasting valuble editing time.
This morning we began editing on After Effects, which i usually really struggle with, however once our tutor had shown us how exactly to crop the clips together to create a Triptych effect, i realised this wasn't going to be a difficult task. My fellow group member Ceri did majority of the editing as she was more familiar with the software so took over in order to speed up time, which helped us in the long run as we were basically finished by 12:45, giving us over an hour to make any last minute changes. We had a little trouble adding credits to the Triptych as we couldn't figure out why the 'fill over stroke' setting wouldn't adjust in order to create a basic credit reel. It wasn't long before Ceri managed to fiddle around with the settings however, and our text went back to normal.
Then it was just a matter of rendering the clip and uploading it to YouTube, which was quite time-consuming but managed to upload in time for our presentation.
I was happy with the feedback given for the Triptych by both my tutors and peers but my tutor did mention to be wary of using uncopyrighted music to support our compositions which i will definitely take into consideration for our forthcoming tasks.


Take a look at our finished piece...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVsADgbmVMI

Triptych

Today commenced the first of 12 lectures for the Creative Media Practice module, held by Mark and Ian. We were introduced to the notion of Triptych which looks at an earlier form of screen narrative, also described as 'windows montage'. In basic terms, a Triptych is the mergence of two or more images/moving images shown on screen whether that be on television or online. In a sense, this allows audiences to focus on different narratives whilst still having a good idea of what else is going on on screen. The images to the left may give you a clearer understanding of what exactly a Triptych is.

It wasn't long before we were set our brief to complete over the next 2 days, which involved creating our own Triptych in groups of 3. After a short discussion with my fellow group members, it was decided that we would aim our focus on movement, with a simple narrative of 3 individuals moving around a building but emerging each individuals body parts within the triptych so it would show Person's 1 head, with the body of Person 2's upper body and the legs and feet of Person 3 in order to show a sense of creativity and common bond. All 3 individuals would be moving around the same place whilst we swapped the body parts at different points in the clip in order to keep the viewer interested and wondering how the Triptych would end. I will be posting images of our finished piece within the next 24 hours so stay tuned!
                                                  

Dissertation

For some reason the thought of dissertation writing hasn't scared me as much as i thought it would have. I think the preparation Keith gave us last year in our Digital Media Cultures module helped a lot in terms of settling my nerves and giving me aqequate preparation for what 3rd year had to offer. I haven't actually started writing anything up as of yet as i'm still deciding which subject area i want to go into but that won't take me long at all, especially as i've done a little reading on each subject already. The television industry is the main area i'm looking to research but i will keep you updated on what my final decision is!

WoW oh Wow..

Unluckily i missed the WoW session Liz Harrison was holding last Wednesday but a tutorial with the course leader enabled me to get all the details i needed for completing my WoW Bronze statement. Reading through the booklet i was given seemed a bit daunting at first, as it seemed like there were a lot of elements that had to go into such a small word count. However i managed to make a start and completed 3 of 8 points so let's hope i power through it over the next week or so so that's another task out of the way :)

Back for the Final Year!

So after 2 years of hard work, stresses, laughter, excitement and a whole lot of learning, I managed to bag myself a nice 2:1 at the end of last year which got me very prepared for!the forthcoming year.
The first lecture back, lead by course leader Sarah Haynes, focused on our Work Based Learning module in which we were told we would be writing a 4,000 word report, detailing our experiences at the company we worked for over the summer break.
I had managed to land a work experience opportunity at Lime Pictures, taking on the role of trainee 3rd assistant director on the set of Hollyoaks, making it the focus of my report.
So far i have made a start (which is always the hardest bit!) but I am trying to do at least 300-500 words each time i work on it, hopefully finishing it WAY before the deadline in March. Fingers crossed all goes to plan!