Nyssa's Digital Media Design Blog

In today's lesson, we continued creating our interactive blogs. We did this, by taking the information that we had put into our blogs, and placing it into each post's correlating page on our InDesign document. We then also placed in any images that we wanted to include, and placed them how we felt would look best on our documents, using the column guidelines that we had to help us line everything up. These images, we also then added some animations that we learnt how to use in yesterday's lesson, to make the document more interactive. I found that I personally had too much text in my blog to place into each page on my document, and still make it easy to read and focus on the images, as we learnt that there should be no more than 88 characters in a line of text, as any more makes it harder to read. To counteract this problem, I used a technique of Object States to place multiple layers of text in one place, and then I placed a rectangle shape on top of all of these, made it ...

In today's lesson, we began to use InDesign to make Interactive PDF's. We learnt how to animate our images and text boxes, to make them do things like fade into the screen, spin around, as well as other things, to make our work more visually appealing. With these effects, we also learnt how to make different animations occur at different times, so that not everything goes off at once when the document is opened. We did this on a new document, which consisted of eight columns, and had a size of 1920x1080. With this newly learnt information, we then created a new document, with the same specifications of our last document creation, which we would be using to create an interactive version of our blogs. We started these, by learning how to use shapes and text as buttons, which we would be able to use to click between pages. We then used this knowledge to create forward, back, and home buttons on our pages, as well as Adobe App Icon images on our front pages, that sent you to their ...

In today's lesson, we started to look at Adobe InDesign. We began the lesson by creating a new piece of work, which for us was going to become a booklet, and altering its properties before beginning to work on it. The changes that we made, were the number of pages that our booklet would contain (changing from one to twenty), the number of columns, which we made five with a 4mm gutter, the margin size, which we changed down to 10mm, and the size of the bleed, which we made 5mm.  We put columns and a bleed into our work, to make lining up our text and images a lot easier, as well as allowing a margin  to place our images on, if our work was ever to be printed, so that the edges of these images would not be cut off disproportionately, when the digital version gets converted to a printable document. We were then able to create our booklets, and start practicing our designs on them.   To begin our designs, we learnt how to add in rectangle shapes, so that we could use the...

In today's lesson, we firstly had to work a bit more on the images that we began to create in yesterday's lesson. To improve on mine, I added in an ear as another facial feature, and then from that base image, went on to create three almost identical images, all with one part of the face missing. I then added in different captions to all of these images, depicting the "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" sequence. I then imported these images into Illustrator, so that I could create a set of three artboards together, so that all of the images lined up and could be seen together. We then go to start on a new project, in which we had multiple images that we had to eventually edit to form one picture. We did this, by first editing the image we had of a girl break-dancing. With this image, we cropped mostly around the girl, and then used the Quick Selection Tool to more precisely cut her out. We then took this selection and created a Layer Mask to separate her from ...

In today's lesson, we first of all went back and re-edited some of the units that we had previously worked on, such as our 'Remove the Man' Photoshop work. We did this, to try to make them the very best that we could.  Through doing this, I managed to make my work look a lot better than it did beforehand, as I was able to remove some of the very visible smudge marks, to make to road and pavement look more realistic. I was also able to edit my street sign, as the text within it was too large for the sign, so now it looks like it fits a lot better, and doesn't stand out as much within the image. I think I managed to do quite a good job of improving my image, and have made it look a lot more like the image had always had the man removed. Later on in the afternoon, we started a new pr oject, and looked at the work of Hannah Hoch, to create a piece of work inspired by her artwork. To do this, we had to download some images off of the internet, keeping track of where we found...

In today's lesson, to begin with we learnt a bit about the internet, servers, and how everything is connected. We watched 'Andrew Blum: What is the Internet, really?', and 'What is the Internet' from Code.org's YouTube Channel. These videos were very informative and interesting to watch, and taught us quite a lot about the Internet and the connections that it has all over the globe. After watching these video clips, we began using Dreamweaver to create our own websites. First of all, we were just practicing and learning what some of the basic sections were in the code, such as 'Head',  and  'Body', as well as the more specific things, such as 'Section' and 'Footer', and also how to add in different things into our pages, such as different sized headings, paragraphs, and images from our files, which we also created a description for, and hyperlinked that to the original place where we found our images. After this, we then went onto...

In today's lesson, we watched a film called Gattaca, and also continued creating our Tea making videos. When we were watching the film, we were looking out for the different camera shots, transitions, and symbolic items and gestures, that were used within the different scenes. We saw that the camera angle would change depending on who was the main focus, as when most people were walking around, the camera would be at eye level with them, however, when the character who was confined to a wheelchair was the main focus of the scene, the camera would be at his eye level. This was interesting to see the different use of perspective, as we as the viewers, could see what the characters were supposedly seeing.  I also found the shots where the camera was in line with the characters as they were swimming, because it looked like the waves were crashing against the lens, especially when the waves were really rough. This scene with the waves, was also good symbolism, as the character...

In today's lesson, we began to edit our tea pieces. To start the day, we first had to transfer the video files from our phones, onto our computers, so that we could use them on our editing software Premier Pro. We then had to open these videos on the program, by creating a new project from the file that included the videos, meanwhile making sure that the new project was named and put into the correct file area. We then had to alter our video clips to fit the correct format, meaning that we had to make them play 25 frames per second, at 1080p, as our phones did not film in these specifications. We did this, by clicking on one of our videos, and then pressing "Create Sequence from Clip".  We then went to Sequence, and Sequence settings, where we changed the current settings to the ones we needed. We then had to export this new sequence, by making sure that the preset we had selected, was DNxHQ 1080p 25, and that the new file would be exported into a new file within our vide...

  In today's  lesson, we began looking into our next piece of work, called “The Tea Piece”, in which we will eventually film ourselves in different clips, completing the multiple stages of making a cup of tea. We will then edit these clips throughout the week, resulting in a final 90 second short film on how to make a cup of tea. In the lesson, we watched two films, ‘LIFT’ by Marc Isaacs, and ‘La Jetée’. By watching these films, we were observing the different camera shots and angles that the creators used, as well as other things. In ‘LIFT’, I noticed that the camera was always facing the people that were being filmed, which allows the viewer to get a sense of the space within the lift, as well as a more personal connection with the people that were being filmed. This personal connection, could also be seen as the lift users would communicate with Marc (The person who was filming), as he would ask them questions, and over time they warmed up to him and spoke a lot more fr...

In today's lesson, we were learning how to use Adobe Photoshop. To begin the day, we were given the task of removing the pan from this picture, and re-filling in the background, to make it look like he was never there. To do this, we had to look at multiple different images of the area that we had downloaded on Adobe Bridge, and take pieces of those images, to replace the missing parts of the original picture. This was made more difficult, by the fact that none of the other images were taken at the same angle as the original picture, so we had to adjust the pieces that we were taking, to properly fit our picture. We also had to learn and use some new tools, such as the Rectangular Marquee and Smudge tools, to edit our images to make them look as realistic as possible, and as accurate to the other images of the building as we possibly could. Later in the day, we got to play around with the techniques that we had learnt to make it look like there was a nuclear bomb going off in a pla...

In today's lesson, we continued to work on Illustrator, to improve our skills even further.  We began the day, by recreating the Google Logo, from an image we got from the internet, and using the ellipse tools to create two circles, and using the Minus Front option on Pathfinder, to make a doughnut shape. We then made a rectangle, that was the same thickness of the circle, and placed it where the flick of the G sits. We then cut off the end piece of this flick to make it look better, and merged it with the rest of the G. Using the ruler, we then placed guides onto the workpiece, and rotated them, to allow us to segment the G, so that we could colour different sections. We then had to delete the inner guides and the top right segment of the circle, and then fill the remaining sections using the eyedropper tool on the original logo, to get the exact same colours. We then played around with the logo on different artboards, to create different patterns, and use some techniques such as ...

 In today's lesson, we had to use Adobe Illustrator to create vector images.  To begin with, we started to just play around with the tools available on the software, such as the Selection, Pen, Shape , and F ill tools. By doing this and creating some random shapes, we were able to learn how some of the different tools worked, so that when we progressed to begin creating more professional work, we knew what we were doing. Later on in the day, we started to use the skills we had learnt earlier, to recreate the Apple logo. We did this, by using the ellipse tool, and the Anchor point tool, as well as some others, to trace the shape of the Apple logo, that we got from google images. We then had to use different opacity and fx effects, to alter what the logo looked like. At the end of the day, we began to use the techniques from earlier, to start creating a vector image of a coffee pot.  We did this in a very similar way to the Apple logo, by tracing the shape of an image, usin...

 Hiiii, and welcome to my blog!! 1. A little introduction about me: My name is Nyssa, and I am currently 19 years old starting my first year at the University of Hertfordshire, studying Digital Media Design.  Some interesting facts about me, are: That I have been doing archery for almost ten years now, starting when I was only nine years old, and I still very much enjoy the sport, even though it is quite uncommon.  I have a dog at home. Her name is Rin (It's Japanese), she is 5 years old, her birthday is valentine's day (February 14th), and she is a Cavachon (Half Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and half Bichon Fris é ). I enjoy watching YouTube/television, listening to music,   and reading in my spare time. I enjoy a very varied range of music genres with a majority being foreign languages, my favourites being a German band named Tokio Hotel, and a range of Korean pop (Kpop) groups, such as NCT and Stray Kids. And my favourite authors are  David L...