Nyssa's Digital Media Design Blog

In today's lesson, we looked at some examples of music videos, to help us when creating our own over the Christmas break. These videos were quite interesting to watch, as it allowed us to get a better idea of what types of things we should be trying to come up with in our work, with some ideas suggested, that we probably wouldn't have even thought of beforehand.

In today's lesson, we finished editing our  Strangers In The Park  videos, making sure we had added in our credits, and acknowledged the university, by adding in their logo at the end of these credits. We then had to finally export these pieces, making sure that we did this, by making it DNX HQ 1080p 25, as as this meant that our video would play at the correct size and frame rate. https://youtu.be/GoqchEQQ2C8

In today's lesson, we were continuing to work on our WordPress websites. We continued editing all of our pages, making sure that they contained all of the information that we wanted to get across, as well as any pictures that we wanted added. By the end of the lesson, we had to have pretty much completed our websites, as this was our last lesson focusing on creating them.

In today's lesson, we first of all went through three different PowerPoints as a class. These PowerPoints went through a varied range of information that we would need to learn, to help us improve further on our course. These PowerPoints were very interesting to go through, and I personally felt like we learnt quite a bit from them.

In today's lesson, we first of all logged into Menti, and had to look at some café websites, to try and find out some information about their shops, such as if they served a certain type of coffee, if they sold Columbian coffee beans to take home, and if it felt like the website accurately portrayed what the café would feel like when you actually went inside. After this, we then looked at some web theories, including Fitt's Law, and the concept of Heuristics. We also then looked at an article ' 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design', by  Jakob Nielsen, and make notes of what tips we thought would be useful when creating our own portfolio website designs.  We then continued working on our WordPress websites, using the information we had just covered, to influence the decisions that we made when creating our designs. I used this information, to make sure that I had added in back buttons on all of my pages, to make sure that it was easy for any users to make th...

After reading the article ' 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design', I have made a note of 5 tips for web design, that I think will be useful for my website. 1.  Match between system and the real world The design should speak the users' language. Use words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than internal jargon. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order. Using language that everyone can understand, no matter what their level of knowledge is on the subject that they are reading about, as if someone can't understand what you have written, then they are not going to want to get through the rest of your web page.  2.  User control and freedom Users often perform actions by mistake. They need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted action without having to go through an extended process. Making sure that if someone clicks on the wrong thing when they are searching through your...

Having completed the activity - consider your analysis and write a blog post covering these points:   1. Could the sites do anything better to present the actual interior atmosphere of their shop? - The website for Coffee Island, in my personal opinion has a nice comforting feeling about it, and it gives me the sense that the actual inside of the shop would be similar to the way the website describes it, especially since the images show people enjoying their drinks. Prufrock on the other hand, gives some insight as to what the interior of the shop is like with one or two images, however I feel as though it  could  add some more reviews or images, to get a better sense of the place, or make the current images less stock photo-like, and cozier. Starbucks in comparison, however, gives absolutely no view of what  they're  like on the inside, as there are no images or reviews to see on their website, and they only show the menu items. 2. Were there any other qualitie...

In today's lesson, we had to continue editing our video footage from our previous lesson.  We managed to synchronize our sound with our video, by turning up their noise levels to make them clearer, and then by zooming in on each individual video to perfectly line it up with its corresponding sound file, making sure that each new scene was a new sequence, to separate them all. Sometimes we had to use the Alt and arrow keys to move them by one frame at a time to achieve this. We continued doing this for a majority of the day, until we had completely finished.  After this, we started on a new project in Premier Pro, where we took all of these newly synchronized videos, and began making our final video sequence, making sure that we were following the script, as we did not film our scenes in the order that they appear in the script.

In today's lesson, we re-filmed our Strangers In The Park work, to improve on our previous attempts.  We did this, by starting off with a new script and storyboard to follow, so that more of us could be involved with the activity. We then set up all of our equipment (Camera, microphone, and tripod), and headed outside to start filming. We took multiple takes of each scene this time, making sure to get good camera angles this time, to make our work look better. We also used the clapperboard, so that we could easily line up our microphone sound to our camera sound when we came to edit our work later on. After we had finished our filming session, we had to transfer all of the files from the SD cards in the camera and microphone, onto our computers, so that we could edit the footage. We did this on Premier Pro, by placing all of our recorded files into individual sequences. However not all of the sound seemed to synchronize with or video, so we had to sort that out at a later date.

In today's lesson, we were able to download some Layouts and Plugins that we wanted our WordPress websites to use. We did this, by following some links to downloadable content, and then we had some time to scroll through these layout options, and download some of them onto our computers, making sure to unzip them as we downloaded them. From here, we then opened FileZilla, and logged in, to get all of our files up. In our WordPress files here, there was a file named wp_content, which then included two other files, named Layouts and Plugins. We then dragged our downloaded items into their respective folders, so that we could use them. After this, we returned to our WordPress websites, and decided which layouts out of our downloaded options, that we wanted to use. Once we had decided this, we had to begin creating our WordPress pages, to build up our websites. We added in text and images to these pages, as well as links to other pages within some, to showcase and separate everyth...

1. Whose website is it and what sort of creative work is it presenting? For my Portfolio site research, I chose to look into the work of Jack Sachs, as I personally found the look of his artwork and portfolio very interesting and different to other portfolios I had seen previously. The website shows off his different artwork style, such as his exhibition artwork, as well as his more animated artwork. 2. How would you describe the overall aesthetic / mood / tone of the website? I would describe the overall aesthetic of his artwork as being very vibrant, colourful, and childish, as it has a very cartoon-style look to it, which gives it the childlike style, as well as the vast range of colours that are used. In contrast to this, the actual portfolio has a very plain look to it, as it is just a white background with a simple grey menu bar at the top, although the main logo at the top does fit in more with the style of the included artwork 3. What colour scheme does it have (how many repeat...

In today's lesson, we began working on our WordPress websites. To do this, we first had to install WordPress onto our computers. We did this, by first opening the PuTTY software and typing in our Host Name and port number, which then took us to a page, where we would have to enter our usual Canvas/Studynet usernames. This triggered the opening of our MySQL details to become available for us to use. We then had to open FileZilla, to look at our files in. Once in FileZilla, we had to enter our Host Name, Username, Canvas/Studynet Password, and Port Number, to open up our online directories, which let us see our 'public_html' files, which we would need to set up our WordPress Sites. After we had done this, we then had to download WordPress onto our computers, by following a link and pressing the download button. This created a new folder on our devices, which we had to extract to unzip, so that we could use its contents, and then move the file to wherever we wanted it within o...

In today's lesson, we had to continue working on the work we began creating in yesterday's lesson.  For me, this included going through each of the remaining frames within  my animation sequence. For each one, I had to trace over the body of the main dancer in the video that I was copying, and then fill in these lines, with the colour choices that I chose, making sure to put in some shading, to make it look slightly more realistic. I worked on this until the end of the day, finishing each frame and then creating a new background layer in a contrasting red colour to make my dancer really stand out even more. By the time I had finished it, I had completed 20 frames overall, and the animated video ended up being two seconds long. We then had to export  this final piece of work as  an mp4 file, by selecting  Render Video ,   and as a GIF file, by selecting Save for Web (Legacy). We did this, to be able to send the work to other people more easily and have the a...

In today's lesson, we continued working on our Rotoscoping work. We had to start on a new piece of work today as we finished what we had been working on yesterday, so our new project, was choosing a video clip of our choosing, ad rotoscoping it. For my project, I found a GIF of the Song 'What Is Love' by Twice, that I wanted to work on. I opened a new document on photoshop, keeping to the 1920x1080 sized canvas, and made sure all of the correct tabs were open (Layers, Brushes, Swatches, and Timeline). I then changed my timeline settings to be 10fps, as I wanted to animate, and then added in my chosen GIF onto a new layer on my timeline, resizing it to fit better on the screen. On a new Video Layer, I then made sure I was working on the first frame of my video and traced over the character I wanted to copy; however, I did change the outfit that they would be wearing, and the colour of the hair. I then went through and repeated this process over and over again, until the end ...