Final Project

I enjoyed doing the final project a lot. We were asked to create a narrative about something we are passionate about. Immediately I told my professor, "The Beatles." However, I was shutdown because we had already done a music project. But, black and white photography was something else I could do.

I am not a photographer. It is an expensive hobby, but I greatly admire the work done by others. My friend, Danielle, is a great photographer and I love her work. I gathered her photos and put them into Powerpoint (which is not necassary, but I was able to make black backgrounds and alter the title slide).

The most time consuming part of the project was the audio because I made it harder than it had to be by using 2 different types of music, my narrative, and ambiance. I spent hours cutting audio and placing it in places to match up with the photos. I did not have myself talk through the whole thing because I found that constant voice can become droning and almost annoying. I let the pictures speak for themselves.

I learned how to fix sample rates during the project. I had an aggravating time in the beginning because my narrative was much, much, slower than the musical part. I am most proud of the overall project and have it be completely about the photography and very little me. I mean, I am in there, my voice is, but I rather have the photos speak for themselves. If I had more time, the part of the audio where the background music for "New York State of Mind" fades into the 1920's music, I could not get "New York State of Mind" to be silent there without messing up the 1920's part. So, some piano peeks through the other track. It is not a big deal, but if I had more time I would have liked to fix that.

Overall, I am very, very happy with it.

Blow-In Card

The blow in card assignment was time consuming, but no too too difficult. I completed the task in QuarkXpress. I found this program to be really simple to use. I had to view my blow in card in high percentages to be able to fit all the information on it.

What I am most proud of and what I learned to do was create the People logo. The letters are close together, but where they do intersect there are no lines showing that. So what I figured out how to do is start the logo out as a text then create it into a graphic. This caused the lines that appeared when letters intersected to disappear.

The hardest part was to get fonts to match the fonts on the original bb card. It was mostly trial and error. Also, the lines on the back of the card under the indicia and along the bottom were very time consuming, even though I copy and pasted them. It began to make me dizzy after a long time of looking at them.

If I had more time I don't think I would do anything else differently. I think I managed to get my bb card to look pretty much like the original.

Website

This project was extremely challenging for me. The program I used, Dreamweaver, was not very easy to understand. I made the mock up of the site in Photoshop, which for some reason was hard to comprehend that I would do this kind of a task in photoshop.

The mock up I created in Photoshop was simple. It was a horizontal menu, which was green, and the header text was red. Each page had one graphic on it. I wanted to use greens because of the whole "jungle" feel of the Rainforest Cafe. Unfortunately, my mock up didn't make it to the final website. I could not figure out nor had a lot of time to "splice" all the parts of my mock up into individual parts to put on my website in Dreamweaver.

I was able to create workable links on Dreamweaver, which was not that difficult at the time. However if you asked me to do that again I would not have a clue now. I was able to do text and add my images. But sadly my final working website has none of the colors or style that my mock up had.

If I had more time I would definitely have taken the time to learn how to splice the objects and put much more effort into getting the website to look nice visually. Overall, I learned how to put a website together with working links and text. I have not conquered the aesthetics part yet.

The address for the site is www.students.rwu.edu/bonesti271

Rain Forest Cafe Brochure

For this project, it was my first time using QuarkXpress. The program was fairly simple and easy to use.

My brochure was a brochure for the restaurant, Rainforest Cafe in Burlington, MA. I only used two font types. One for headlines and the other for body text. The coloring of the brochure and design I tried to make jungle-like like the restaurant. The brochure is a light blue like the ocean with a fade effect to give it contrast and texture.

I did not run into any problems making the brochure. I am proud of the look of the brochure. It is very put together and I like the vines I used as underlines under each heading. It is not too much but it gave the brochure something extra.

If I had more time, I am not sure what I would do differently for the brochure. It wasn't a very extensive project. With more time I might have worked with colors and the overall "theme" and look of the brochure. I would try out different ones and see what worked best. Overall I am happy with how it turned out.

Muse Soundslide

The Soundslide was a lot of fun to make. I had never used the Soundslide program before but it was really easy. I simply saved my PowerPoint as pictures and uploaded them into Soundslides.

For the audio, I chose "Bliss" by Muse because the piano intro is amazing and perfect for the sound/look I wanted to achieve for the Soundslide. I used Audacity to cut and paste parts of the song to loop it throughout the whole presentation. I found Audacity really easy to use. After I edited the song as a WAV file, I imported it into iTunes to make it an mp3 because that is the only audio type Soundslide supports.

From there it was just a matter of picking how long I wanted each slide to show for before transitions. It was an enjoyable project and if I had more time I don't think I would have changed anything. I am happy with the final outcome.

Muse CD Release Poster

The CD release poster was a fairly easy project. It was my first time using QuarkXpress but it didn't give me any problems.

Since it was a CD release poster, it needed to be eye catching so that was my biggest priority. I also wanted to play on the title of their new CD, "The Resistance," so I used that in the headline. At first, I used a brighter blue color for headlines, but when it printed it had low resolution. I fixed that problem and also added a hot pink and a lime green color in the headline to make it more eye catching. I also changed the font and the font size.

If I had more time, I would have worked with the background more and try to figure out how to use a transparent image with text over it. I simply did not have the time to figure that out and I think it would give the poster my texture. Overall, I am happy with it.

MUSE PowerPoint

For the music Powerpoint project, I decided to do the band Muse. I had already done the Beatles for a past project so I felt I should mix it up a bit.

I am very familiar with PowerPoint so this project was enjoyable and easy. I didn't want to go for a "cute" look with this, since Muse is progressive rock and I love them because they are so unique. So I didn't use bright colors and I made sure to use pictures that are either from live shows or the band in the studio being themselves.

I used the transparency effect on all my slides except the title slide. I liked the way it gave definition and texture to the slide without any animation. Also, I tilted pictures to make them seem more 3-dimensional.

I did not run into any problems really with this project, it was fairly simple. I also was able to drag images right from my browser to PowerPoint. I am most proud of the project as a whole. I liked the "look" and the colors I chose. It is very Muse-like. If I had more time, I would have worked with time transitions more and figure out a better way for them to flow with the music. The presentation could not be over a minute long so it was difficult to get the timings where I wanted them.

Animated Postcard

What I was trying to accomplish with the animated postcard was blending my font poem image into my postcard image I created. I really did not encounter any problems doing this because it was easy to follow my professor as she was going through the steps.

I made the images fade into each other by the use of "tweening" which was new for me but I also enjoyed it. This process is done by highlighting the last frame of the font poem and the postcard image at once and clicking the "tween" button.

I am proud of the accomplishment of finishing the assignment overall. If I had more time I am not sure if I would do something difference because of my limited knowledge of Photoshop. If I knew more it would be a different story.

Exquisite Corpse Image

The Exquisite Corpse image was a lot of fun but really challenging. What I wanted to achieve with this image was to relate to the poem on the other side, even though it did not have to. Also, I wanted to use all of my own images, which I did besides the background.

What I did first was I took pictures of my boyfriend's face, but in halves. The first time his eye was open, and the second time it was shut. I did this because the lyric that was going to be on the other side was from the Beatle's album, Revolver. All four of the Beatle's profiles are on the album cover so I did a little spin on that. The following link is an image of the Revolver album cover.http://tinypic.com/r/2im2ip5/4 I made sure I got his eyes because I thought it was a play on the word "mind." People say that the eyes are like a window to the soul. Also, I made sure one was closed to play on the word "off." Then I made a pile of CDs on white paper for a neutral background. with the shiny side up and took pictures of that. Then I did the same with the iPod and shaped the headphone wires into a heart.

What I found most challenging was resizing the images to fit the background correctly. Since I took them all myself and uploaded them from my digital, they were huge. It took some time, but I eventually got the size ratios right. I had to keep copy and pasting them onto the background canvas to see how they looked. I am sure there is an easier way but I am still new to Photoshop. I then decided to duplicate the CD image three times and scatter them throughout the image. I also played with the saturation of them to bump up the shine color.

I am most proud of the creative decisions I made with the images reflecting the lyric. I wanted to make sure I did that and use my own images. The background I only used because I liked the graininess of the image and how it made the images looked once I multiplied them. If I had more time however I would have really, really liked to work with the brightness of the two faces. I feel like they get lost in the image sort of. I could not figure out how to work with the faces without effecting the rest of the images. I am happy with the image considering I am so new to Photoshop.

Composite Activity

Font Poem

For the font poem project, I chose the first line of the Beatles song "Tomorrow Never Knows." The Beatles are a very,very important part of my life so there was no doubt in my mind from the beginning that I would use them for the project. I chose this particular lyric because I could choose fonts that conveyed a feeling based on the words used. That was a big part of what I wanted to achieve with this project.

The font decisions I made were based on the word. I put a curve setting on the word "turn" to convey the motion of turning. The word "mind" I used a creative font like Comic Sans and "relax" I used a smooth, hand written font and I made the same decision with the word "stream." The word "float" I used a bubbley font to convey the image of water, and the word "down" I decreased the font size as the word came to and end to give them feeling of a decline. Unimportant words like "and" and "your" I used fairly simple fonts.

The most challenging part of the project was finding fonts I was satisfied with and picking a size. To solve this problem, I just experimented. Some words at first I got a little too crazy with the size so I would have to edit that a lot. Also, the segment, "float down stream" I had to play with the positioning of to make it more pleasing to the eye.

The part of the project that I am most proud of is choosing fonts that did a play on the word's meanings. I am glad I thought a head to pick a lyric that I was able to do that with. It gives the project more depth. If I had more time I would have played around with effects more like I did on the word "turn" and just experimented more in general. There is never enough time.

Contact Sheet Project

The contact sheet was not too challenging, but I did want my final contact sheet to show contrast between the different images. For example, the resolution section really showed the difference between the largest resolution and the smallest.

The resolution section was the most challenging because I really wanted to use my own images, but mine were all too small for that part of the project. To solve this problem, I used one of the images on the computer which was a swan. It turned out nicely and it was big enough for you to see the difference in resolution.

Some decisions I had to make were which images would be most appropriate for which part of the project. For example, the content section I had a really nice black and white picture of my friend Rachel that I wanted to use. However, a person is not the best object to use for an abstract image like we were using. I decided on this photo of a spiderweb structure in my boyfriend's house I took. At first I was not abstract enough and had to really zoom in and crop the center of the spiderweb.

I am most proud of the Format/Mode section because that photo I took myself at my first Third Eye Blind concert that I was covering for my high school newspaper. The black and white image came out really nicely.

If I had more time to work on this contact sheet, I would have tried to figure out the Duo Tone better. It looked great on screen, but when printing it was too strong and distorted. I tried working on it but there was really no difference. Also, I would have liked to experiment with different images to see which effect looked best.

Current Topic: Podcasting

For this assignment, I needed to research podcasting. I think I am one of the few people that does not religiously use their iPod, so the topic was somewhat foreign to me.

A podcast is a series of digital media files, either audio or video, that is released episodically and downloaded through web syndication. Special client software, known as "podcatchers," are used to identify and automatically download the files. An RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication), is used frequently to download the podcasts automatically.

The term "podcasting" is a mix of the word iPod and broadcasting. However, podcasting did not originate from the company Apple like many believe. The first system to enable automatic downloaded and storage of files was an mp3 manufacturer, i2Go in September, 2000. It was not until June 2005 that Apple included podcasting to their Apple 4.9 software and podcasting directly to their iTunes store.

The cool thing about podcasting and what makes it so appealing is that there is a podcast to cater to anyone's interests. From comedy shows, to science and medical podcasts, and even literature. Also, most podcasts are free to download as well!

Companies and businesses are now using podcasting to reach new demographics of people easily. Information is easy to access and people can get involved as well because making your own podcast is easy. All you need is a microphone and video camera.

The following are the links I found information on about Podcasting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting
http://howtomakepodcasts.com/
http://www.whatisrss.com/
http://smallbiztrends.com/2007/01/small-business-podcasting-trends-for-2007.html
http://www.impactlab.com/2008/02/04/podcasting-trends/
http://www.podquiz.com