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