Reflection

Well this is it the last post for this class.....and I can honestly say that my attitude towards blogging has changed. I feel like it was a good tool to keep this journal and I will probably use it in the future to upload images from trips and other such activity's for friends and family. I also found our coarse blog to be extremely helpful especially with all the examples from this year and last of projects and how to do things. As for the different programs we used this semester I think that I found each and everyone quite useful. My favorite was photoshop mostly because I see myself using it a lot in the future, I really liked how we could change pictures to do almost what ever we wanted. I had a lot of fun just playing with it at home on small projects of my own. As for Dreamweaver I found that once you understood just a little it became some much easier to use, I quite enjoyed creating my website but due to time and lack of need I probably wont do much more to it in the future. The program Premier was one that I think I would actually use in the future and I found it quite easy to use....well at least for the stuff we were doing. All in all I really liked this class and the projects, I really felt that I learned things in this class that I will remember and use someday on my own and to be honest this is probably the first time I can say that about a university class I have taken. I also really enjoyed being stretched to do things that I would not have normally done on my own and to experiment with new ideas and projects. It has been fun and who knows maybe ill get more into the newmedia discipline. Thanks for a great semester, cheers.

Time Bomb

Well today me and Esther finished our last newmedia project. We entitled our video Time Bomb mostly because that is how it felt. The whole pace of the video was such that it seemed like it was running down almost like time was running out. One of our last sequences was of two images flicking back and forth rapidly and then cutting to a clip of a nuclear explosion, to me it felt like a timer going off followed by a detonation. The meaning of our video was time is running out to save our earth and if we dont do something soon it may be to late and we will have to live with the consequences. In the end I actually really enjoyed working on this project, the program Premier was not to hard to work with all thought at the end there was some things that were kind of fidgety. I wish we would have had more time to work on it and then we would have been able to really find high quality footage and really fine tune our video. One thing that would have been really nice to do would have been to sync our still shot cuts in time with the beat or certain notes in our audio, unfortunately we did not have enough time to do that kind of detailed work. It was neat to put audio music to our piece after we were finished because it seemed like the music was almost written for the video we created, it was so neat to hear how everything just came together in the end. As people view our video we hope that they will feel like there is something wrong with our attitudes towards what we are doing to our earth. The interesting thing is im not really an environmentalist or anything like that so to make a movie that seems to push an environmental agenda is not something I would normally do, it was just that we did not want people to think everything is ok. As the old saying goes ignorance is bliss we decided to see if we could erase peoples ignorance and possible evoke some sort of personal evaluation about what they are doing to our earth either directly or passively to effect it in a positive or negative way.

Cool movie

Here is a video that I really liked and we used it for some of its footage in our own movie "time bomb"

Final Project

Our last project is a video editing project, I was really worried about it all semester because I felt like it was going to be the hardest project. Once we got started on it it was actually quite straight forward. My partner and I choose to do it on environmental issues like water, air, and land pollution. Our footage was all stock footage that was taken from youtube.com and still images found using google.com. We had the idea to start out with images that were relatively calm and showed nature at its finest which would then start to turn into footage the was showing various forms of pollution. The ending was my favorite part where still images increase in speed until a nuke goes off and is faded into a scene of kids playing in a park and a sunset. All in all I was actually quite pleased with the final project.

Web Site - Finished

I finished my website today and it is now posted on the web. The address is www.uleth.ca/~phillip.plourde, I think I am really pleased with it. All of the pages worked out exactly the way I wanted them to. I felt like some of the text was not as well planned as I wanted it to be but I can always go back and change it when I have more time. I really liked working with dreamweaver, it was not to hard to learn and once you got the hang of it you could work really fast.

Great Web Idea

Today as I was working on finding a theme for my website I decided that since I was a Bio major why not give my site a bio theme. As I thought about this more I started to think it would really work. Now I am just looking for more bio pics but some of my ideas include using DNA sequences, and lost of random SEM (kind of special electron microscope) images of different cellular structures. I think I will use the SEM and DNA images for the home page and maybe even a Bio luminescent plant for the intro page. For the rest of the pages I think I am going to use Bio images that relate to each topic. For example im going to use a image of two nerve cells making contact for my Contacts page and possibly people working in a lab for the experience page.

Web Site - Intro

We have now begun to discuss web site design. There was a couple of styles we discussed in class including Information Publishing, E-Commerce and Brochureware. My favorite style is the brochureware one and a good example of it can be found at: http://www.advertisingdesign.com/index2.html. The other styles were useful but I found the Information Publishing sites annoying mostly because they tried to present so much information that I would get lost in them and not be able to find anything or I would lose my place. At the end of class we took a look at the program Dreamweaver. It was simple enough to use and I also learned that you use photoshop a lot when doing web design which is something I never knew before.