Animation Storyboard

Here is the storyboard for my animation, complete with a script on each slide. Click to view larger image.
























Note: if the image doesn't get big enough to read in your browser(as was the case for me) right click and select save as to be able to view it at full size.

Animation FATP

So for my animations I'm going to show a discussion between two characters about twitter in a somewhat comedic fashion. Here's my FATP:

Focus: Why do people use twitter?
Audience: The Class
Topic: Twitter
Purpose: To entertain

Hopefully you all will find it funny and a little ironic.

Podcast: Reflection

Overall I thought this was a pretty cool and fun assignment to do. For this project I bascially made an audio version of my presentation, so the FATP was very similar and I already had much of my content for it. Putting it all into a scrip was enjoyable. The whole time I was writing it I just thought "What would be something I would hear on the radio that was informative?" Immediately of NPR so I think my style came out similar. Audacity was a fun tool to use as well. Very easy to figure and the process of putting together the show was cool to see happen in front of my screen, like where to cue the music, how to fade it in and out, along with where to put the sound effects. Houndbite proved to be a simple but effective as well. It was very straight forward on how upload my podcast and share it. I'm hoping more of our assignments will be like this.

Podcast: Practicing Good Webdesign.

Here's my Podcast! It is entitled Practicing Good Web Design. It is an informative clip where I used the Elements of Design, combined with the F-Shaped pattern and the fundamentals of useability to make an attractive, easy to use website.

Podcast Script

Here is the outline of my script for my podcast entitled "Practicing Good Web Design"

Into Music: Tea Roots

Introduction of show along with introduction of myself

Thank you to the sponsor

Overview of what the show is about

Arrangement:
Whitespace
Design Simply
F-Shaped Pattern

More Elements of Design:
Color

More Fundamentals:
Build Well
HTML
Transformation
Keyboard Accessability

Wrap up:
website
credits
bibliography

Outro Music: Tea Roots

FATP proposal: Web Design Podcast

I'm basing my podcast on my last project, so the last FATP is pretty similar to this one:
Focus: Good web design
Audience: The Class and anyone interested in Web Development
Topic: Web Design
Purpose: To discuss good web design while using the fundamentals of usability, elements of design and the f-shaped pattern.

Podcast Review: Are Stupid People Happier?

The Podcast that I chose is from HowStuffWorks.com and is titled "Are Stupid People Happier?" The Podcast was all audio in the form of a discussion where two people were given a topic along with relevant research. Along with that they gave their thoughts on the research and also brought up what they knew about the subject in terms of experience and opinion. Overall though I was not very impressed with the Podcast because most of the discussion seemed to be filler. They started out on track with the subject at hand and pretty much answered the question within the first few minutes of the show. They went on to what they thought were problems with the research and even into what happiness was(which I thought was relevant) but for most of the show they just discussed different types of psychology that had to do with happiness which I didn't really think was needed as it only related to the issue instead of shedding more light on it. It felt like the brought that. in because they had another 15 minutes to fill. So while I think the format and style of the show had potential(and I wouldn't doubt that some of their other shows were good if they had more to talk about) it didn't really work for the subject because there was not enough to discuss in the time allotted.

Slideshow reflection

When I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my presentation I had a hard time thinking about what I could do that could easily relate to the elements of design. Yet when I was reading through the Wikipedia articles bits and pieces of what I have learned from my web design class in high school and my current HTML class now came to mind. Then the relationship became obvious, so I decided to do what I knew about good web design. At first I didn't think I was going to be able to fill that much of a presentation but the more I worked on it, the more relationships I saw between the Elements of Design, Universal usability and the F-shaped pattern emerged and I ended up with plenty! So the biggest thing I got from doing this project is that if there are different ways you can go about doing something well, they will often share some aspects from each other.

So for my project I decided to do a presentation about what I know about good web design. My presentation shows this in relation to the fundamentals of useability, the f-shaped pattern, and the elements of design. The FATP for this is:
Focus: Good web design while also using the fundamentals of usability
Audience: The Class
Topic: Web Design
Purpose: To give examples of good web design while also using the fundamentals of usability

The mindmap for this can be found here: http://share.xmind.net/carmello6769/web-design/

The Flowchart for my project:




Slideshow:

Usabilityslideshow

View more presentations from Carmell06769.

So this week part of our assinment was to take photo's with composition in mind. I just got done going to one of the biggest car shows in New England so it gave me a opportunity to take some pictures:
I love this one because it it really marks the time of the car. I tooks this one with the thirds compostion in mind, one of the meeting points being Kennedy's head.

This one I took with the diagonals composition in mind by trying to keeping the head ornament centered in the photo as best as I could.

For the next one I think it fits under the leading the eye composition because the GTO "The Judge" Logo really stands out against the white fender, so your eye is automatically drawn to it first.

In this photo I was going for the converging composition, with the glasses leading your eye down the middle and out the door.

Lastly, I thought this picture of me on the Burlington waterfront was a good example of creating depth, having me in the forground looking out, and the last of the sunset in the back of the photo over the lake.

So this week I decided to try out GIMP for this weeks assignment for the fact that I wanted to see how similar it was to photoshop and I just installed Kubuntu alongside XP on my computer and needed a good image editor. After using it for a bit I did realize that they were pretty similar and it wasn't that big of a transition to use. So the picture that I started out with was this:
I really like this picture I took of this fox but I thought the colors were kind of washed out from the flash and I didn't like the plate to the left of her, and that's where GIMP came in. First I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of the plate. This is accomplished by selecting another part of the picture to be copied over the area you want fixed, then dragging the brush over the plate. After that it was on to fixing up the colors. GIMP has a nice feature that automatically does that. Under the colors tab you go to auto and select enhance color and things automatically become brighter and enriched. The last thing I did was feather the edges for a nicer presentation of the photo. To accomplish that, I used the rectangular selection tool to crop what part of the picture I wanted. Under the options for the tool I selected feather edges and rounded edges. I then inverted the selection to cut out the part of the picture I wanted to get rid which resulted in the picture below:

Google's Picasa is a program that manages your photos. With it, you can create photo albums with pictures that you have on you computer. After creating the album, Picasa gives you many different options on what you can do with that album after you created it. For example, the programs gives you the option to upload your albums to Picasa's Web Albums site, along with the options to upload them to your account on Blogger.com The program comes with a lite set of photo editing features such as retouching, color levels, contrast, croping, and give you the option to put your photos through a good sized set filters. A screen cast that goes more in depth on these features and how to use them is located below. Picasa can be found at http://picasa.google.com/

Free online screencasting tool

So one of the webware products that I have gotten to use is called Picnik. It is a fairly simple photo editing program that opens up right in your browser. The webware features some of the basic things you would expect to see in any program of this nature, which include opening up a photo of your choice(what I really liked is that the photo you wished to edit didn't even have to be on your computer. Picnik gives you the option pick from a website, your web cam, and even let's you connect to your facebook or myspace to retrieve images from them!) You have the ability to then resize, crop and rotate your picture to your liking. Some of the more complex things you can do to your picture include adding fancy borders, text(with different effects) and it also allows you to put it through different filters. All in all I actually really liked this program. When I first saw it I thought it was just going to be like a crippled version of photoshop for the web. Yet once I used it I was that really wasn't the case. It's true that for a photo editing program it's not nearly as powerful as photoshop, but the thing is Picnik doesn't try to be photoshop. It's just a nifty little photo editor that allows you to quickly spruce up your photos with the option of adding some cool effects to them. What I liked the best about it was not the fact that whatever you can do in Picnik you can do in photoshop, but the fact that Picnik let's you get to the same comparable effects in a much easier manner. I took a picture the car that I just bought and cropped it, added a cool drop shadow effect along with some semi-transparent text and it only took me a few minutes to do. Photoshop in all honesty would have taken me much longer to get the same effect on a first time use. Picnik can be found at http://www.picnik.com/ Below are some screenshots of the webware along with the finished product. Click on any of the images to veiw them in full size.