Final Reflection

During this class we have covered a lot more than I thought we would, with each week bringing something entirely new to the table. We covered things such as the beginnings of multimedia, social networking, webware, open source, animation, video and even the transformation of the Internet itself. Each of these things were demonstrated to us via our discussion, reading and most of all our projects. All of which gave me a much broader perspective of how much power there is behind all of these tools that the user can easily grasp, making this class very worthwhile to me.
I organized my portfolio by Social Networking, Weekly Work and Discussion, Other Tools and Projects because those seemed like the logical categories that the work we did as well as the flow of the class took. For me it would start out with what the weekly work was and what the discussion questions were to keep in mind while I did the reading and assignments. We would then use various tools to help us accomplish our tasks for the week. Some weeks involved more in-depth projects that all of the previous helped develop. Then our assignments would also involve some sort of social networking, whether it be setting up a profile or making sure that we blogged the process of our work for others to view and comment on. So therefore I put a short description of the class work for each week along with it's discussion, my links to any of the social networking involved in another section, and the tools I used to get my work done and the links to my projects in each of their own respective sections of my ePortfolio site.
Yet even though each week covered a different topic than the last, I really liked the class because each week still built on top of the last in one way or another. For example tools that we were introduced to one week became useful later on in other assignments. Mindmapping was a tool one week that we learned in-depth about with it's relation to multimedia. It then became a great tool to help us coordinate our thoughts and help creativity flow for other assignments and projects. I believe this flow of being able to build on what was done the week before was one of my strengths in this class. For example I thought some of my best work came out of transferring and evolving my twitter theme between different forms of media. They were all basically the same with minor tweaks to the story each time, but executed differently. The storyboard for the first animation laid out a good foundation for both my animation and my video. The FATP helped me maintain my focus for each as well. With each one I was able to adapt the settings available to me, whether that was one of the pre-defined scenes that limited me on the animation, or the town that that I live in and the people I had available to me at the time.
The most effective techniques for creating my projects had to be the FATP as well as using the flowcharts. I liked using the FATP because sometimes when I am creating things I can go off on a tangent of ideas and eventually stray if I do not keep focused. The FATP helped me stay on task on many occasions helping me achieve my original vision while keeping in the confines of the assignment. The flowcharts helped strengthen those aspects of the FATP because it would help me visualize my assignments in steps and give me a solid path to follow.
I would say one of the most difficult challenges of the portfolio was adapting it to the extended requirements from that over the old one. I already had something that worked so I didn't want to change the site too much or start over, so I had to think about what I could instead add to the site to make it work. I overcame this challenge by stepping back and trying to think about this class as a whole and then seeing if I could see any connections. As you can see in the way my site is set up like I mentioned before, I organized it by how I saw the class flowed which I think worked out quite nicely as it helped me fit things nicely into categories.
Overall this class was a worthwhile experience for me. The ePortfolio helped me really see how all of what I had learned connected to each other and this class has really changed the way I look at the internet. I see it much less in the web 1.0 view of when I first started using the Internet and instead see how empowering it can be too the user, with all the tools it offers the possibilities for creativity seem endless and so are the ways you can share it! Also the most important thing I got out of this was that the Internet is not just the product of developers, but largely by the end user. We are the Internet.

Here is the link to my ePortfolio: http://sites.google.com/site/carmenseportfoliosite/Home

Video: Reflection

This was another fun project. If you saw my last project, this is the live action version of "What's with Twitter?" Being the live action version my FATP was the same and I already had a storyboard for it, so I created a flowchart to help me plan the flow of the movie. For this I used Gliffy once again so there was nothing new for me to learn to create an effective flowchart. Yet creating a video was a new experience for me. I used the video function on my digital camera for all the recording which was easy enough, yet I couldn't get it to record with out some "popping" in the audio, which was disappointing. Windows Movie Maker was another first for me and I wasn't very impressed by it. For a simple movie editor it wasn't so simple to use. First figuring out how to import your clips was tricky because I didn't find anything that just said "Insert video" or "Import". You have to do you videos in collections, and when I did get the hang of that, the program split up my clips without me asking it to which was weird. The more advanced options I thought were made accessible in ways that weren't very self explanatory. Yet once I was able to get everything opened up it was easy to put video, text and music together.

Video: Final Product

Here's my video. It follows very similarly to the animation I made. I go down to visit a friend at a restaurant and I immediately go on a rant about my dislike for twitter. I try to think of something to use to get people to hear of my ideas and I in turn get an ironic solution.

I apologize for the static during the dialog, but there was a problem with my camera that I couldn't figure out.


Music By SackJo22 provided under the creative commons attribution licence.

Video: Flowchart

Here's a diagram on how the movie will flow:

Video: FATP

So for my video I'm basically making a live action version of my animation which is once again, a discussion between two friends about why people use twitter.
Here's my FATP:

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

Animation Reflection

This was a really fun project! At first I was kind of stuck at what kind of story to give it while keeping it related to the class. So I went back to my first post and decided to do something about twitter. I was a little confused at first about what was expected of me for the project, so I ended up with two storyboards)one being a template I used in photoshop and the other being the comic I made. The comic webware I used was Toonlet and it was a breeze to use. The process to make my comic was basically choose a character pack, constuct your own characters(with plenty of options for face, head, body and arms) then add the text. Everything on it was really straight forward and easy to find the link in my blog. The webware I used for my animation was GoAnimate. This one was a little more tricky to use compared to the comic, which didn't come as a surprise to me as an animation is more complicated than a comic. So while I didn't instantly get it, it didn't take long for me to get a hang of it. Yet the process was fairly similar to the comic, except you had to add in the scenes, the duration of each one as well as movement and facial expression. Overall I enjoyed using it though. Definitely a cool project though.

Animation: Final Cartoon

Here's the cartoon! It sticks with the story from the storyboard and the comic. Hope everyone enjoys!
GoAnimate.com: What's With Twitter? by Carmello6769


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Animation: Comic

Here's the comic I made using toonlet. It's a rant one man named Bob is having about his dislike for twitter and his friend Rob's solution:
What's with Twitter?

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.

Well along with this class I'm taking another class about HTML, and one of the things we were learning about is good website design. Part of this was to do some research on the website www.websitesthatsuck.com If you can't tell by the URL, it's a site all about bad website design and it gives some really good examples of what not to do. I urge everyone in the class to check it out as I believe it could help out with the organization of your ePortfolio site. It gave me some stuff to rethink on my site. Check out the worst sites of 2008 and some of the videos.

ePortfolio website

Well today I have (for now) finished my website for my class ePortfolio. I used google sites to make it and I have to say that they have made it pretty easy to make a simple website. It's easy to add pages as well as easy to keep them organized for the fact that the navigation is already set up for you at your left. The WYSIWYG editor is pretty straight forward as well, and the option to view and edit the html make's this tool a lot more powerful than you'd think.
I had a little bit of a hard time putting the portfolio together at first, but as I kept at it the easier it got to organize my thoughts. The organization strayed a lot from what I had initially laid out with the mindmap, but I think it turned out better. I just hope my page with the weekly work it detailed enough. The link to the site is sites.google.com/site/carmenseportfoliosite. If anyone has any sugestions please leave a comment.

Concept proposal

So for this project I didn't really have a career in mind so I decided to go a different route. For this project my portfolio will be about this class and what I have learned in this class. To do this I want to try and make a website that would include documentation and examples of the work that I have done. Here is the FATP for the project:

Form: Website that documents the work done
Audience: The professor and the class
Topic: Multimedia as it pertains to the class
Purpose: To display what I have learned about in the class