The final site is here and the essay can be found here.
Peace.
Highly aware of the risk there is of me sounding like an idealistic, overly romantic idiot… I’ll keep this short.
Basically in all facets of my life, whether at work, school, socializing and especially in creating art I try to keep to my morals and beliefs.
I do not stick to the guidelines of any religion, though appreciate the ideals behind some, I do not agree with any political views in their entirety.
What I do believe is that every human is born with basic and equal rights. These are not privileges but rights that no human should be deprived of.
These include the right to free speech and voice opinion, the right to practice ones own religion and the right to provide for oneself and family and earn a living.
I strongly oppose anyone or anything that deprives any peoples or person of these human rights (among others).
Written in 1850 by Anselme Bellegarrigue. It was the first manifesto of anarchism. THe manifesto outlines the ideals of anarchism. It asks what is anarchy and addresses the misunderstood nature of anarchism as a political ideal. Both those from the Left and Right hold ideas of anarchism that are often not investigated or well understood.
The manifesto contents that “Anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war”. The idea is that voting is a delusion and helps no one but polititions. The idea is also that the structure of our society is an enormous crime against humanity and human rights.
The context for the manifesto came after the French Revolution and wishing to be emancipated from the enforced system and voting.
Hey guys!
I’ve managed to do the layout for both sides of my “world” now.
see the site here
I did use a tutorial to help a bit on the metal plate. Just goes to show, when in doubt, google it.
I think I’m pretty satisfied with them, except for the home page of course, which I’m trying to work up the motivation to make. The 2 second flash picture is doing its job AND I managed to image map it so that when you click on different sides it takes you there! Amazing!
Cheers.
So I’ve realised the layout for half of my two-themed site. You can see it here.
I created the heading and its roots by smudging text with a typical font I then brushed on the leaves with scattering on to make it spread out the way it does. The background is me just using a white brush a putting a glow on the clouds with a bit of a grey gradient. And finally the text box is me erasing the edges of a rectangle and putting an slight bevel on the edge.
Tell me what you think.
I’m pretty happy with it so far. There is an annoying white border around some things which I’m trying to redeem with more accurate photoshop technique but other than that everything’s coming up Milhouse.
Out.
Here’s my schedule and what I’d like to achieve in the coming weeks for my creative site.
Week 6 – 8
In this time I need to finish the layout of my site and formatting all the HTML. All bugs need to be fixed and it needs to be finished and working so I can focus the rest of my time on the creative content for the site.
This will include me :
- Designing the background images
- Utilizing a table layout method. (two or columns) Making sure content will fit and look appealing.
- Suitable colour scheme
- Designing headings (animated?)
- Choose fonts appropriate to each “city”
- Make sure all links work and the website flows.
From this point I will focus on the actual creative content.
Week 9 til Due Date.
- Complete all written story (the draft of which is already very extensive) and extensive linkage so that viewers can “creep” the way I intend.
- At least 4 audio tracks (one a week)
- At least 6 drawings/digital images (similarly timed out)
- Possibility of a video or short animation. (???)
On top of this I plan to note everywhere I get my ideas from and every resource I use to help with the more technical side to things this is for help with the 2000 word essay accompanying the creative project.
My main gain for the time being is to finish the HTML by that date, and even better would be before. I need as much time to spend on the creative concepts so that the actual site is interesting.
For our Week 5 Class exercise I read through the article Designing a Movie for Sound by Randy Thom.
I thoroughly enjoyed the article as this is an issue very close to my heart. One of my favourite areas to work is in film with sound. And I know all to well what it is like to have a director or crew who have not taken sound into consideration at all.
Thom raises an astounding amount of good points in the article.
He speaks of how a film should be written with sound taken into consideration from the initial screenplay. This doesn’t mean descriptions of specific interesting sounds in the script, but to give opportunity for sound to help tell the story and play the integral role that it should in harmony with the visual. Point of view shots are an example of writing which gives sound a large roll in putting an audience in a characters shows. Or considering the use of sounds not blatantly in the visual mise en scene but which would be so interesting to be heard even though not on-screen. My favourite quote from the article relates to this:
“Starving the eye will inevitably bring the ear, and therefore the imagination, more into play.”
The article addresses the overall disinterest with sound and lack of backing it has on a film. One particular area this shines through is in post-production. A sound editor is given little time and little to work with and is expected to work miracles. I can relate to this due to a recent experience. The sound was not considered at all in filming. With a context requiring complete isolation the set which was chosen was near a main road with lots of bird life around…. great. Safe to say the on-set audio was terrible. Everything had to be reproduced in post including the dialogue. And all I got was groans and nervous looks when it came to ADR. It took hours upon hours to get anything sounding good.
I agree with Thom in cinema constantly being dismissed as a “visual medium” and “good” sound is awarded to films that are the loudest. If you watched your favourite film of all time without the sound design included, I guarantee it would terrible. Too many movies are filled with dialogue no stop from start to end. When sometimes breathing space where beautiful soundscapes or score can bring with it context and meaning that is so rich to the storytelling process.
Sound is such a useful and important creative tool. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why it gets such a rough end of the stick.We listen are moved by so much music every day. When added to visual both the audio and visual become more powerful. Video clips help sell a song, soundtracks sell films, I think how many times I’ve heard someone tell me “you should see that film, it has an amazing soundtrack.”
However, I’ll endeavour to show the power of it and the artist value it can bring to a creative project.
End rant.
So after our lecture on Monday evening I have been doing further research into some basic design concepts.I mostly used the links provided on Eugenia’s blog and then tried to put the ideas into practice. I either took some quick photos with a digital camera or found some photos I already had that demonstrated what I was intending.
I thought delving into these ideas would be helpful when it comes to designing my website as I would like it to be as visially appealing as possible.
My first port of call was in regards to colour. My interest here is gaining colour harmony for my site. From Color Matters I learnt of two basic formulas for finding colour harmony.
First was analogous colors, the use of 3 colours found next to each other on the colour wheel:
And then complementary colours, found on opposite sides of the colour wheel:
The Principals of design were then also quite interesting. There were so many elements which can be utilized for different purposes. For instance:
Scale to emphasise the impact of how large an object is.
Proportion showing (or hiding) the relative size of objects within the picture.
Composition is then another concept that has escaped me until now. Specifically here is the basic rules of framing landscape photography, which can be used or broken. These are
Geometric Shapes (kinda, but not exactly)
Diagonal Lines (not really a landscape… but the line is there!)
and of course
I’m quite happy I delved a little deeper and tried it myself. I think this is going to be quite beneficial in the coming weeks.
Dave.
In many ways Marshall McLuhan was a fortune-teller on modern media. So many of his theories have eerily come true. However there are certain aspects which are close but not entirely true to todays society. For instance, McLuhan stated that individualism will die and devolve back into the conformist mass society of the pre-industrial world. However although I agree that a large and growing number of people are becoming more conformist because of modern media, I also feel that modern media is producing a minority of individuals and creative minds to an extreme like no other generation has seen. The technology gives the opportunity for very advanced original thought.
In terms of the more modern thoughts of Henry Jenkins, I believe we do live in a very convergent society, A huge global web-based society where we are all networked and connected. We however rely very much on the knowledge of other people on the web, through sites like Wikipedia and google, which is not what I would consider a contributory society. We are somewhat participatory, however it takes a great deal to convince us to get involved as a society. We are so immune to the interactivity of Web 2.0 that it takes the most entertaining and captivating interactive sites to draw our attention.
This semester’s assignment for Concept Development has me pretty stumped. Though after a fair bit of effort I think I’m actually on the verge of my brain having a genuine idea!
So I’m going to put forward an idea and hold it up against Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, explained to us on Eugenia’s blog.
I’m considering creating a fictional based website “world”. A world that would be separated into two sides. The urban, advanced and hi-tech side and the organic, rustic and old-fashioned side.
What these sides would represent, and what I would utilise them for is somewhat vague at this stage. But at the moment I am imagining a site where I could for one create audio, whether it be folk/acoustic for the rustic side and produce some electronic music inspired be the urban side. And I could post up other projects similarly whether it be art, writing or video.
I could even try to have some of evolving plot or narrative involving the two sides and post a whole rang of multimedia to convey the story… Romeo and Juliet rip off anyone?
What I am still in debates over is I would wish for some form of interactivity. Whether this be in the way the visitor would navigate around the site (which might be difficult to make very stimulating when I’m under the impression we are using html) or I have a submission page where people can submit their own projects to fit the worlds or I make a call out for specific projects to be made and they are utilized in the site/story. This is a difficult feat, especially because its success involves a high level of involvement from visitors, and the internet is a big bad world with billions of sites for people to see….. why mine?
Visually speaking I want the site to look as appealing as possible and be easy to navigate. Below is one mock-up I created for the main page where you could pick which site of the “world” you would like to visit.Its pretty basic, done in flash quickly. I’ll make a more detailed one soon.
mock-up drawing for main page
So its going to be a difficult in the design department, but I never really make it easy for myself. To give you an idea of the type of site id wish it to me here are some of my favourite sites visually and navigation wise.
- kulturbanause (more visually because it just navigates like a blog)
- deanoakley
- and especially fat/
In terms of six hat thinking I think I have a lot of black hats to over come…….
The project will require me to research more interactive we development, things other than an animation sparking when you roll he mouse over an area…. I need to research methods of how to get people involved.
The idea is exciting but very daunting to me. I feel that it will be a waste of time, no one will see it/use it and I’ll go through a whole lot of stress for nothing.
The good thing that could from this site however, is a growing and evolving, collaborative site which creates a network for creative people. and an avenue for me to express my creativity and share it over the web
On the other hand due to my lack in expertise the site could run no where near as smoothly as I am hoping and no one will see it or get involved.
I will have to condense the size of the site if I wish to achieve this idea. It has to be done by the end of semester and to involve the level of collaboration where people are submitting projects for viewing could take to the end of the year. An attractive site with engaging navigation, in which I showcase some of my work themed in these two spectrums, by week 13. This is the goal.
A flash site would be a good alternative to html for making the site fun to move around. I have to see if this can be an alternative. The site cannot be too far out of my grasp to achieve. Not too many pages and complications and for now no submissions only my work. This is in order for me to submit a good-looking and working web project by the end of semester and not a half-finished one.
I’ve decided it will be best if the set up involves a home page which you choose which area you want to visit. And then one page in each area which has some written story and a piece of multimedia (photos, audio, video ect.) to compliment and progress the story. And of course an about page.
This will be my multimedia web narrative.
