Multimedia Final Project

The final project wasn't too difficult: it just required a lot of coordinating the music and the script with the slides. I chose the topic of London, England because when I went there, I felt an immediate attachment and connection. When writing my script, I chose to focus on the hopes and dreams ever present in London. I then specifically focused on the Queen because she represents hopes and dreams. My ending paragraph is a quote summarizing the atmosphere of London.

I wanted this presentation to be more artistic and less tourist-like, so I took artistic pictures of London off of Google. Using the storyboard I had created, I developed 18 slides with different timings to match my script and to fill the two-minute slot. After creating the slide show, I worked on the audio. It took me a while to figure out which songs I wanted to use, but I ended up incorporating two very different songs about London. The first one, "Good Life" by One Republic, contained lyrics, while the second song, "30 Minutes in London" by Antoine Dufour, did not. I transferred these songs into Audacity as .wav files and then coordinated my script with the music. I wanted the intro, middle, and end narrations to be separated by a little bit of music. Once I created the final audio piece, I imported it into the Powerpoint presentation. From there, I created Soundslides and then imported the files into WebMg.

BiBi Cards

Creating the BiBi cards was extremely tedious, but educational. Creating the card in Quark was much more difficult than creating it in InDesign because of the lack of tools in ID.

To create the card back spotted background, I used the Photoshop program because the effect I needed was not available in InDesign or Quark. I used the sponge effect with a specific blue-green color in Photoshop and experimented with the transparency.

All of the text styles I used were luckily available in both programs, although the thickness of the fonts varied. This created a problem when trying to find a font small enough yet still legible for one of the sections on the card. I had to use the free transform tool in ID on almost all of the text, but Quark did not have that tool, making it difficult to transform the text. I found out that changing the X and Y variables of the text on a tool box on the bottom of the window worked best.

In both programs, I had the most trouble creating a triangle shape, because neither program includes the triangle shape option. In ID, I had to distort and free transform a rectangle shape and in Quark, I had to use a pen tool (which took me a while to figure out).

Other than a few shape and text road blocks, I had no problem creating the rest of the BiBi card. The front with the barcodes took some time, but it was just creating a bunch of different sized rectangles.

Website

To get ideas for the Canobie Lake Park web page, I visited multiple amusement park websites. I first placed the Canobie Lake Park logo in the corner of the page and then added in its catch phrase in bold letters. I used San Serif font for easy reading. I added in buttons for quick access to tickets, direction, and email. I also copied the park map and placed it into the page. I placed two other pictures into the page, one of which is the most popular roller coaster of the park, to attract attention. At the botton I repeated the task bar, but added a few other options, and placed the address and copyright at the bottom to replicate the feeling of an actual webpage. I added in the search button, so users can easily access information on the website. I used the thematic colors of the park of blue and yellow.

Pamphlet

Creating a pamphlet in InDesign was much less difficult than creating a project in QuarkXPress, but the pamphlet did take a great deal of time to create. To set up the document, I chose a landscape document and added 3 columns. To create the yellow background, I traced the document with a rectangular box and used the fill tool. I thought framing the pamphlet with a red border would make the pamphlet appear neater. I used the thematic colors of red and yellow because those are the colors of Canobie Lake Park. Transferring the images from the Internet to the pamphlet document caused the most trouble for me. I had to create an image box on the InDesign document, size the online photo in photoshop, and then transfer the image to the image box. For the headings, I used a Serif font called Minion Std. and for the main font, I used a Sans Serif font called Myriad Web Pro. I thought that displaying a coupon offer on the font of the brochure would attract more people to the brochure because people are interested in saving money. I provided a schedule of events, using the table tool, and wrote about a few rides to give the reader an idea of what to expect. I would have to say I am most proud of the schedule. I tried to incorporate a variety of rides to attract a wide range of ages to the park. Given more time, I would probably be more creative with the pamphlet design. The pictures on the pamphlet look blurry on the computer, but when printed, they did not come out blurry.

Poster

For the background, I took a photo off of Google, resized it, and added the dry brush filter. I dragged it into Quark and resized it again as an image. I then added two back rectangular boxes to the poster to fill out the rest of the background. I added AAchen Bold font using the textbox for the Nickelback title and used blue font because that style is most often related to this band. In font styles, I chose a gray shadow for the Nickelback title. I used Charlemagne font for the Live word and tilted the word while the text box was selected. For the two bottom texboxes I used bright blue Apple Casual font to grab the reader's attention. I also tilted the texboxes and added a 4-point solid frame. The StubHub icon was taken from Google, edited in Photoshop, and transferred to Quark through image import. I also placed a cutout filtered photoshop stage picture in Quark and then changed the opacity in Quark.

The difference of layers between Quark and Photoshop was confusing and sometimes made it difficult to add images. I have never used Quark before, which made it extremely hard because I basically had no idea what I was doing. I had the most trouble with importing images into Quark. Sometimes when I put images on my poster, they would cut out a spot on my poster or wouldn't move beyond a certain point. I'm most proud of my filtered Nickelback photo.

PowerPoint

For the first slide, I began by adding effects and styles to the title of the slide. I used an attention grabbing font from WordArt and then added a reflection effect and a scroll in effect, both of which I am most proud of. I placed the band picture as the background, but had to crop it and resize it many times so that font didn't cover the image. I used the wipe right transition on slow in every slide. The second slide I had some difficulties with because I could not figure out the timing. I used a standard, legible font and scattered the phrases surrounding an artistic filtered photoshopped image with a border, which I am most proud of. I then timed each phrase to fade in and out individually and to then come in at the same time at the end by using the custom animation. For the next slide, I had to make the main album image more transparent so that the song names could be read. I then added in a few more album covers and transformed then into grayscale so as not to take attention away from the main album cover. I surrounded all the albums with borders. The next slide was the most difficult to create. I used a seperate table for each row so that I could have each row fade in and out individually. For the last slide, I faded out the background.

To create music with my slide, I took two .m4a song files from my computer and transferred them into iTunes on the lab computer. I then transformed each song into a .wav file using the advanced tab and dragged the songs into Audacity. I took 30 seconds from each song and meshed them together. I selected insert sound from file in PowerPoint.

Animated Post Card

For the corpse collage, I mixed pictures of myself and pictures from the chapter 9 exercise folder together. I dragged each photo into Photoshop and transformed them into the right sizes using the free transform tool. I placed all the pictures on one document and selected hue/saturation. I clicked the colorize option and chose a pink hue because my font poem is about roses and a medium saturation. I did have difficulty creating the hue/saturation at first because I didn't realize I had to check the colorize option, which was responsible for the pink wash. I then selected the layer of each body part and varied the opacity in the layer toolbar so that it looked as though the different body parts blended together, but no so much that the overlapping couldn't be seen. I blended in a rose background from Google to represent my font poem.

For the animated font poem, I simply selected animation from the window toolbar. I then turned all the eyes off on all layers except the background layers. I selected the first animation slide and then turned the first word layer eye on. I selected duplicate selected frames and then turned the next word layer eye on in addition to the first and so on. After I was finished with that, I fooled around with the amount of seconds in between each word and developed my animated poem.

To transfer my font poem to my collage, I had to save my corpse as a jpeg and resize my corpse to that of the animated font poem by clicking constrain proportions. I then selected the corpse, copied, and pasted it onto the font poem animation.

Font Poem

I chose these particular words out of a poem because they were the most descriptive and I felt they would be easiest to create in Photoshop. Fonts I included in my poem include Monaco, Ruzicka Freehand, Nuptial Script, Ironwood, Rockwell Extra Bold, Edwardian Script, Myriad Pro, Zipty Do, Pompeia, Nyx, OCR A, Oragami, Synchro LET, and Shuriken Boy. For the simpler words such as they, are, and the, I used simpler fonts so as not to take away from the more important words of the poem. For "sky," I used a sky color and used an airy like font. For the first "rain", I used a blue color and then used a font that looked as though it was melting or dripping down like rain. For the second "rain," I used a bambo looking font to convey the feeling of rainforest rain and tilted the word downward to convey the motion of rain. I used a fancy pink font style for the "roses" to convey the femininess of roses. I shadowed "they" with one other lighter colored gray "they" because they is a plural word. The word off is coming off of the word "from" to represent the meanings of the words. "Shaken" is blurry and shaky and "bush" is bold and circular to represent the words. I chose a background with rain droplets and transformed the color into dark gray.

I had a hard time remembering how to create different effects for each font, so I had to constantly use trial and error. One of the biggest problems I faced was creating layer styles until I found out that the blend option had to be changed from multiply to normal. I would have to say I am most proud of overcoming these obstacles on my own and creating a piece that fits the requirements for a font poem.

Contact Sheet

When working on the contact sheet, I noticed that I was familiar with some of the applications within Photoshop. I took a few computer graphic design classes in high school, all of which included Photoshop. I was most familiar with the format/mode and orientation sections, but the others I had less or no experience with.

The resolution row was a bit tricky to complete simply because I had trouble finding a 1200 dpi picture. I searched Google images and learned that once I selected the large picture option, I received 1200 dpi pictures. I choose the striped caterpillar because I felt it would be easier to see if the picture became fuzzier, if I could no longer define the stripes. Once I found a picture, I dragged it into Photoshop, decreased it to one inch in height, and proceeded to decrease the dpi by selecting image size and typing in the accurate dpi size.

The format/mode row was simpler because I have had previous experience with it. I choose a 300 dpi image full of colors to drastically illustrate the variants in color with each column. I began with the RGB color because that is what the image was originally set in from the web and decreased it to one inch in height. I then changed the color to CMYK by selecting image, mode and CMYK. I developed the B&W picture by selecting image, mode, and grayscale from the original photo. For Duotone, I kept the image in the B&W condition and then selected image and duotone. From there, I was able to choose what color I wanted to appear in the photo besides black. I chose pantone red, giving the photo a red tint.

For orientation, I choose a picture with greater length than height from Google. I then typed 1 in. by 1 in. into the width and height toolbar at the top. From there, I clicked on the crop icon on the left side toolbar and dragged the crop tool from the top left corner of the picture to where the crop tool stopped. I then doubled clicked on the selected area of the photo and placed it into the square column. For the portrait row, I did the same, but made the width .75 in. and the height 1 in.

For the framing row, I changed the height of a picture from Google to 1 in. using image size. I then typed in 1.5 in. for the width and 1 in. for the height in the toolbar at the top. I took the crop tool and chose a spot in the center of the image. I then double clicked the selected area to zoom into that specific area. I proceeded to do that three times for each column.

For the content row, I took a picture of a violin off the Flickr photo website. After dragging it into Photoshop, I selected the crop tool and focused on a specific part of the violin. I kept cropping from the original photo until I got down to a specific detail on the violin that wouldn't be recognizable unless the representational photo was seen first. I shrunk the photo down to 1 in. in height each time I cropped it.

For the purpose row, I chose a journalistic style photo offline and shrunk it to 1 in. in height in Photoshop. For each column, I took the original photo, went to filter, and choose a specific filter technique I wanted to use. The filters I used were palette knife, colored pencil, and neon glow.