interactive websites

ive been looking at interactive websites to try and find what unique styles other designers have come up with the produce an effective intereactive website.

http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/new-fantasyland/

this is the new website for fantasy land at disney land florida, it has an interactive map on the home screen where you can click on different characters and find out why they are featured on the map. when clicking on 'the beast' it gives you information of the beasts castle restaurant. this works well for children but slow and uneccessary for adults, apart from this is does work well as a website. 

http://wechoosethemoon.org

this website was a website built dedicated to the apollo 11. you can play around a launch your own rocket and go on your mssion to the moon, the only problems with this website is the slow loading and also some of the graphics are quite pixalated at times, apart from this the website is a wonderful idea for children and adults alike. there are voice overs from the astronauts who were on the rocket at the time, image galleries you can look at and you can skip certain stages of you 'mission' 

http://www.mono-1.com/monoface/main.html

this website was created by an advertising agency who live by the motto "simpler is better" in the case of this website i agree, this really is pointless yet engaging fun to have at your computer screen, the endless possibilites and the occassional snigger from the website user are effect enough for me to be seen as a genuis intereactive website. 

http://waterlife.nfb.ca

this website was created as part of a documentery called waterlife. it shows humans how important water is to us and each section of the website has its own specific shape e.g. water is healing, so the shape is a cross. the animation to this website has been to a high standard there is no pixelation at all. 



All of these websites were done in flash, although im not using falsh as part of my brief i feel looking atthiese websites has helped me gain a greater understanding of a unique interactive website and how i can attract my clientel. 

Brief

we were given our new brief yesterday (monday 25th february) 

In this brief we are designing and producing our own website and an Ibook for iPad all on a series of natural wonders.

i have been given Volcano's as my natural wonder and i was really pleased about this. 

on my website i want to create something that will be educational as well as asthetically pleasing to look at, we have looked at the 'beer camp' websites and i love the design for their 2011 website 

http://2011.beercamp.com

i want to create something similar to this, but it depends on how difficult it is going to be with the coding because our coding has to be done by hand. 

The Ibook i'm going to be producing is being made in Ibook author and this will be really interesting to do, for this i am going to have to consider a background for my Ibook as well as a fun navigation system. 

this brief is a double project brief and we have double the time but its going to be alot of work to do, i'm going to be learning more on this brief than any other because i've never done any websites/coding. 

Evaluation

my evalutaltion for my video is quite hard to write out because im not sure on the video itself. i wanted to try to do a fully kinetic type video, although this didnt work out due to technical difficulties so that was a shame, as i wanted to broaden my knowledge into motion abit more, i was looking on youtube for tutorials and found a really good one for motion 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZMmn7dmPmY&feature=related

this helped me to figure out alot of the basics as well as the tutorials that had been put on the server for us to look through. one difficulty i did have was using the keyframe editor and adding keyframes in the correct places and the actually working correctly.

when i got the hang of what i was doing i think it started to come together well.

i didnt get any comments on my footage in my crit so i didnt know if it was relateable or not, but i do think it relates well and has that moody, depressing feel which would of been the feelings of those times. the class had said that my music matched the mood perfectly which i was actually unsure about to start with but this helped to sway my decision so i stuck to it my other choice was
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPJc71Osvk

because of all the technical troubles i had in the holidays i started working on my original video to mix in the text aspect and try to get it to fit together, one problem i did have was pictures not being the same size as the footage. unfortunatly i didnt realise when filming that the footage would be either landscape or portrait and this does show as a weakness in my video. but from this i can learn to be more careful and choose how i am going to film and finish my video to suit. 

ive changed the beginning of my video from an image to kinetic text. alot of people in the class have used the bbc4 logo yet i couldnt find where this was located so unfortunaelty i havent been able to find this? it does make the video look more proffessioal so this is yet anouther flaw to my film.

anouther thing that didnt go quite to plan was trying to find the images of martin luther king and the archive footage in a good HQ quality, i purchased a dvd from the interent but after several attemepts to try and get the dvd footage onto my mac with no success i gave up and used footage downloaded from the internet. maybe there is certain software to convert dvd's to .MOV format???

apart from these i am happy with the outcome of my video and feel i have achieved a film that fits with the time era, and also a short film which i think is interesting to watch (hopefully!) although i have less blog and sketchbook work which isnt good, ive been finding it harder to time manage with this project as its going out and filming, then if its not right refilming and all my attention is on the film and not on blogger, also im not sure what you can really put in  a sketchbook on film making. maybe screenshots of the building proccess but i can learn from this in future and show a step by step guide to my final outcome. 

overall i found this a really fun project and one were ive learnt the most. 

kinetic type

these are some screen shots from my video. the kinetic text was done in motion which i have learnt quite abit about as iv have been experimenting quite a lot with effects. although with my text i wanted to keep it nice and simple so i used basic effects which stand out. i have used singular words on their own and with these i have kept the same effect on all of them so they link through within the video. 

ive kept the black and white theme of my film, becasuse of the era, colour was available but it was so expensive people just wouldnt of used it. i feel my kinetic type has worked well, although i think it would of been helpful to see other peoples kinetic type, because youtube and other sites only show high quality and high end styles which people have been doing for years, apart from that im happy with mine!

Pitch

these are all some screen shots from my pitch, whilst giving my pitch i was talking about my ideas to use kinetic type to produce martin luther kings face, unfortunately whilst trying to do this i couldnt open motion and couldnt work on the idea for several days, for this reason i have kept his face but the text does not build to make up his face.

this was going to be an idea for the whole video and have the whole video as kinetic type. i have a few seconds of this working but not enough to be able to finish in time and get an idea of how the video would of worked. i have my other video i had produced and i have edited this to have kinetic text and also the final image on martin luther king. 

i was trying to burn a dvd i bought onto my computer so i could use a good HQ video of footage from him speech, unforunately after numourous youtube tutorials i wasnt able to do this because the disc was copyrightd!

Music

Researching the musci for my video took a long time i needed to find music that fit the fear/need/desperation of the times martin luther king was in. 

i looked on youtube to find music that had been produced without words and was just backing/ orchestra music. 

i found these songs to be the most interesting 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLPJc71Osvk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuAGGZNfUkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xquWvQMMNKE

in the end i went for the mount legend track from the world war 2 soundtrack. 

my section of the speech

This momentous decree came as a great beckoning light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.

One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

One hundred years later

i think this part of the speech is really powerful and effective without having the typical "i have a dream" part. this part was the reality that he was living in and you feel the pain of the times, thats why i'm using this part. it reflects the era and hopefully will be as effective as "i have a dream" 

kinetic type

whilst looking on youtube for kinetic type videos i found a few that were inspirational to my work. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL2IIpNkSKs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIc0g1VEO0k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRuAJgCrZUk

i like the styles used and the little extras they have added to make the text more interesting. 
im going to use kinetic type in my video but overlayed on my video picking out the most important words.

Bus Boycott

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat.The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which concluded with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery public buses. King's role in the bus boycott transformed him into a national figure and the best-known spokesman of the civil rights movement.

this is the imformation that most people know about the bus boycott in montgomery but while i 

was researching into this i found anouther case where someone refused to give up their seat, 

but this case wasnt publicised. 

In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old school girl in Montgomery, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in compliance with Jim Crow laws, laws in the US South that enforced racial segregation. King was on the committee from the Birmingham African-American community that looked into the case; because Colvin was pregnant and unmarried, E.D. Nixon and Clifford Durr decided to wait for a better case to pursue.

Who was martin luther king?

Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American clergyman, activist, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. 

A Baptist minister, King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia in 1962, and organized nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama that attracted national attention following television news coverage of the brutal police response. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.

his i have a dream speech is the most famous speech he gave and is the speech i have chosen to do. 

Martin luther king married Coretta Scott, on June 18, 1953, on the lawn of her parents' house in her hometown of Heiberger, Alabama.They had four children: Yolanda King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King, and Bernice King.

inspired by Gandhi's success with non-violent activism, King visited Gandhi's birthplace in India in 1959.The trip to India affected King deepening his understanding of non-violent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights. In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King said "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation."

i think this quote he had said on the radio really is a powerful one, you can feel his passion for what he was doing, and how much it meant to him.

development

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XElUS201fM8&feature=endscreen&NR=1

this youtube clip is one i found to be really useful. i wanted to do a portrait of martin luther king but made up of his speech. i wasn't sure how to do this so i started looking online, i looked at a few vides before i found this one and it helped me to achieve a portrait, it still needs some work and some of the fonts needs to be made darker and and also bolder and the lighter fonts are ok at the moment, it took me 1 1/2 - 2 hours to complete this because a lot of things i was doing where going wrong. 

this is a screen shot of my portrait, as you can see its a rough copy because its the first time i have done it, i don't think the original image was a good choice because it was to dark so the mid tones are similar to the shadows. 

this portrait done of barack obama is what gave me the inspiration to do martin luther king, i think it is really effective and during my short clip i want to use kinetic text so eventually all the words will make up his face at the end. hopefully this will work but i will have to keep practising with different images and see what happens.