Happy Easter

Animation Further Progress

Today I did some practice on making a symbol on Flash. Too show a way of time keeping I decided to create a calendar, crossing out each date to a deadline. I drew the calendar using a combination of shapes, lines, the text tool and the brush tool. As each individual part of the calendar was separate it meant that when I moved one part of it, only that part would move and that wasn't what I wanted as I wanted the whole calendar to gradually come onto the screen. 

I highlighted the whole calendar then right clicked and chose 'create symbol' then I name the symbol Calendar. Now the calendar is a symbol it means that every part of it is just one shape, so it all moves together.

I think that I am on track to be able to finish my animation today as after the calendar I just want to insert an end card that says 'Time Keeping Is Important' just to make it clear what the message of my animation is. 

Here is my finished animation as a GIF, I am happy with how it turned out overall. There are a few bits that could do with some perfecting for example tidying up around the edge of the calendar, but the overall animation makes the small mistakes less important.

Initially when I began creating the animation I was unsure that I would be able to make it long enough, or add any interesting aspects. I have surprised myself with what I have done as I like the different scenes e.g. the bedroom, the alarm clock and the calendar.

Animation Progress

After creating my storyboard idea for my short informative animation I began to develop it on Flash. To help build up my Flash skills, I decided to simplify my idea slightly so that I could get used to a few skills and be happy that I can do them fairly well rather than struggle with trying to do too many new things.

I find that creating new layers is very helpful to make sure everything is running smoothly as it allows me to separate different parts of the animation and work on new things without ruining parts that I've made previously.

Here is what I've developed so far using mainly hand drawn illustrations, classic tweens, layers and keyframes.

I am happy with the progress but I would like to work on adding:

• More fluid movement, looking at what I learnt from the walk sequence.
• Applying the soundtrack I created in Tom's lesson to this animation.
• Making sure my message 'Time keeping is important' is clear.

My Chronicle Week- Day 5

Today was the last day of working with The Bath Chronicle. It was a day of finishing off all of the projects so Alex can decide what to do with them.

I completed my music article and sent it to Alex, he told me that he would get it up on the Chronicle website within the next few days which will be a great oppurtunity for me but also a good oppurtunity for the students I interviewed to get their names heard.

Ben and I completed our article to support the Vox Pop video. Alex managed to get hold of some opinions from local candidates about what they think about 16 year olds being able to vote, we included their unedited words in our article to expand it more.

Jake finished edtiting the video so the article and video are now complete to support eachtoher on the website as Alex seems kean to post our work.

Ben was lucky and talented enough to have one of his press release articles published in the Chronicle newspaper!

Alex was very pleased with the work we did.

My music article was later published on the Bath Chronicles website!

http://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/follow-Laura-Doggett-City-Bath-College-music-star/story-26160782-detail/story.html

My Chronicle Week- Day 4

Now all of the Vox Pop interviews have been collected, the task was to watch the footage through and rough cut it so that we had 1-2 minutes worth of clear, helpful footage that will give the public and ourselves an idea about what the public think about 16 year olds voting and the interest in politics. 

Here is the draft edit of the video:


Along with the video that we hope will be displayed on the website, I felt it would be a good idea to write a short article including some of the facts I had researched previously so that there would be some statistics alongside the opinions. The facts I included were based on the Scottish referendum as 16 year olds were given the right to vote on that and it turned out to be successful.

As well as the facts about the referendum, I included the fact I found about more young people voting on the X-Factor than the general election. When I presented this fact to Alex, he thought it would be a good idea to include it as even people who don't have an interest in politics will be able to relate to this fact, it could potentially make the article more exciting.

I drafted the article that could potentially introduce the video on the website:

After showing Ben the article we decided to make a couple changes so that it was slightly more concise and we swapped the paragraphs around so that there weren't three paragraphs in a row all with rhetorical questions. We also altered the headline to make it slightly more snappy.

As the political video idea is starting to look more solid. I decided to try and produce my own article linked to my own interests and also the interest of lots of teenagers. I have a mean interest in music, and as Laura Doggett, a previous Bath college students who is making it in the music industry visited the college recently, I thought it would be good to do a follow up to find out what current students expect to get from the course. Also I want to find out what the lecturers aim to lead the students towards.

I have made an outline of some questions that I intend to ask the students and lecturers so I can use their answers as quotes in my article.

Student questions:

- What made you want to study music?

- What opportunities does the course give you to help you in the music industry?

- Does the success of Laura Doggett and Gabrielle Aplin make you feel as though you have an equal chance?

- What do you expect the course to lead you towards in the future?

Lecturer questions: 

- Is your aim as a lecturer to try and make every student famous in the music business?

- Do you feel as though the students wan to follow in Laura and Gabrielle's footsteps or are they more independent?

- Do you have hope that many students will turn out like Laura and Gabrielle?

- What would be your three top tips to your students to develop their success?

I made a phone call to the music department at college and they were more than happy to get some students and a lecturer involved in answering some questions.

Then I went ahead and asked some of the students and one of the lecturers the questions and recorded their answers as voice recordings. They were all really helpful and I used their responses are a basis for my article.

Alex was very impressed with my article and gave me some feedback on how to make it compete. He also said that our group was the most enthusiastic he's had so far which is great news!

My Chronicle Week- Day 3

This morning, Alex sent the group and email showing an example of something a newspaper in Hull reported on, the top 10 inventions that came from Hull. He said that he would like two members of the group to recreate this article for Bath and for the other pair to make a list of the top books and authors that come from Bath.

Something interesting that Alex told us is that people are more likely to click on a list that has an odd number of points than a list with an even amount of points. Therefore, Ben and I created a list for the top 11 books and authors from Bath.

Ben researched authors from Bath and I researched books that are wholly or partly set in Bath, we then put our ideas together and created a list of the top 11. Alex gave us some advice on how to improve our orginal list:

Here is the final list:

After creating this list, I began to put together some questions that we could use for Vox Pops. We wanted to find out about peoples interest in politics and mainly whether they think 16 and 17 year olds should be able to vote. We took out questions around college and out into Bath and collected our footage.

My Chronicle Week- Day 2

The day began with another meeting with Alex. He set the group up with our own individual press releases to turn into a story. After having done a similar task on Friday I felt as though it was good practise to do another one and this time I could make improvements based on the feedback I was given.

After writing the outline for my press release about a First World War exhibition in Bath postal museum, Alex gave me some helpful style tips.

Here is my finished, altered press release:

I decided to do some research in the affect of young people voting and what people think about it. I look online and produced some notes which I find helpful as I now have more of an idea about whether more people are for or against 16-17 year olds voting.

My Chronicle Week- Day 1

At the beginning of my first day working with the Bath Chronicle, I went to visit the head quarters to find out what my position would be and to find out some more about what the Chronicle do. Alex, the head of content, gave the rest of the group and I a tour of the news room, explaining everyones jobs such as the sports editors, weather reporters, advertising, events organising and layout designers. After finding out a bit about what everyones role is with the paper, Alex set the first task.

A press release was given to me to turn into a story. I was given a word count of 100-120 and told to include pictures so that the story would be fit for The Chronicles website.

After writing my story using the information I was given, Alex gave me some advice on how I could alter it to make it more similar to the Chronicle's writing style. I took on board his very helpful advice and altered my story.

During the second part of the day, as a team we worked together to develop the topic we'd be producing content on for the Chronicle. As there's a general election coming up in March, Alex thought it would be a good idea for us to focus on a politics based story. To attract a younger audience as well as the chronicles traditional audience we thought it would be good to focus on the question 'should to legal voting age be lowered to 16?'.

As a group we mind mapped some ideas to start developing and creating our article idea. We discussed subjects we could base an article on, decided who we would need to contact to gather all the information we'll need, drafted questions that we could ask in an interview and we thought of different ways of presenting the content such as video or a written article.

By the end of the day we managed to collect some interview footage from students around college to get a brief idea about their interest in politics and thoughts on teenagers voting.

Here is the press release I did at the beginning of the day: