Entry 16 – Web Authoring Task 1 15/12/2011

I have begun writing the first report for the web authoring project and started documenting the different terminology and technical information that is associated with it. Finding the required information was easy enough but the real problem so far is wording the information into a more easily understandable form. As it stands right now, I have a report full of technical jargon that I don’t even fully understand! Therefore I will simplify the information and perhaps provide illustrative examples alongside the text to make the report more understandable. Gathering research has never been a strong point of mine, and more than ever it was tiresome due to my lack of knowledge with web design. It was hard to keep track of what I was researching because a lot of the information was very technical. That’s not to say I didn’t understand any of it, it was just very tedious sifting through so much text heavy information. On reflection I’d say I did manage to gather a lot of usefully information, but it will need to be shaved down considerably before I start to write the report.

Entry 15 – Kolb’s Reflective Cycle 15/12/2011

Reviewing Kolb’s reflective cycle:

This has been a highly valuable diagram as it has broken down how to evaluate my own work in an easy to follow way. Hopefully this will show in my later blog entries.

Entry 8 – Improvement Plan and Models of Reflection 20/10/2011

Entry 7 - First attempt at Animation 17/10/2011

On Sunday 16/10/2011 I experimented with animating a character on Microsoft Paint. Here is the end result:

The animation was drawn using paint and edited together in windows live movie maker. I am very pleased with how this came out, but it took all day for just 2 seconds of footage!

This is definately not time effective and this excersise has convieced me to limit the amount of actual character animation that I will use in my presentation.

Entry 6 – Generating Ideas and Self Directed Study 13/10/2011

I have created a production schedule and started undertaken research into other flash animations. Most seem to use fast paced and surreal humour to carry the story across. I think I’ll need to adopt a similar pace for my animation because I will only have a little over a minute to convey a lot of information. The most popular animations featured characters and vibrant colours so I will try and attempt this. After watching the Paint animation, I’ve been inspired to draw the animations in paint and then animate them in flash. As I’ve drawn in paint before I feel confident that I can achieve  good quality images, the only real problem for me is animating the characters so that they move in a realistic way. To avoid this becoming a major problem for me, I’m going to limit the amount of actual animation as I can.

Entry 5 – Flash Motion Guides and Transform Effects 06/10/2011

I have learned how to use the motion guide in flash to create the appearance of a bouncing ball. By altering the ease settings I was able to convey a realistic sense of gravity as the balls speed increased on the impact of the ground and bounced higher. I explored Transformation effects and manipulated several Jpeg images by rotating them and altering the colour of the images.

I found the Motion Guide a very useful technique as it adds a whole new level of flexibility to the program and customisation to your animation. The timeline effects were interesting but I think they are a bit gimmicky. I think the usefulness of this feature to me, will depend entirely on how creative I can be with it. However we have only tapped the basics so there’s probably a lot more you can do with the image transformation technique so I can’t wait to find out!

Entry 4 – Submission and Flash work 29/09/2011

I have successfully animated two balls rolling in the opposite directions and have learned the use of the Motion Guide layer to animate a symbol along a set path. I also added shadow effects to both symbols which created an altogether more realistic appearance. The ease option within the Motion Tab allows you to slow the movement of objects which is cool.

Entry 3 – Introduction to Flash 22/09/2011

I have used Flash before but I am no expert. I have learnt the functions of the many different toolbars and some key Flash terminology, such as Symbols (graphical objects such as buttons or simple images that can be moved around and animated in flash) and Scene which is the workspace where the symbols are animated. I have written what I’ve currently learnt inside my Flash Skills Audit.

I put my new found knowledge to the test and even made an animation of a rolling ball. There’s something I couldn’t do using this program before, lesson well spent!

Entry 2 – Research into Animation and Timeline 22/09/2011

I have started annotating the assignment sheet and grading criteria and have also begun researching into the early pioneers of Animation.  I have checked out a book from the library which profiles the career of Walt Disney, a chief figure (if not the most important person) in Animation History, and have started to write my report.

Entry 1 – Citing and Referencing Sources from the Library 15/09/2011

This lesson I have learnt the correct way to cite sources taken from books by including: The title of the book, the books Authors, The publishers of the book, the date and place the material was published and the page numbers for the sources I have borrowed.

This has helped me get to grips with writing bibliographies, as I was a bit clueless due to only having cited internet sources before.

In a group we watched some of the previous years animation presentations and discussed why the students achieved a high grade, or why they didn’t. I found that the best presentations were the ones that had paid attention to the file formatting and understood the image resolution meaning their images were of a higher quality and not distorted.

I want to make sure I remember that most people received high grades not only because of their presentations but also because of their high quality written work and evaluations. It’s not all about making the finished product!