- Associate Director, BiG i AM music and promotions www.bigiam.co.uk - PR consultant/associate Meadowlands Festival, 2011. - Music correspondent, What's Happening Magazine - Monthly music columnist, BN1 Magazine - Monthly music/arts columnist Guide2Brighton - Guest lecturer, Sussex Downs University (music production) - A&R consultant, Yellow Fish Sessions media programmes
For my mobile website I began with my mock up designs, and quickly discovered that they were too complicated for a mobile to handle therefore I would have to simplify it however using some of the same aspects as like my original design.
I began with reading up on Jquery Mobile which would help me in discovering how to create a website that is optimised for mobile. The main website that helped me was:
http://jquerymobile.com/ This website was able to explain and justify to me what I would have to do to make a mobile optimised website using HTML and CSS.
I therefore began building my website using the basic code that I had found from this site, and then adapted it to what my design would be.
From my original design I have kept only the top section, which I had designed. I kept this part of my original design because I felt that it made the mobile site more inkeeping with the original website that is already live, and therefore people would be able to associate this mobile site and the full website.
The features such as the buttons, the header and the footer have all changed, this is mainly due to the Jquery basic coding, as I was trying to keep it as simple as possible.
The header and footer I made the same dark blue as what is in the logo, in the sun beams. This is because then there would be some continuity throughout the website.
The buttons I have left the similar colour to the background, which is a blue/grey colour, I felt this worked with my logo design, as at the bottom the blue faded to a similar colour, which then draws people eyes to the links.
Each page will be the same, however, instead of having all of the buttons, there will only be a back button and the information that is needed for the section that people will click on. I have chosen to do this because I feel on a mobile optimised site, you would not necessarily have all of the links on each page, as doing that would over complicate the site, therefore sticking with my simplicity idea I have kept the back button on all of the information pages and I have put all of the links on the home page.
I have been monitoring my viral animation as well as my promo film, which was uploaded to YouTube on the 2nd June 2011.
With regards to my viral film I have noticed that it has has over 300 viewings within 1 month, which then leads me to conclude that I had made a fairly successful viral film, to have had that many viewings in such a sort space of time. Which consequently answers part of the Meadowlands Brief.
With regards to my first post-festival promo film, I have again noticed that this film has had over 90 viewings within 2 days of being uploaded to YouTube. I also emailed the film to Mark Ede, being our client, and his response to seeing this was: "Look great! I've set em round!" Indicating that he was pleased with what I had created, and he wanted to show other people as well.
The relevance to this was to demonstrate the effectiveness of both my animation (pre-festival promo) and my post-festival promo film were on YouTube.
Even though I did not go to the festival I wanted to help in making the post-festival promos. Therefore, I decided to take some of the footage and put it together for a post-festival promo film to music.
I began with the idea of wanting to start off with people arriving at the festival, and it is all calm showing the campsite full of tents, and then for the festival to begin and it is all lively and upbeat with everyone having fun.
I had to look through to determine which pieces of film I wanted to use, which would make the festival look the best. I wanted to combine all of the different aspects of the festival and not just the music side of it, and as I was looking through all of the footage, I had come across a bit of footage which contained a woman singing into a microphone with everyone else in the tent singing with her, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which I thought was really charming and therefore somewhere I wanted it to appear in my film. After thinking about I thought having it the end section of the footage, where everyone is clapping would be a fantastic ending.
Therefore, I feel that I have included a nice balance of artists and comedians performing, a ride, and some other unique parts of the Meadowlands Festival within this film, which then showed everyone what Meadowlands have to offer for next year.
I also made a panorama of the main stage at the Meadowlands Festival . I had both footage and photos to play with, as when the arena was empty I have got footage but when the arena was full I have got photos, therefore I used Photoshop to stitch together the photos and finish the Main Stage Panorama.
After talking to Mark, via email, he had also disclosed to me that he wanted a film about Jo Harman, (which previously Harry said he would do) and a film about Mamas Gun, therefore in response to this I made a short film about only Mamas Gun at Meadowlands Festival.
Due to the lack of footage that I had to play with for the Mamas Gun Promo film, the film is alot shorter than I thought I would make it, however this then lead to my advantage because after I had finished making it, the film ended up being short but in your face, and after consulting with Mark about it, he liked what I had done.
To create each of these promos I had used Adobe Premiere Pro, which is like Final Cut, therefore I was able to use it to the best of my ability. For the panorama I had used Adobe After Effects, mainly because I knew I could create this film easier in this program.
All the way through creating these films, I have always consulted with Mark before putting them up on YouTube, this is because as he is our client he has the final say in what goes up, and with each of these he has wanted them up on YouTube, demonstrating that I have created work that he is proud to show off.
With my website, I found I did not have many big problems until I found that my website when I uploaded it to the internet and my videos did not play, also when I tested my site in Internet Explorer I found that the Video Lightbox did not work either so I had to go back to the code to figure out what did not work and what I had to change.
Also some of my buttons within the image lightbox were not showing up, therefore I had to take a look at the coding to see what was wrong.
I fixed the buttons problem easily, the way I did it was by looking back into the HTML code to see where the code was trying to find the image, and I had found that it was being directed to the wrong place, therefore I had to re-link the HTML by finding the right path to the image, after doing that I then found that they worked.
Trying to fix the first problem found to be a lot harder then I anticipated. I began with trying to re-link them like I did with the buttons, but unfortunately that did not work.
I then tried deleting the code that was there to begin with and then restarting the process all again, I tried that technique about 3 times, however, again that did not work either. I wass beginning to think that I would never be able to get my videos to play, which was my main concern. After trying everything I could think of my dad then asked me have I checked the server to see if there was a MIME setting that would allow for the videos to play. MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension. After checking the server I found that there was no MIME setting for .m4v videos, I therefore looked up on the internet what I would have to put into the server to allow for the videos to play, and the code was video/x-m4v. This told the internet to play this file type. And after doing this small change I then tested my website in IE 7/8/9, Firefox and Safari and the videos all played beautifully in each.
The last and final problem I had to solve was the video lightbox not working in Internet Explorer. After looking through the coding I found that there was some code at the bottom at was for the normal lightbox, therefore I cut it out of the motion section and stuck it in the print section. After testing my videos in Internet Explorer I found that I had fixed the problem, and I had sorted everything that was making my website look unprofessional.
I have tested on many different screens, as well as the different Internet servers, for example Internet Explorer 7/8/9, Safari and Firefox. And within each of them my website worked exactly how I wanted it to.
I have also tested it on a mobile device when it is on 3G, and my website loads faster then what I expected which means people won't be waiting long to see everything.
These are the pieces that I had put forward to be in the show:
This was put forward to be printed, I created this poster for the Time Capsule project in Year 1.
This I chose for the same reason as the above poster, and I created it at the same time.
This I chose to be shown on the projector. I created this for the most recent project Meadowlands.
This again was to be shown on the projector. This film I created for the project YCN, in the second year.
This was to be shown on the projector. I created this short film for the Crash Bang Wallop project in the first year.
I chose this to be shown on the projector. This was one of 3 animations that I had made for the 3 easy pieces project in the second year.
This is called Stomp.
I chose this to be shown on the projector. This was one of 3 animations that I had made for the 3 easy pieces project in the second year. This is called Bongos.
I chose this to be shown on the projector. This was one of 3 animations that I had made for the 3 easy pieces project in the second year. This is called Varese.
And the piece that was chosen to be in the show was the Bongos animation from 3 Easy Pieces.
We also, as a class, created a portfolio, which gave people who either did not have anything in the show, or not a lot to demonstrate their talents as well. And the pieces that I had created were put into it:
I chose to make this poster because I wanted to show that I had created the resolve screens that were at the end of the Meadowlands films, that were displayed within the graduation show.
This is to show the interactive stuff that could not be shown in the graduation show. I chose to do a poster about the Bertie the Pirate interactive flash animation that I had created
I am 22 years old, I have got a fantastic boyfriend who I have been with for the past 5 and 1/2 years, and still going strong and once I have finished my course I hope to go into the computer animation business.
