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Brian St. Denis's blog
This morning we had a short discussion about the definition of the word 'practice,' and by the afternoon it was clear why. We practiced a lot today. If our class can't upload content by now, they never will. As we kicked off publication project, our class learned about CMS (content management systems), such as this fine website we've all been diligently posting to these past six weeks. The framework is already in place, and all we need to do is type in our content to the correct fields, and voila. It's efficient, it's consistent and it's simple. Looking at this website, the section you're reading right now is called the core. To your right is the menu, 'who's online', and 'who's new' modules, or widgets. At the very top is the header, and at the bottom is the footer. There are other modules off to the left, such as the most recent blog posts. These are all sectioned off into blocks. What you see is the front end of the site - conversely, the administration side that you don't see is the back end.
Tension was high in the classroom today as it became clear why our little group initially chose print journalism instead of broadcast: To stay out of the camera's way. Yesterday's lessons were all about using your voice, and today was about presenting that voice on camera. After the hours we spent watching CBC anchors enunciate and make hand gestures, this author did his best to emulate them. The two years of callcentre employment may have also lent itself to how to carry my voice. So what's next? Good question. The rest of the week will be rounded out by moving from this blog and making a more personal one for our stories for the final four weeks. It's crunch-time for deciding a topic to research. Geographically there are a few areas to cover. Home is in Chatham, while my internship is in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. It's been a while since working on a journalistic endeavor (the writing for the magazine was either already done or was delegated) so it's more difficult than expected to nail down a focus.
Since the second week of e-journalism, a few of us have been trying to come to terms with what seem to be conflicting schools of journalistic thought. In print journalism, accuracy and truth is paramount. In broadcast journalism, these are obviously still important, but the amount of footage that needs to be captured, such as cover shots and interviews, is often staged. Our brains have been wired for quite some time to recoil at such blasphemy. How can it be news and the truth if we're asking our subjects to repeat the same actions or words 3 times so that we have footage that looks good? Today we started on the road to compromise. Yes, that shot of a doctor entering his office, sitting down and rifling through papers is a setup, but those are all actions that would occur in that setting at some point during the day. It's his office, his chair, his papers. Besides, it'd be absurd to sit around with a camera waiting for him to ACTUALLY do those actions.
Today's short lesson was a bit of a rehash on what we've already covered in Dreamweaver. There were a few important tweaks, such as aligning the containing table to the center of the screen to accommodate for today's wide range of monitor size. We also learned how to create simple rollover buttons using two different graphics. There is an option in the insert menu that allows for this; all you need to do is browse for your two images and DW does the rest. The ones we looked at today only changed colours but with Flash and a little ambition they could move or have little animations. Overall, it's cool to have started out in DW, learn video and Flash, and then revisit DW to bring these other components together into websites.
Over the last two days it's become apparent how easy it is to create a professional looking DVD. For someone who has been collecting DVDs for many years, having seen many different kinds of menus and animations, it's almost a letdown to discover how simple they are to design. We learned how to make still images from Final Cut Pro (command N) and use them as menu backgrounds, like wallpapers. Even better, though, is a movie playing in the background. We've all seen DVD menus, and the best ones have some sort of action in the background, often a highlight reel of the film's best scenes. This is easy enough to create in FCP, just by taking a few clips and running them together and applying a video filter. FCP has several interesting presets, including one that makes the image look distorted as if through a broken television. You could never get away with such effects in an actual video or production, so it's fun to play around a bit.
A much appreciated few extra hours of sleep started off this week. We were given two major assignments to complete by the end of the week (one by Wednesday, the other by Friday) and we have lots of work time to complete them. Now that we have a few video projects under our belts, with likely several more to come, we're learning a way to show them off in a portfolio. The easiest way to do this is to create a DVD of your own content, complete with menus and chapter stops. Simply burn as many copies as you need, and you can hand it over to a potential employer. Unlike the web, the compression settings for DVD are a different codec, called MPEG II. If the compression process didn't happen, it would be impossible to burn it to any type of media. We learned how to do this through Final Cut Pro and Compressor, and then how to import it into DVD Studio. The program is similar to FCP with its timeline format. Finally, we learned how to put our finished and edited projects back onto tape.
My most noble attempts to finish this assignment on my own and from home were thwarted this morning with some difficulties involving button behaviours in a flyout menu. On the surface, it seemed like the two would be a simple match. Making a slideshow activated by buttons, combined with a flyout menu containing those buttons, didn't seem like it would've been a huge problem. Flash is picky, though. It's important WHERE you put the behaviours. In the case of the flyout menu, putting the behaviours on the buttons as they came down didn't work. They all needed to appear, and THEN the behaviours would activate the slideshow. Hard to visualize perhaps without seeing the finished project, but if you know what a flyout menu looks like, you should have an inkling. It's hard to figure these things out just by looking at the timeline; it takes some support and a lot of trial and error. It certainly didn't help that the first attempts to solve the problem was via email.
Today's lessons added sound and video into the mix. Adding video to Flash is surprisingly simple; the program even has a plethora of pre-made skins. All you need to do is import any video into the program, wait for it to be converted into the .flv format, and place it where you want on the page. Sound is a little more complicated, but not by much. The tutorial demonstrated how to add background songs/audio to play during a slideshow, as well as noises that activate when buttons are clicked. As in Final Cut editing, we'll have to be careful what music choices we use to avoid copyright trouble.
Today found us working on some more practical applications of Flash, namely making interactive menus for navigation. We created two different types: rollout and flyout. The rollout menu is useful because it can hide links and therefore space when designing your webpage. The flyout menu has a similar application but is a little fancier to look at. We've already learned the importance of navigation in our first week. The pincushion approach can be achieved even easier using Flash. Instead of recreating the nav links on each individual page, the Flash menu can be embedded, with rollout options for all the internal links.
Today's lesson reinforced the importance of layers when using both Photoshop and Flash. It may seem like it's overly complicated to make a new layer for each new action or shape you design, however tiny, but in the long run it pays off. It allows you to tweak the final product later on down the line. If you just want to remove that tiny circle and replace it with a square, you don't have to ruin the time spend on the backgrounds or worry about cutting a hole in your other graphics. With Flash, keeping buttons, text, slides and actions separate works on a similar principle. In the morning we designed a simple slideshow, using buttons to cycle forward and back through 3 images. Making separate layers for each part of this slideshow kept things organized and avoided mixing button behaviours with action scripts.
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