Lisa's Year 2 Blog

What can I say … wow I love love love how the SOUR ‘日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)’ video is put together and although seemingly easy to compose the video as it is just a picture in picture video of lots of webcams, it then get complicated when they all inter-connect for example when the rain drop is passed down the screens, I found this rather jaw dropping its soo cool

and then I found this video for the new song (well new’ish) by Frans Ferdinand called Can’t Stop Feeling that also has a cool video, although not split screen, it does have interacting screens that interact with one another through out. I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did

I looked at the post that was put up about a little piece of programming called PhotoSketch normally i read the posts and think yeah its alright but this one just made me go WOW that is freaking AWESOME! I even showed the video about it to others that didn’t even do my course because i was so amazed at how awesome it was. To think that you could just draw pictures and a piece of software can not only recognise what you have drawn but also can find them all within the right ratios of each other to then merge into a picture as easy as pie! Ive always struggled with Photoshop so for something to create the picture for me would be perfect (Im not a lazy bum i just cant work it)

However, when i went on a quest to find out how to get this software people suggested websites where you could test it out but the downside is that everyone is soo bowled over by its brilliance that the one website that does it has crashed for a good amount of time .. people broke the website PhotoSketch is that good!!

so all that remains to be seen is whether or not it is actually that good or whether it is all just hype and im found to be very disappointed .. common get the website working again… please

After the success of my draft version of my Psychogeography video, I then began to think of ways in which i could make it more interesting and visually exciting for the audience. In class we were shown a variety of videos some of which were interesting but some i looked at and thought this is good but i dont really get it. ( e.g Powers of 10 ) although visually good i didnt really see how it would help me as i dont have a clue how i would go about doing something like that . However one of the other videos, JJ Feild – The Tulse Luper Suitcases I: The Moab Story (Clip 4) i liked the way the map was in the background moving as they spoke and i thought that would be something interesting to try and incorporate into my own video… somehow.

I liked my first draft of my psychogeography video so i really wanted to keep this in my final piece .. but how? Then i came up with the idea to do a split screen but instead of doing a 2 split or 4 split, i decided  to make it slightly harder for myself and do a 3 split screen. I intended to make two smaller screens with my original video and an video made on Google Sketchupof my walk sped up and then a longer rectanglular screen at the bottom with a moving map showing the route.

So to help with my ideas, i downloaded Google Sketchup and had a little tinker. After the tinkering on the software i discovered that it would be extremely hard to do what i wanted to do which was to recreate the walk in Google Sketchup, it would be easy if i could use it confidently or if there was lots more time to do the project. So ive had to develope my ideas further and change from using Google Sketchup and came up with the idea to film my walk and then speed it up so it doesnt get too boring for the viewer.

So my final idea now is… A 3 way split screen, two small boxes at the top left and right of the screen including my original footage and a sped up filmed version of my walk and in the longer rectangular box at the bottom of the screen containing a moving map of the route i take.

This is my walk from my house to university.

I had no idea how to embed this on here but Jon showed me how

Yesterday I spent all of my blogging time on the internet (i didnt feel bad because i was getting all interactive!)

I did play the penguin google maps story called The 21 Steps, I really enjoyed the story actually, I would have enjoyed it if I was reading it in a book but the fact that you could see the route Rick took and where he went on his journey was an enjoyable piece of interactivity that you wouldnt have got from a book.

From looking at the penguin google maps story, I created a google account so i could create my own google maps. Although easy enough to do, I stumbled across a few problems, one of the annoying problems was that some how every time I drew a line where I walked, I kept highlighting the page making the image all fuzzy blue. The main problem was that when I made a place mark, added in a description and put in a picture, I then resized the picture to fit in … apparently this is a no no as when you think you’re done and go back to see how it all looks … your pictures are all out of proportion (note to self for next time … just add in the pictures and leave them) But after those two minor problems it all went swimmingly and here is the finished map of my psychogeography walk from my house to uni

After doing this I then started to fiddle with my google settings using igoogle I added apps (such as Facebook, YouTube and the weather) into it that I wanted and chose a theme I want (in this case it was one of my favourite bands All Time Low) and although it takes a little longer to load (not much) I think it looks lots better than just normal google but ill leave that to you to decide

After the fiddling I then did what I thought I would never do … created a twitter account!! It’s not as bad as I thought I find myself tweeting as you can see down the left hand side… I just think it’ll be much more interesting when I start following others and people start following my as at the moment the only person reading my tweets is my boyfriend who is always sat next to me when im writing them so not very excited for him. But feel free to follow me my link is on the left.

After my twittering I then created a Delicious account and began to bookmark all of my favourite websites which range from Facebook to Cinemas, Wikipedia to Amazon… all the rest can be seen on my delicious account (again the link is to the left)

To summarise, I spent pretty much the whole day faffing on the internet using the interactivity available to me, some of the things I thought would be dull (twitter) isnt too bad, I can actually see myself getting addicted to tweeting! Some of the things I found pointless (delicious) but when thinking about it it’ll be quite handy if I cant remember the name of a site that I like going onto like Find-DVD I always miss out the ‘-‘ and then wonder why it doesnt work and have to google it .. now I dont with my delicious icon in the toolbar.