Battle of Hastings Background

Check it out!! Feel free to leave comments and suggestions.

Kyle’s Project Review

Kyle’s project was fantastic! I was really impressed with his website and twitter feed. His video clip/map was entertaining also, however I agree with the prof about the song choice, perhaps another would be good.

After exploring his site, I really liked the graphics and visual effects of the page. The transitions are very attractive, and the pictures keep the interest between the content. The content is great too, utilizing the primary sources to offer a glimpse into the daily lives of the regiment. His twitter feed is useful for dates and first person experiences. It is very evident that he did considerable research into this regiment, and that his source was highly informative.

I also really liked that he had his twitter feed subscribe button on his site in a very accessible location, available through each page. His home page is fantastic in that it offers a glimpse into what the site has to offer, further research opportunities and the interactive map giving a short but complete guide to the movements of the regiment through the war.

Overall, I think Kyle’s documentation and presentation of the information he had was produced into an accurate, vivid portrayal of events with high levels of interest maintained through multimedia throughout the website. His twitter feed adds a great deal to the experience of the soldiers during the war, and brings social media as an additional connection to his site.

Great job Kyle!

 

Here’s the link to his website!

Well that was a fail

I was so excited my video finally got up to Youtube after some failed uploading attempts I neglected to post it here.

 

Here you go.

 

Enjoy.

 

Follow Me…

I will inevitably post about my video coming online (tweaking the last little features now! Rendering soon…) but in the meantime feel free to follow @BattleBites on Twitter for sneak peeks and the video link!

Excitement

I discovered colour correction on Final Cut Pro. This makes location scouting SO much better, as lighting is infused to look like a light box…I should clarify that the filming is done, and location scouting meant building a hill out of my coffee table, a book, some towels and a platform. I wanted it to clearly look like someone playing with toys to create a world. More time involved, but better end result!

 

 

It Really Is Coming…

Hello Everyone,

So after some hardcore work, filming, editing, (and some severe panic) my video is FINALLY coming together!! I hope to have it ready for viewing on Sunday…and am well aware that I have been promising dates in the past and not delivering. 

The panic was mostly involved in the formerly mentioned issue of losing footage due to memory card attachment. This new panic, however, it was slightly different as it had appeared I had lost all of the content I had completed…well over 12 hours of work. I spent a good half an hour hyper ventilating and consulting the infamous Apple Support and finally resolved my very large dilemma and found my project again. It was missing a few features, but a few more minutes of editing (and who is counting anymore…) fixed it up.

The thing I am finding is that despite the time commitment I have given this project, the overall result will not look that impressive. Maybe I am slightly critical, but figuring out Final Cut Pro, and editing took much longer than I had ever anticipated. Also voice overs and background music, as well as the intro all had to be conceptualized and created basically out of nothing–many ideas I had and researched amounted to nothing. Something to note for the final report I suppose.

Anyways, more updates to come tomorrow!

 

Nothing to do with this class at all…

This is the video I created instead of doing a presentation for one of my other classes. It was a huge educational process for this class, though, as I used Final Cut Pro X on it as well, so elements of my Battle Bites video were much easier to put together. Enjoy!

This is far from a perfect video, and some of the timing got messed up from creation to rendering (like 3:19-4:08) but it definitely helped me see what I can do to prevent that for Battle Bites #1.

Also, creating this intro animation is proving much more difficult than formerly imagined.

Crunch Time

Well it appears that all of my classes are preparing to wrap up with lots of papers and presentations to follow. As I am working through various projects this one is still the one that intrigues me the most, as I have found a sort of love/hate relationship with filming and editing. On one hand, I love that I am filming. Loading up my clips onto the computer fills me with such a sense of satisfaction, and playing around with the various effects of Final Cut Pro X is a lot of fun. On the other hand, some issues arose when trying to figure out this program via trial and error. Thank heavens for the Apple Support Communities, I honestly don’t know how people could have coped with their issues by only referencing troubleshooting in the user manuals of the past. I was one of those people a few years ago and I still don’t know how I did it.

Anyways, as I said, Apple Support Communities is one of my favourite tools thus far. Although a lot of the comments are not very helpful there are a few gems that have helped me immensely with the work I’ve been doing. For example, I was importing my media from my digital memory card directly from my computer, but I was importing it all into the same folder, which apparently wasn’t copying it to the hard drive in any coherent form…So I would edit a string of events and then take out my memory card to continue filming and lose chunks of my video. Luckily putting the memory card back in solved most of that, but the online forum gave me step by step instructions of how to avoid that in the future. It was pretty terrifying to see “Media not found” in big red letters all throughout my video.

Also, last class I believe it was Courtney that recommended the “Vine” app to me. It allows short video clips to be filmed and posted to social media sites such as Twitter. Courtney was awesome enough to share that with me, saying she immediately thought of my project when she was playing around with it. Like her, I think it would be a great addition to my Twitter previews, and could be a great asset towards the social media aspect of this channel.

Today, in addition to more filming, I am hoping to come up with a catchy intro to be used in all of my videos. Something short that can let everyone know that this is a running channel that will have more videos, all “stamped” with the Battle Bites logo.

I am very excited to get to my finished product and share it with the class! I am hoping the first video will be up on Youtube by the end of the week if not sooner.

See you all in class!

Presentation Review

Kim’s presentation was great! She has a solid idea for her project, and I think her website will be really useful when it’s done.

The idea to follow Scottish migration patterns and ancestry through interactive buttons and maps and appeal to both younger and older audiences is innovative and creative. I particularly enjoyed her thoughts on “clicking though the past”, allowing for as much delving as someone desires- whether simply skimming some information or deeper research into the past. I also really liked her idea of others being able to contribute from the site, things such as photos, journal entries, folklore etc. This would be a valuable resource for those looking into ancestry, particularly if they come across other contributions that relate to their lineage.

Kim has also succinctly told us that she has limited her research area, which would have been my advice had she not mentioned it. She is limiting her research to the 19th century, and is collecting both statistics and digital resources, as well as consulting journal articles and other scholarly sources for her website content, all sounding very thorough in her approach. I did appreciate a mention of a possible fun facts interactivity through the links as well, with items such as what food would be eaten on the ships during migration. Things like this would add a great deal to a younger audiences’ interaction with the site, and tidbits of information are suitable for intriguing further clicking.

Her connection to Google maps will be interesting also, and I am looking forward to how she will incorporate that within her site. As she is approaching a high school audience, maybe she could also incorporate a “Teachers Page” and include some lesson plan tips for how to utilize the site to it’s maximum benefit within a classroom setting. But I’m sure she has enough to do already, and this would be a suggestion for a larger scale project with perhaps a longer time frame.

Overall, Kim’s website sounds like it will be a fantastic resource and creating it will keep her busy for the next few weeks! I look forward to seeing it when it’s done.

Project Update

Last Tuesday we had many presentations discussing the projects that classmates are endeavoring to complete for the end of the semester. I enjoyed the diversity that the class has adopted, as projects ranged from databases to websites, and everything in between. I thought it was particularly admirable that everyone stayed true to finding something they were genuinely interested in and followed it through to something they can actively learn while creating.

I have been learning while working this last week, researching like crazy about the Battle of Hastings. I have been working on paring down what to contextualize versus what to include links for pertaining to further understanding. I have also been working with my editing program related to another class, which I have another video to create for the next couple of weeks.

I am particularly interested in the sound effects that final cut pro has, and utilizing them to their full potential within my videos. I find that I have to sacrifice perfect lighting and animations in order to have time to get everything done, and so time management is becoming my new enemy. Between all of the rest of my classes I have a lot of work to get done in a very short time, so scheduling is increasingly important, even if I only work on this project for 5 minutes a day, at least something is getting done. I find with editing, 5 minutes easily turns into 20, as I am so interested in the process and rather picky about the final effect.

Between my homework and work schedule I think it is fair to assume I can have my first video done in the next 2 weeks, and regular tweets accompanying the youtube channel. I have started my twitter feed, and have been rather unscheduled in my attempts to keep it going, but will be improving that by hopefully utilizing an automatic scheduler that we have discussed in former classes.

I will also update this blog tomorrow after class, as I have begun to lag in my blogging habits and need to incorporate some of my aforementioned scheduling to include writing time too.

Until tomorrow!